A den of zingers

A couple of months ago I mentioned my chance discovery of the marvellous French website catho.org which contains numerous primary sources for the study of the Catholic French including the Latin text of the 1917 Code of Canon Law and the 1996 edition of Denzinger's Dogma.

The entire site – design and content – seems to have been adopted by the Congregation for the Clergy for their site clerus.org. On their Magisterium page, they offer Denzinger in English. The text is somewhat older. It stops at what is now DS 3904 (2333 in that edition), the ruling that all must believe in the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in Munificentissimus Deus, 1st November 1950 (n.45 in the English translation at the Vatican website). Much better than nothing.

(The title is a reference to a remark by Ralph McInerny.)

Eating dust and ashes

I have a certain admiration for the vigorous anti-Catholic one-liners of Edward Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury (1883-1896). Here is another one.

In 1887, Leo XIII celebrated the Golden Jubilee of his ordination to the priesthood.  Archbishop Benson's friend, Canon Mason, suggested he might send the Pope a gift "in the hope that an act of personal kindness might smooth the way towards the healing of the schism ". Benson replied*:

It is the Pope's business to eat dust and ashes, not mine to decorate him. Therefore, my dear Mephibosheth†, hold thy peace.

 

 

*A. C. Benson, The Life of Edward White Benson, sometime Archbishop of Canterbury, 2 volumes, (London: Macmilan, 1899), vol. 2, ch.11, p.586, letter of 27th November 1887.

† Mephibosheth was the son of David's friend Jonathan who appears in 2 Samuel 4, 9, 16, 19 & 21 (those are all chapter numbers) - Benson quotes 2 Sam 14:19 at the beginning of his letter to Mason. As a grandson of Saul Mephibosheth might be thought to have been a threat to David's rule. In 2 Sam 16 his servant Ziba tells David that Mephibosheth remains in Jerusalem expecting to be given the throne of his grandfather. It turns out in chapter 19 that this was a lie. Benson gives that name to Mason to say "I know you are loyal but you appear to be disloyal".

On a related matter

Fr Gabriel de Chadarévian op provides an account of the requirements for a good preacher. In a footnote he offers a useful definition of kerygma, one of those words one often sees (in theology I mean) but are rarely explained: 

The name, life, the truth, the words and teachings, the signs (healings, exorcisms and miracles), the salvation of Jesus of Nazareth, Son of Man and Son of God, his passion, death on the cross and his bodily resurrection and his return in glory to judge the living and the dead, heaven and hell.

I was amused by the opening sentence.

As a Friar of the Order of Preachers founded in the 13th century, I like to think that I belong to a bloodline of famous preachers and teachers of the Catholic faith, starting with our founder St. Dominic, blessed Jordan of Saxony (his first successor), St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Vincent Ferrer, and  Father Henri–Dominique Lacordaire, to name a few.

Unless those are all related to each other and Fr de Chadarévian, he cannot possibly belong to a bloodline of all of them.

A cornucopia for copy and paste

My current project requires the transcription of large slabs of text, specifically Magisterial documents of the Catholic Church. I recently discovered a French website, catho.org which has the 1917 Code of Canon Law in Latin and French as well as the 1996 edition of Denzinger's Dogma. So I was able to save myself typing out DS 1247-1279 (the questions to be posed to those accused of the Hussite or Wycliffite heresies, decreed by the Council Of Constance 22nd February 1418). Also Catho.org gives the older paragraph numbers of Denzinger right next to the current number. This is useful for using pre-1963 works of theology. From the home page you navigate to the French versions but there is a little button ("Latin" hand written with a mouse it looks like) to switch to the original. It does not provide the Greek texts of the early councils. Also it only provides French texts of the Fathers. Clicking on the pair of blue semi-circular arrows (looks like a refresh button) within a given text takes you to citations of the passage which you are reading. As they say on the home page:

Un système UNIQUE AU MONDE, issu de la technologie exclusive du logiciel Ictus, permet de savoir immédiatement où un document est cité. Ainsi, vous découvrirez comment les Pères de l'Église commentent un passage des Saintes Écritures, ou bien comment un texte du Magistère (concile, encyclique) est utilisé par un autre document. … Grâce à Internet et aux techniques les plus modernes appliquées à ce trésor de textes, ayez l'érudition d'un vrai moine!

Quite so.

