At least it was the right kind of Blair

The journalist Tim Blair used to work for one of Australia's oldest magazines, The Bulletin. It was founded in 1888 pushing republicanism against (British) Imperialism and "Australia for the White Man" (one of its straplines). In 2004 the Bulletin sent journalists to cover the trial of Schapelle Corby in Indonesia.

The Corby family were remarkably friendly and helpful to our people, giving the Bulletin more time and greater access than they gave reporters from most other outlets. As a result, despite the swarm of journalists in Bali – some waving cash – our weekly was able to grab a couple of fine exclusives.

Do read on to find out why.

Spectacular feat of diplomacy

My excuse for not replacing my glasses with contact lenses, or undergoing laser treatment, has always been some lame remark about needing the specs as a prop. Andrew Stuart, British Governor of Vanuatu in the early eighties, put his need for glasses to a different use:

Stuart wrought his final act of diplomacy, and triumph over his French rival, by removing his glasses when faced with a letter from Father Lini (also sent to Robert) which ordered the expulsion of both French and British forces. Stuart was thus able, while apparently still ignorant of the letter’s contents, later to offer the transitional services of the Marines to the new state, which Lini accepted.

Oxford's only Classical College

Gothic, in Headington Stone, is the preferred architectural mode at Oxford. Preferred, that is, by the general run of members of the University. It was rare to hear a good word for the modernism of St Catherine's College. I never heard anyone express admiration for the nineteenth and twentieth century farragos in the younger colleges. (People liked farragos to be medieval, in appearance if not in fact). Keble's brick was universally despised. There was a special horror reserved for the Queen's College, Oxford's only college built (all its older buildings being demolished) in the classical style. Here is a video about its architecture. Note that, despite his enthusiasm, the presenter still feels it necessary to say (at 3:42) that "it is a pity we no longer have the medieval buildings of Queen's". What were the fellows to do? build an entirely new structure alongside the old?

A spotter's guide to Monsignors

Prompted by Pope Francis' pruning of the Monsignori, Fr Christopher Smith at the Chant Café links to a series of articles from the 90s on the history of the rank by Duane L. C. M. Galles. They were published in Sacred Music, the journal of the Church Music Association of America.

Fall 1995 (pp. 16-21) Part I  [pdf]; Winter 1995 (pp.27-35) Part II [pdf]; Spring 1996 (pp. 13-17) Part III  [pdf].

Alas there are no pictures to explain the different forms of dress.

Galles concludes:

It remains to be seen if bishops will exercise their faculty to erect collegiate churches and create canons (and canonesses) to encourage the cultivation and preservation of the solemn liturgy and the treasury of sacred music. These have now languished for three decades in the American Catholic Church, but with encouragement they may once again be cultivated, preserved and honored in a manner hallowed — as we have seen — by the most venerable traditions of the local Church.

Fr. Smith remarks:

If the present desire for decentralization is real, then what is to prevent diocesan ordinaries from establishing their own forms of clerical honorifics?  What would prevent them from breathing life into an often defunct, but ancient, tradition of collegiate chapters of canons, which would lead an exemplary liturgical and common life, and also bring back some of the color and diversity of the Roman Church? 

To be and know oneself

When the Vatican revamped its Latin journal, the Catholic Herald published a story about it in Latin.

Mirabile dictu! Latinitas redit

Civitas Vaticana editionem primam actorum diurnorum Latinorum recreatorum, Latinitatem, aperuit. Editio nova praefationem a Francisco Papa adscribit, qui 180,000 sectatores eius tabularii Latini, Strepitus, habet.

Latinitas quater quotannis vulgatur et litteras de historia, libris, lingua et scientiis continet. Acta diurna in parte, Diarium Latinum, quoque continet. Ad ecclesiae linguam publicam promendam in MCMLIII fundata est. Editio nova litteras in lingua Italica Anglicaque primum habebit.

Editionem novam nuntians, Cardinalis Gianfrancus Ravasius Italicum Communem, Antonium Gramscium, interpretatus est, dicens, “Linguam Latinam aut Graecam non studes ut eas dicas. Id facis ut cum populorum duorum, qui societatis novae fundamenta erant, humanitate convenias; id est, eas studes ut tu sis et te cognoscas.”