Meanwhile I am agog at developments on Newman Reader. Although they have adopted a rather odd looking font (looks like Papyrus) for the front page we can forgive all that because they have put PDF scans of all 32 volumes of Newman's Letters and Diaries (it would cost thousands to assemble a collection of printed copies) as well as of modern collections of Newman's miscellaneous papers. They seem to have done an OCR job on it so the text is searchable, at any rate it is as searchable as something on Google books (presumably Google did the work, since "snippet view" and "preview" versions of L&D are available on Google books). I cannot find Newman's preface to Hutton's Anglican Ministry, but I just gave you that. Nor is there the full version of his ejaculation in favour of the Papacy beginning "Deeply do I feel…"

Last, but not least, (via Chant Café) the complete four volume Missale Romanum cum lectionibus is now online.  Each volume is split into four files. They take an age to download. They have been gone through a first run with optical character recognition so you can copy and paste up to a point. It is not very accurate however. But it is better than nothing. Much better.

Finding the answer I knew all along

More than ten years ago I read an introduction to the history of English law.   The following passage stuck with me.

The earliest canonists held marriage to be effected by the physical union of man and woman in carnal copulation.  They became one fled by commixtio sexuum .  But, since copulation could occur outside marriage, a mental element was also necessary.  There had to be an agreement to marry.  According to Gratian (c. 1140) marriage began by agreement but became complete and indissoluble only when the agreement had been sanctioned by a Church ceremony and consummated in a physical union.  There immediately arose difficulties with this approach.  The requirement of formality tended to increase the subjection of young couples to pressure from parents and lords, while the notion that physical union was essential led to embarrassing theological questions about the marital status of Christ's parents.

J. H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History , fourth edition
 (London: Butterworths Tolley, 2002), part two, ch. 28, p.479.

If Mary was perpetually a virgin (CCC 496-501 esp. 499) then the ideal of the Holy Family (CCC 1655) becomes ever more remote. I had wondered how this problem was resolved or if it had simply been quietly dropped.

Then Edward Peters (often mentioned in these parts) posted A caution re reading Bergoglio as a proto-Francis. He discusses an earlier Pope who had been involved in the debate between agreement and consummation as making a marriage.

The great canonist Rolandus Bandinelli lent his prestige to the Bologna interpretation. Coupled with Gratian and Hugh of St. Victor, Bandinelli was a powerful proponent of the consummation=marriage school. True, Bandinelli seemed to shift more toward the consent=marriage school later in his career as canonist, but even upon being elected Alexander III in 1159, he still vacillated between the two theories, and not for some time did he finally side with the Parisian interpretation that consent makes marriage (while consummation adds a technical type of indissolubility). Thus, even though it disagreed with a position Bandinelli had earlier strongly defended, Alexander firmly gave the Church an insight into marriage from which she has never retreated. Moral of the story: Something about being pope forces men to approach issues not as intellectual exercises, both sides of which can be argued, but as articulations of the doctrines and disciplines of the universal Church. Rather more weighty. I am, therefore, much more interested in what Francis says and does as pope than I am interested in what Bergoglio said and did as a bishop or priest or (good grief) as a seminarian. [emphasis added.]

Gosh I thought. There's the answer. So I came to write this post and found the following  in Baker immediately after the passage cited above.

After grappling with such problems, Pope Alexander III introduced, in the late twelfth century, a more sophisticated doctrine of marriage.  Under the new rules, marriage could be contracted by consent alone, without any ecclesiastical ceremony, parental consent or physical consummation, provided the consent was notified in words of the present tense (sponsalia per verba de praesenti ).  Such a marriage was irregular, in so far as the parties could be compelled for the sake of order and decency to solemnise the marriage publicly at the door of a church, and punished for any sinful connection theymay have had befofre so doing.  Yet it was valid and, before consummation, created an indissoluble bond which would be upheld even in preference to a subsequent church marriage with a different spouse.

Baker, op. cit. , pp.479-480.

I must have been asleep when I read that bit. 

 

Being the most awesome like liturgical dude like ever

Josef A. Jungmann SJ (1889-1975) was expert in the history of the Roman Rite. (The dates are important because there has been more than one Josef Jungmann SJ). To say he was lionised perhaps will mislead. Leviathanised would be closer the mark. The praise is always fulsome. The blurb at the beginning of this article is a standard example.

Alcuin Reid gives us a couple more. 

An historian, he has unequalled mastery of the complex changes in liturgical forms, but he has a wonderful sense for the abiding values of the Liturgy. With fine discrimination her is able to assess the gains and losses through the centuries and to suggest reforms that will restore to traditional values their pastoral efficacy. A deep pastoral concern pervades all his work.
[Charles Davis preface to the English translation of Odo Casel, The Mystery of Christian Worship, p.xii. Quoted in Alcuin Reid OSB, The Organic Development of the Liturgy, (Farnborough, Hants: St Michael's Abbey Press, 2004) Chapter 3 "The Liturgical movement and Liturgical Reform form from 1948 to the Second Vatican Council", "Introduction", p.134, fn.5.]

And another one: 

There is mighty little that he holds that anybody would be inclined to dispute; for he seems to come as near to omniscience on this subject as is humanly possible … Jungmann's conclusions are pretty well universally accepted by the pundits. He is THE great man of the day.
 [Clifford Howell SJ in "The Parish in the Life of the Church" in Living Parish Series, Living Parish Week, p.23. Quoted in Alcuin Reid OSB, ibid., "Josef Andreas Jungmann SJ", p.152.]

How can anyone survive that sort of praise?

(Clifford Howell's The Work of Our Redemption  is available online.)

The trinkets of Rome

At some point in the early 1890s the Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward White Benson*, carried out the third visitation of his diocese.  His addresses to the clergy on that occasion were collected in a book Fishers of Men  (London: Macmillan, 1893), which is available at the Internet Archive.  I could not find it directly through Google Books and I was only getting the top half of each page when I tried to use the online reader (which is useful for linking you directly to a given page). YMMV.

I have not read this book, I was only flicking through it to see the context for a quotation. In Chapter 5, Archbishop Benson discusses "Spiritual Power".

The Power we speak of is of course power in relation to human life. Power to mould and to invigorate the life of man.  So the person or the institution in which spiritual power is, has gained and keeps the Divine view of life, and deals with life in the Divine method.  It is from Jesus Christ alone that the Divine view and the Divine method can be learnt (p.111).

He contrasts this with a purely mechanical method of power. From this Archbishop Benson gradually unfolds an elegant expression of the standard Protestant "corruption theory" of the medieval Church.

You may trace the rise of the mechanical system of compulsory confession in and about Orleans in the ninth century, part of the tremendous effort to raise the barbarian lords and subjects; the gradual formalising, the destruction of spontaneity, the tariff of penances, the numerous repetition of devotional formulas, the gradual assumption of more and more authority in the form of absolution, the growth of a new sacrament, the fabulous basis and mockery of Indulgence. (pp.115-116).

He even quotes St Teresa of Avila against the Church, who "again and again speaks of her directors as lowering and impairing her spiritual strength."  The doctrine of the Real Presence is seen as a way to ease the difficulty of ascending in heart and mind to God by translating God "at any moment" "into the material world" and localising Him here. "The curious application of a transient figment of philosophy [i.e. transubstantiation CCC 1374-1376] to the mystery of Communion rationalised this and pronounced it done. The very earthly flesh of Christ was brought back to be worshipped." (pp.116-117). The same materialism leads "Rome" to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception and devotion to the Sacred and Immaculate Hearts. (He calls it the worship of "two Sacred Hearts", but that is just an oversight.) This devotion, he claims is the restoration of the Manichaean heresy (p.117).

The reason Archbishop Benson brings all this up is he detects some of it in the Church of England, particularly in ritualism ("solicitude for deayed usages"). In his view the end of Catholic devotions is devotionalism: "the Kingdom will be a mustard-tree no more; it will be a petty herb of mint or anise: no more nested in by all the Birds of heaven—great, swift strong winged minds, as well as the shy and tender." (p.121). He digresses briefly on the power of Anglican laymen (what Newman called the State's pattern man, in a passage denounced by Kingsley) to remedy devotional "weakness" in the Anglican clergy, and then returns to his theme. 

What a moment is this to be fingering the trinkets of Rome! The very moment when it is denying not the "power" (that would be hopeless) but the "authority" of  the church of this country with an audacity never used before. The "power" shines in dark places, and strikes to the edge of the world. So it is the "authority" which must be disparaged now. [Earlier he had distinguished between power and authority, both of which the Church possessed; the latter without the former belonging to the Prophets, the former without the latter belonging to the Pharisees]. Large-minded men may be amused, but surely not without indignation, at being assured that 1200 Roman Catholic Bishops have refused to admit the validity of English orders; as if that contained some argument—as if we did not not know what the position of thesegood men is; at being assured that a pallium  not being received here from Romeis a proof that the continuity of the British and English Church is broken; at being assuredthat England has been just dedicated as "Mary's Dowry" and placed "to-day" under the Patronage of St. Peter. Is it a time to be introducing among our simple ones the devotional life of that body? (pp.122-123).