They invited people to offer translations in the comments. Most of them are fairly literal. This is an attempt in the journalistic mode.

Latin makes a stunning comeback!

The Vatican has unveiled the first edition of a journal for Latinists – Latinitas. The new edition includes a preface by Pope Francis, who has 180,000 followers of his Latin Twitter feed.

Latinitas is published four times a year and contains articles on history, literature and science. It also contains a day by day news section "Diarium Latinum" (Latin Diary). Latinitas was founded in 1953  to promote the universal language of the Church. For the first time the new edition will have articles in Italian and English.

Announcing the new edition, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi cited the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. "You do not study Latin or Greek to speak them. You do it to meet the humanity of those peoples, that is, you study them to be and know yourself."

Notes:

sectatores eius tabularii Latini, Strepitūs. Strepitus ("noise, din") is the Latin word for Twitter. It is fourth declension and the sentence only makes sense if it is in the genitive. Literally the phrase means "followers of his Latin archive of Twitter".

Acta diurna in parte…quoque continet. Acta is plural. It is possible that the draftsman thinks it can take a singular verb. This would give a much smoother rendering "The journal (acta diurna) also contains a "Latin Diary" in one section." According to Kennedy (§199) where two nouns making up a composite subject form a single notion, then they can take a singular verb, e.g. Senatus populusque Romanus. Nevertheless, from a cursory glance over Perseus it seems that the Acta Diurna (an official publication in Ancient Rome) always take a plural verb.

Italicum communem. Catholic condemnations of communism (often by means of a condemnation of the teachings of communists) use the coinages communismus and communista. For the former this goes back at least as far as the encyclical of Pius IX Qui pluribus of 1st November 1846 (DS 2786). For the latter, Leo XIII warns the audience of his encyclical [English] Quod Apostolici muneris (18th December 1878, ASS 11 (1878) [pdf] p.372) against the doctrine of those "qui diversis ac pene barbaris nominibus Socialistae, Communistae vel Nihilistae appellantur"  – "who are known by diverse and almost barbarous names, as Socialists etc." Pius XI points out that the "communistarum effata" – literally "axioms of the communists" – impoverish the human person in his encyclical Divini Redemptoris of 19th March 1937 (DS 3773). In both those instances note the use of italics to show that the word itself is not Classical. The Holy Office  issued a decree on 1st July 1949, DS 3865, in answer to a question whether it is permitted to join a communist party – "partibus communistarum nomen dare" (answer in the negative). On that occasion the questioner apparently chose the term communista without the "scare italics". For what it is worth, in the OCR scan of AAS 41 (1949), p.334 [pdf] no italics appear at that point. Finally, John XXIII in his encyclical Mater et magistra of 15th May 1961, talks of "communistarum, qui dicuntur" (as per the OCR AAS 53 (1961) p.408 [pdf], cf. DS 3939). Without going into the thorny grammar of that sentence, it is clear that there the word communista is held at a certain stylistic arm's length "those who are called "communists"" – just as Leo XIII referrred to it as a pene barbarum nomen. In fact one could avoid translating "qui dicuntur" altogether and just use quotation marks. Latin, like Greek, prefers to allow the grammar to govern the sense. For one thing the ancients did not have any full blown system of punctuation. In any case communis cannot mean "communist". It is an adjective and per Lewis & Short (s.v. I B) it is used substantively for nothing more specific than "that which is common".

interpretatus est. A number of the commenters at the Catholic Herald render this "he quoted". This is clearly wrong. It would be protulit, possibly making verba the object and putting Gramsci in the genitive. Interpretor means "I translate". There is a sense of the speaker providing some kind of explanation or exegesis of his source. Cito, unlike English "cited" has a more strictly legal, and legal-like meaning.

The passage cited by Cardinal Ravasi is derived from Gramsci's notebooks as given by Stanley Aronowitz in "Gramsci's Theory of Education: Schooling and Beyond"*

Pupils did not learn Latin and Greek in order to speak them, to become waiters, interpreters or commercial letter-writers. They learnt in order to know at first hand the civilization of Greece and of Rome—a civilization that was a necessary precondition of our modern civilization; in other words, they learnt them in order to be themselves and know themselves consciously.