[Reference to a power which "shines in dark places, and strikes to the edge of the world" probably means the British Empire. Of course a baby born in the course of this visitation would have been old enough to be ordained into the Church of England in 1914 just as the British Empire entered the first of two wars which would destroy it and lead to Britain's utter humiliation. Even though they won.]

So why mention this? Well the Daily Telegraph in London just published an interview with +Justin, the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury.

“I am a spiritual magpie,” he says. As well as speaking in tongues (a Protestant practice), he adores the sacrament of the eucharist (a Catholic one).

And again: 

For his own spiritual discipline, Justin Welby uses Catholic models – the contemplation and stability of Benedictines, and the rigorous self-examination of St Ignatius. And, in a choice that could not possibly have been made since the 16th century – until now – the Archbishop’s spiritual director is Fr Nicolas Buttet, a Roman Catholic priest.

A Catholic Priest as the spiritual director of an Anglican! And not answering questions so as to clear the way for a conversion, mind. Newman would do his nut.  To be fair, Justin Cantuar:'s evocation of Catholic models could be justified in Benson's terms, for the latter seems to have some sympathy with the spirituality of St Teresa of Avila.(Although Benson could simply have been quoting a Catholic to twit the Catholics, just like I, erm, am doing here, quoting one AofC against another).

Fingering the trinkets of Rome indeed.

* (Archbishop Benson's youngest son, Robert Hugh Benson, became a Catholic in 1903 and subsequently a priest. He was the author of Lord of the World and The Friendship of Christ.)

Easier access to the Catechism

The trouble with the Vatican website's publication of the English version of Catechism of the Catholic Church is that the index lacks the numbers used everywhere by everyne to refer to a specific passage.  Nobody uses the chapter numbers. You have to click on one of the links to to chapter, article, or section names in the approximate area and work your way from there. There is a similar problem with the French, Latin and Latvian editions. The ChineseMalagasy, Portugese and Spanish editions all have the range of paragraph numbers next to each link for easier navigation. The Italian edition is similarly divided but in much longer ranges (the first is nn.1-1065) and the links take you to large PDFs.

 St Charles Borromeo Catholic Church in Picayune, Miss. has acquired the right to publish the complete Catechism on its own website. They offer the standard table of contents (as on the Vatican website) as well as a table of contents with paragraph numbers. Both take you to the same files.

While we are on the subject here are direct links to the various indexes to the Catechism on the Vatican website (I can never find them in a hurry):

Alphabetical index
 Words arranged by frequency
 Reverse alphabetical index (i.e. by the last letter in a word)
 Words arranged by length
 Frequency statistics

I am not sure what use there is for any of these apart from the first but there they are, so there you go. 

 

Gus and Tommy Latine

Augustinus.it provides the complete works of St Augustine in Latin and Italian. They are organised according the Augustine volumes in Patrologia Latina (PL 32-46). For some reason PL 46 is not included in the "elenchus" on the left but the sermons in that volume can be found by searching "PL 46" in the Tavola Cronologica. Unfortunately it does not include the prefatory material found in the printed volumes. This means it is no help in deciphering the PDF of this discussion of the text of sermones inediti.

There is also a page of links to English translations of his works. Apart from those listed there, I don't know of any others.

Corpus Thomisticum is a site with the complete works of St Thomas Aquinas, courtesy of the University of Navarre. There is also a collection of links to volumes of the Leonine edition on archive.org.

New Advent only has a translation of the Summa Theologica, done by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province in 1920. The Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. offers the complete works of Aquinas in more recent translations. (Bookmark that link because there is no obvious way to navigate there from the homepage). It was novices at the DHS who produced that charming work Lives of the Dominican Saints. I wouldn't mention that, except that it always makes Dominicans squirm when I do.

Descendit ad inferos

3 "Descended into hell"
 …
One can try to deal with problems either by denying their existence or by facing up to them. The first method is the more comfortable one, but only the second leads anywhere. Instead of pushing the question aside, then, should we not learn to see that this article of faith, which liturgically is associated with Holy Saturday in the Church's year, is particularly close to our day and is to a particular degree the experience of our [twentieth] century? On Good Friday our gaze remains fixed on the crucified Christ, but Holy Saturday is the day of the "death of God", the day that expresses the unparalleled experience of our age, anticipating the fact that God is simply absent, that the grave hides him, that he no longer awakes, no longer speaks, so that one no longer needs to gainsay him but can simply overlook him. "God is dead and we have killed him." this saying of Nietzsche's belongs linguistically to the tradition of Christian Passiontide piety; it expresses the content of Holy Saturday, "descended into hell".
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Introduction to Christianity, Ignatius (2004).
Part Two: Jesus Christ, II The Development of Faith in Christ in the Christological Articles of the Creed, 3 "Descended into hell", (p. 294).

The Pride of Place

Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments,  General Instruction of the Roman Missal (2003).

41. All other things being equal, Gregorian chant holds pride of place because it is proper to the Roman Liturgy. Other types of sacred music, in particular polyphony, are in no way excluded, provided that they correspond to the spirit of the liturgical action and that they foster the participation of all the faithful.*
Since faithful from different countries come together ever more frequently, it is fitting that they know how to sing together at least some parts of the Ordinary of the Mass in Latin, especially the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, set to the simpler melodies.**
* Cf. Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, no. 116; cf. also Sacred Congregation of Rites, Instruction Musicam sacram, On music in the Liturgy, 5 March 1967, no. 30.
** Cf. Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium,  no. 54; Sacred Congregation of Rites, Instruction Inter Oecumenici, On the orderly carrying out of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, 26 September 1964, no. 59: AAS 56 (1964), p. 891; Sacred Congregation of Rites, Instruction Musicam sacram,  On music in the Liturgy, 5 March 1967, no. 47: AAS 59 (1967), p. 314.

Preaching and the Biblical Languages

The Rev. Gerald Ambulance discusses the problem of preaching.

Greek is another good time-killer. Try this kind of thing: "Now the word translated 'preaching' here is the Greek word kerygma. And that comes from the verb kerysso, meaning 'to preach'. So when St Paul says 'preaching', what that word really means is 'preaching'." (Stephen Tomkins, My Ministry Manual by Rev. Gerald Ambulance, p.31).
Rod Decker, Preaching and the Biblical Languages: Garnish or Entrée Mellon or Mantra? has a more serious approach.

Some extracts.
Forty years ago as a college and seminary student I was a cook. I worked in various types of kitchen settings: short order, line cook, and commercial dining rooms. In most such situations we were concerned that the plate we served look nice. Part of the “dressing” was some sort of garnish—a sprig of parsley, a spiced apple ring, a lemon curl, etc. The garnish was not part of the nutritional value of the meal. We did not intend that our customers eat the parsley. It just looked nice. What we wanted them to eat was the entrée. Whether that was a juicy steak grilled to perfection or a chicken breast stuffed and wrapped and prepared just so, we took great pains that it be good quality, tender, and tasty. We did not, however, carry it to their table on a greasy spatula or in a crusty roasting pan. We served the finished product in an appealing, ready-to-eat form. That setting provides my analogy. 
The biblical languages should not function merely as a garnish. Too often pastors pay only lip service to the biblical languages. They may acknowledge that they are important—at least to the commentary writer. They expect others to do the dirty work so that they can garnish their sermons with impressive-sounding jargon, a sprig of Greek parsley. “In the original Greek this is an ‘ā-or-ist’ tense, therefore it means [such and such.]” Or they add a lemon curl. “The Greek perfect mood proves that we were saved in the past and will be eternally secure forever.” Or for a real “ringer” (i.e., a spiced apple ring garnish), “This word in the original Greek is number 4352 which is a compound of 4314 and 2965, so it means to lick God’s hand like a puppy dog.” All such statements are merely attempts to sound impressive or to wield the Greek as an authority club. They prove nothing and do not add anything to understanding the meaning of the text. That is neither the purpose nor the value of the biblical languages.
The languages are much more like the entrée than the garnish. They are not the entrée as such, but the tools used to prepare the entrée. We do not feed God’s people with Greek and Hebrew. What goes on the sermonic plate is an appetizing, tender piece of meat. If we are ministering in an English-speaking context, that means that the entrée—the biblical content—must be explained in relatively simple English that our audience can understand. Just as the goal of a vernacular translation of the Bible is communication, so the goal of a biblical sermon must be the communication of the Bible’s message in language that our audience can understand.
He then discusses the Doors of Durin in The Lord of the Rings. (It seems even Baptists are not immune to the lure of Tolkien.) Just as the Fellowship needed to say the Elvish word for "friend" mellon, to enter Moria, so "it is through the door of the biblical languages that we enter (certainly as friends!) into the Scriptures".
On the other hand, we ought not make the biblical languages, as important as they are, into a mantra (the last part of my subtitle). Some people, being firmly convinced of the general argument that I have proposed thus far, use the biblical languages, not as a mellon, but as a mantra. They are certainly sincere and they have commendably placed a high priority on the biblical languages, but they then go one step too far in making the tools of exegesis into the gadgets of homiletics. Just as a mantra refers to something repeated continually, so these preachers continually inflict their audience with Greek and Hebrew. They preach Robertson and Danker and Wallace in their efforts to preach Christ. Their sermons contain profuse reference to Greek and Hebrew words, to technical grammatical description, to diachronic etymologies, and even verb parsings. Some even imply to God’s people that they should (or even must) learn Greek if they are going to understand Scripture and become spiritually mature. Their churches become language institutes and their pulpits become lecterns.
According to the epilogue to Decker's paper, Dr Christopher Cone, at the same conference, argued that it is the job of preachers to teach their audiences the Biblical languages, textual criticism, genre, and so on.
God revealed Himself using language. That he revealed Himself in such a way has tremendous implications for teaching. God expected that His audience would be sufficiently skilled in the principles of the languages He used so that they could understand His meaning. We all need to understand how to understand God’s word. We all need to know how to handle variants, translations, background, rhetorical structure, grammar, syntax, vocabulary, and context.
"We all"? Everyone needs to be able to cope with textual criticism, ancient genres etc not to mention the languages? How shall we be saved?