It appears that Cardinal Ravasi was speaking in Italian. What he said is quoted in Zenit's report of the press conference (the English version of that bulletin includes no reference to Gramsci):

Non si impara il latino e il greco per parlarli, per fare i camerieri, gli interpreti, i corrispondenti commerciali: si impara per conoscere direttamente la civiltà dei due popoli, quindi il passato, ma presupposto necessario della civiltà moderna, cioè per essere se stessi e conoscere se stessi, consapevolmente.

The Italian website gramscisource.org provides the complete works of Gramsci, or perhaps only his obiter dicta. (He seems to have been a great filler of notebooks). This passage, I think is the source of Cardinal Ravasi's citation, from (so far as I can judge) notebook 12, § 2:

Non si imparava il latino e il greco per parlarli, per fare i camerieri, gli interpreti, i corrispondenti commerciali. Si imparava per conoscere direttamente la civiltà dei due popoli, presupposto necessario della civiltà moderna, cioè per essere se stessi e conoscere se stessi consapevolmente. 

* Carmel Borg, Joseph A. Buttigieg, Peter Mayo (edd.) Gramsci and Education (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), ch.5, pp.109-120, at p.114.

Becoming Tradition

Tradition and Ideals by Adam Wood

Think about this in any other context. You can’t (reasonably) say that pasta isn’t authentically Italian just because it was invented in China and didn’t get there until the Rennaisance. It makes no sense to champion cabbage as the ideal Irish cuisine and dismiss potatoes as an innovation from the New World. How would somebody even try to make rules about this sort of thing? “All cultural cuisine in use as of April 15, 1875 is to be considered the ideal representation of each country’s national gastronomic habits.”

…

If God the Son became a real human being in a real culture, and institued a Church which was to be guided by real human beings through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and revelation provided by Scripture and Tradition, I would suggest that we can’t simply ignore what “tradition” is like everywhere else that real human beings are involved. (Not to mention the fact that the history of liturgical practice is similarly messy and varied.)

…

When will Gospel music, or Praise and Worship pop styles, or anything else become a legitimate part of the musical tradition of the Church? It will not be when some professional thinker finds a convincing argument for its inclusion, or when some piece of written legislation appears to allow it. It will only be when musicians who are deeply connected with the existing tradition of liturgical practice, who understand it in a way that cannot be set down in legislation or academic papers, find a place for it.

Wood summarises his essay at the Chant Café in this way:

There is no such thing as ideal liturgical praxis, only a lived tradition. This means that rather then theorizing about what is the essential aspect of the ideal (the Proper texts, the original melodies, the Latin language), we rather must live with and live into the received tradition (Gregorian Chant, the Graduale Propers, Sacred Polyphony, etc) before we can even begin to think about what new treasures should find a place in the storehouse.

He dispensed himself from Mods

In 1414 the Emperor Sigismund convened an Ecumenical Council at Constance, with Pope John XXIII presiding. This of course was the anti-Pope. Baldassare Cossa not Angelo Roncalli who convened the Second Vatican Council. Constance is famous for the resolution it brought to the problem of three men simultaneously claiming to be Pope. (Until 2013 it was the most recent example of a Pope resigning). However Sigismund also sought condemnation of the teaching of Jan Hus. He asked the Fathers of the Council date operam ut illa nefanda schisma eradicetur – "take care that that unspeakable schism be uprooted". He assumed from its termination that schisma is feminine. In fact it is neuter since it is a Greek word belonging to the Greek third declension. It goes like σῶμα body. One of the Cardinals pointed this out and Sigismund replied:

Ego sum Rex Romanus et super grammaticam.

"I am the King of the Romans and above grammar." Thomas Carlyle tells the story in his History of Friedrich II of Prussia vol. 1, book ii, ch. xiv, p.153 (Boston, Mass.: Dana Estes & Charles E. Lauriat, 1884). He cites Wolfgang Menzel's Geschichte der Deutschen which can be found on Google books here (scroll to p.477, footnote) and in translation here. Menzel does not provide a source.

From Carlyle it appears that this speech was delivered on 25th December 1414, which means this Christmas will be the 600th anniversary.