What Cone and, to a lesser extent, Decker do, is confuse preaching the words of God with preaching the Word of God. They come rather close to the Mahometan approach of treating a particular language (at least two languages so far as Christians are concerned) as the very language of the Almighty.

Almost ten years ago, as friends of mine were ordained to the diaconate, I was always writing the following passage in greeting cards, from St Gregory the Great (Hom. in Ev. xvii) used in the Office for St Luke on 18th October.
For our Lord follows in the wake of those who preach him, since preaching paves the way, and then our Lord himself comes to make his dwelling-place in our hearts. First come the words that exhort us, and then by means of them truth is received into the mind. It was for this reason that Isaiah [40:3] commanded preachers: "Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight the paths of our God." For the same reason too the psalmist gives them the order: "Make a highway for him who goes on high above the setting sun" (Ps 67:5/68:4). 
Msgr. Charles Pope discusses this passage.

From the Maronite Heritage Centre

I have been a couple of times to the Maronite Heritage Centre in the grounds of St Joseph's Cathedral in Redfern, the seat of the Maronite Bishop of Australia. However on both occasions the centre was being used for exequies: a mercy meal (held after a requiem) on the first occasion and a mahfil (condolence of the family before a funeral) on the second. I could not spend time poring over the displays. They hold a wealth of information on the history of the Maronites in Australia, but also a brief account of the history of Lebanon and its people. I transcribed the following from the display for that section.

Read More

The non-existent taboo against composing new Gregorian chants

It is obvious to anyone who attends a Catholic liturgy that despite repeated attempts by those in authority Gregorian chant is far from being "given pride of place in liturgical services". One problem is that it is not a form of music that can be easily and readily played by ordinary musicians. It requires specialist training. Another problem is that the chants themselves are complicated. Many of them can really only be sung by a choir. One way to overcome this was the Graduale simplex in usum minorum ecclesiarum. As its full title indicates, it was meant for the use of Churches too small to sustain a full Gregorian choir. Judging by the present situation that would be pretty much all Churches, including most Cathedrals.

According to Archbishop Bugnini, when the Graduale simplex was first presented, there were loud objections. In his memoir of the reforms he quotes an objection and answer document published by the Consilium.

II. "New forms would be introduced that are not adapted to the faithful and not in conformity with the art of the Church and with the liturgical renewal."
Answer: Not in the least! the melodies of the Graduale simplex are all in the present chant books. None of them is new. The manner of singing, in which one or more cantors alternate with the congregation, which sings a refrain verse, is the oldest and most traditional in the Church. Its use has shown how easy and possible this kind of singing is; the truth of this claim was seen at the fourth session of the ecumenical Council and can be seen every time the congregation responds to the chant with an easy verse, as often happens even in televised Masses. This manner of singing is completely in conformity with the Church's art, as is shown by the venerable tradition dating from the time of such Fathers as St. Ambrose and St. Augustine [presumably referring to Augustine, Confessions ix.7]. It is also consistent with the liturgical renewal, since one of the reform's basic principles is the active participation of the faithful in both the actions and the singing of the sacred rites. (Bugnini, The Reform of the Liturgy 1948-1975, chapter 58, p.894).
(Jeffrey Tucker discusses the Graduale simplex at the Chant Café).

This suggested to me that there is some kind of taboo against composing new plainchant melodies. I have seen it held against the Graduale simplex that it uses melodies from the Divine Office, so a fortiori one would expect there to be some rule against composing entirely new ones. It should be noted that Urban VIII's revisions of the Breviary hymns (mentioned the other day) to make them more Classical and in accordance with Classical metres, are criticised by the Catholic Encyclopedia (§VI) partly because in fact more recent scholarship has shown their Classicism to be defective. Perhaps the fear is that in composing new melodies unknown rules of composition would be broken.

On the other hand the Pope's Mass for the opening of the Year of Faith "used new compositions in the Gregorian tradition for the introit and communion".

On hating the Sermon on the Mount

Beware the blogroll of the wise – it can lead you far away from where you thought you were going. Through one of the sites in my RSS feeds I stumbled across the blog of Andy Naselli, an Evangelical theologian in (where else?) the United States.

One of his top posts of 2012 was about the reaction of unreligious people to the Sermon on the Mount. He was prompted by a conference talk on Exodus 19 by Timothy Keller, a presbyterian pastor in Manhattan.

During his talk, Dr Keller repeated a story told by Virginia Stem-Owens in her article "God and Man at Texas A&M". In 1987 Stem-Owens was teaching a course on rhetoric at that university and assigned – from the textbook – the Sermon on the Mount in the Authorised Version, asking her students to respond to it. This is a transcription of Keller's remarks introducing the story.
You know nineteenth century liberal theology, and you know people say, would say "oh, the important thing is not what you believe about doctrine or dogma or anything like that. The important thing is that you just live like the Sermon on the Mount, because it's so beautiful: that's what a Christian ought to live like" – They clearly have never read it.* Because when [Stem-Owens'] students read it, this was a couple of things they said "I did not like the Sermon on the Mount, it made me feel like I had to be perfect, and no-one is". Here's another one that said "the things asked in this sermon are absurd, to look at a woman like that is adultery? to be angry and insult someone is like murder? these are the most extreme, stupid, unhuman statements I have ever heard.
*Msgr Knox said the same thing about people who claim to like The Imitation of Christ.

Stem-Owens said: "At this point I began to be encouraged. There is something exquisitely innocent about not realizing you shouldn’t call Jesus stupid."

Anyway, Naselli reproduces what I believe is the whole article by Stem-Owens. It is a good read.

I'll return to my usual diet of Popes, Monks and mocking the media soon.

The change of the year

Alfred, Lord Tennyson In Memoriam Canto 105, published in 1850.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
     The flying cloud, the frosty light;
     The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,

     Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
     The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
     For those that here we see no more,
     Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
     And ancient forms of party strife;
     Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
     The faithless coldness of the times;
     Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
     The civic slander and the spite;
     Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
     Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
     Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
     The larger heart the kindlier hand;
     Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Msgr Ronald Knox – using the methods that proved somebody else wrote Shakespeare – once proved that In Memoriam was in fact written by Queen Victoria in memory of Lord Melbourne. It is published in his Essays in Satire (1928).

Solesmes and an English Benedictine

I have mentioned the Graduale Triplex before. It is one of many books of chant produced by the community at Solesmes. Charles Cole posts photographs of the place where these books were produced, and presumably still are: Atelier de Paléographie Musicale.

Judith Champ in William Bernard Ullathorne : A different Kind of Monk (Gracewing 2006) – about the monk of Downside who was an early missionary in Australia and later the first Archbishop of Birmingham – writes about Ullathorne's visit to Rome after leaving Australia to give an account of the Church there. Downside (like Ampleforth) is part of the English Benedictine Congregation or EBC which traces its origins back to English monasticism before the Reformation. The English monasteries on the continent were founded by refugees from English monasteries closed down by the reformers. When they were closed in their turn during the French Revolution ("closed" does not do justice to the violence involved in both cases) the monks came back to England bearing a tradition not unlike liturgical tradition itself.

On the way to Rome Ullathorne met Prosper Guéranger – the founder of Solesmes.
Dom Guéranger went to Rome, in 1837, to ask the Vatican for official recognition of Solesmes as a benedictine community. Rome not only granted Dom Guéranger's request, but on its own initiative raised Solesmes from the status of priory to that of an abbey making it the head of a new Benedictine Congregation de France, successor to the Congregations of St. Maurus and St. Vanne as well as the more venerable and ancient family of monasteries belonging to Cluny. On July 26, Dom Guéranger made his solemn profession in the presence of the abbot of St. Paul Outside the Walls in Rome.
"Dom Guéranger's Restoration" 
Champ remarks that Ullathorne still remembered the meeting with affection and pride, many years later, in a letter to the Abbess of Stanbrook.
I was the first professed monk, he told me, he had ever seen. I therefore claim some interest in the monks and nuns of Solesmes, who are his children, and I shall be obliged if you will tell the abbess and community that I claim an interest in them and their prayers, as I also claim some right to thank them for their tender and sisterly care of the Abbess of Stanbrook.
Quoted in Judith Champ, William Bernard Ullathorne : A different Kind of Monk (Gracewing 2006), chapter 2, p. 63. 
The first professed monk the founder of Solesmes had ever seen. Remember that next time you hear some trad make a crack about "Every Bodily Comfort" or a sniffy remark about the vernacular in English monasteries.

Pity the poor commies

To be elected Pope it is not necessary to be a Cardinal, although only Cardinals may elect a Pope. The last time they elected someone not of their number – in the Conclave that elected Urban VI (born c.1318 reigned 1378-1389) — the consequences were not happy. You do not absolutely have to be a Cardinal to become Pope, but it certainly helps. George Weigel tells us how Karol Wojtyła became Cardinal-Archbishop of Kraków. Wojtyła (in case you didn't know) went on to be Pope John Paul II and an instrument in the collapse of communism in eastern Europe. He describes a conversation between the Polish regime's chief communist ideologue, Zenon Kliszko, and one of the few serving Catholic politicians. Weigel states that Kliszko was Marshall (or Speaker) of the Sejm (Parliament) but apparently at the time that was Czesław Wychech. According to Jonathan Kwitny in chapter 1 of Man of the Century, Kliszko was "minister of religious affairs" (lower case in original). (That link might not work since the New York Times has a delayed firewall: the same link should be the first result of this search). Anyway, Weigel:
In the late fall of 1963, Father Andrzej Bardecki, the ecclesiastical assistant at Tygodnik Powzechny [Universal Weekly, a Catholic newspaper], had a visitor. Professor Stanisław Stomma, head of a five-member Catholic micro-party permitted in the Sejm, discreetly asked Father Bardecki if they could take a walk on the Planty, the greensward that surrounds Kraków's Old Town and a pleasant place to talk while avoiding the secret police bugs in the Tygodnik Powzechny office. Once the two men were outside, Stomma told Bardecki that he had recently spoken with Zenon Kliszko about the logjam in filling the vacant archbishopric of Kraków. Kliszko, who did not lack ego, was very pleased with himself for having vetoed all seven names the Primate had proposed over the past year and a half. "I am waiting for Wojtyła," Kliszko said, "and I'll continue to veto names until I get him." Stomma had thanked the ideologist for sharing this confidence, but had had to work hard to keep himself from laughing. Wojtyła was precisely the candidate Stomma, his fellow Catholic parliamentarians, and priests like Father Bardecki were quietly hoping for…
Then there was the warden at the prison in Gdańsk, who at the time had a distinguished prisoner. Father Piotr Rostworowski, abbot of the Camaldolese monastery outside Kraków, was doing time for helping smuggle Czech citizens across the Czech-Polish border. When Karol Wojtyła's nomination as archbishop was publicly announced, the warden paid his prisoner a visit and gloated over the nomination. This was "very good news," he told the abbot; Wojtyła was exactly the man the comrades wanted. Four months later the warden, on another visit to the abbott, took a different line. "Wojtyła has swindled us!" he cried.
George Weigel, Witness to Hope, Harper-Collins, 1999, chapter 6, pp. 184-6. 
I thought of that story when I read a post by Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith at the Catholic Herald. It was about the 'White March' of 17th May 1981 organised as a show of support for the Pope after the attempt on his life on four days earlier.
People did go to huge Communist rallies in the old days, but they went, one rather suspects, because they felt they had to, rather than because they wanted to. But for John Paul, people turned out with a will. It was all organised by word of mouth, and all organised in defiance of the state. And those were the people I felt sorry for – the members of the Politburo, the high ups in the Polish United Workers’ Party: Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev’s henchmen. How their hearts must have sunk when they saw half a million people turn out to pray for their Pope. For at that moment they must have seen that it was all quite hopeless, that Communism was doomed, that it never had, and never would, command people’s affections in the way the Church and Karol Wojtyla so effortlessly did.