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.

The replacement in-laws

The Catholic World Report publishes a depressing interview with Mary Eberstadt, author of How the West Really Lost God.

For one, changing Western legal codes have made it easier for people to view “family” as an optional arrangement based on voluntary association, rather than as a permanent institution formed by elemental biological ties. Once upon a time, whoever was your sister-in-law remained your sister-in-law for life. Today she might be replaced at any time by other sisters-in-law or sister-in-law-type people, depending on her and your brother’s intentions. That’s a new and potent social fact. … From the very beginning, after all, the Church has stood as a sign of contradiction for so many things that pagans could have and Christians couldn’t: infanticide, artificial contraception, abortion, and the rest. And from the very beginning, insistence on that strict code has not only made some people hate the Church (though of course it has). It’s also made other people love the thing, including some of the finest converts in history. … We modern people have less familial experience than those who came before us. We have institutional substitutes for the family from cradle to grave, daycare to nursing homes. That’s part of why Western society is less religious than it used to be, I believe—because if it’s hard to be an atheist in a foxhole, it’s also hard to be one in the nursery, say, or when contemplating an open grave. The fact that so many Western people are alienated in different ways from these primal experiences is part of what’s going on in so-called secularization.

An honest man

Mark Shea came across some atheistic nonsense in his comboxes , including the following:

[N]one of the Gospels in their earliest form recorded a virgin birth of Mary: ‘The remark has long ago and often been made that, like Paul, even the earliest Gospels knew nothing of the miraculous birth of our Saviour.’ … [T]he church admitted that Virgin Mary was created at the third Council of the church at Ephesus in 431 when Bishop Cyril of Alexandria (d. 444) embraced the cause of Isis and anthropomorphized her into Mary, who then became the ‘new’ mother-of-God. The church added to the fabricated nature of Virgin Mary saying that other passages narrating a miraculous birth ‘were later additions to the original body of the apostolic catechesis’ with further aspects of the conception narratives ‘derived from extraneous sources’.

After carefully unpicking and correcting all this, Shea points out that this sort of stuff is lifted from Fundamentalist tracts (hence the title "Scratch and Atheist, Find a Fundamentalist." He then links to the author of one of these tracts, Ralph Woodrow who revised his views and published a book denouncing this sort of thing. In an essay on his site, Woodrow points out the flaws in the method of seeing (supposed) similarities between the religion of ancient Babylon and typically Catholic practices, and concluding that the the latter derives from the former.

By this method, one could take virtually anything and do the same—even the “golden arches” at McDonald’s! The Encyclopedia Americana (article: “Arch") says the use of arches was known in Babylon as early as 2020 B.C. Since Babylon was called “the golden city” (Isa. 14:4), can there be any doubt about the origin of the golden arches? … By this method, one could condemn Protestant and evangelical denominations like the Assemblies of God, Baptist, Church of Christ, Lutheran, Methodist, Nazarene, etc. Basic things like prayer, and kneeling in prayer, would have to be rejected, because pagans knelt and prayed to their gods. Water baptism would have to be rejected, for pagans had numerous rites involving water, etc. By this method, the BIBLE itself would need to be rejected as pagan. All of the following practices or beliefs mentioned in the Bible, were also known among pagans—raising hands in worship, taking off shoes on holy ground, a holy mountain, a holy place in a temple, offering sacrifices without blemish, a sacred ark, city of refuge, bringing forth water from a rock, laws written on stone, fire appearing on a person’s head, horses of fire, the offering of first fruits, tithes, etc. By this method, the LORD himself would be pagan. The woman called Mystery Babylon had a cup in her hand; the Lord has a cup in his hand (Psa. 75:8). Pagan kings sat on thrones and wore crowns; the Lord sits on a throne and wears a crown (Rev. 1:4; 14:14). Pagans worshipped the sun; the Lord is the “Sun of righteousness” (Mal. 4:2). Pagan gods were likened to stars; the Lord is called “the bright and morning star” (Rev. 22:16). Pagan gods had temples dedicated to them; the Lord has a temple (Rev. 7:15). Pagan gods were pictured with wings; the Lord is pictured with wings (Psa. 91:4).

Woodrow was accused of making his retraction for financial reasons, but, as he pointed out, his Babylon Mystery Religion: Ancient and Modern was a huge seller and his ministry took a loss by withdrawing it.

BBC Bias: So that's alright then

The BBC Trust recently published a review [pdf] on its practice of impartiality.

The BBC justifies its lack of impartiality about Christianity with the excuse ‘its not a perfect world’

Well there you have it, the BBC have invented a special class of impartiality for its journalists covering Christianity, ‘Due Impartiality’, which in this imperfect world means not bothering to be impartial. This bare-faced admission is in line with the prejudice and discrimination exhibited by UK courts who uphold ‘Due Religious Freedom’  for Christians, meaning ‘increasingly restricted religious freedoms’ for Christian Bed and Breakfast owners, Registrars, Counsellors, and Teachers.  Its also in line with the NHS’s version of ‘Due Freedom of Conscience’, which means no freedom of conscience for Midwives and Mental Health counsellors.

Now write it out 100 times

The Vatican website has a separate page for the table of contents of John Paul II's Apostolic Constitution on the Roman Curia Pastor Bonus, in all the the different languages (English, German, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish – plainly the French just don't need to know).  Only on the English page do we find anything like the following.

Copyright 1998 for the English-language translation of the Apostolic Constitution  "Pastor bonus" by Francis C.C.F. Kelly (Ottawa), James H. Provost (Washington) and Michel Thériault (Ottawa). Posted on the Vatican Web Site by permission of the copyright owners. The translation was first completed in 1993. In 1997, it was revised by Michel Thériault; subsequently, it went under a new revision by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Secretariat of State. After a final revision by Michel Thériault, the translation was considered to be faithful to the letter and spirit of the original text and its publication was authorized by the 
Secretariat of State.

I wonder what happened.  Perhaps in this trabslation, the CDF was mandated to come to its decisions only after informal bongo sessions.  The Internet Archive goes no further back than 1998 when only the Italians could know what "the Vatican" was up to.

 (For the title: Romans go home).

Lungs one and two

The Church must breathe with both her lungs, said John Paul II, East and West.  Well the present Pope seems to be doing fine.

Somewhere on the interwebs I discovered there is a lot of respect given to the writings of Hugh Barbour O.Praem. I think that means things like The Schism: Grounds for Division, Grounds for Unity.  It still does not help with working out what all the fuss is. Meanwhile here is some blogger with Ah, the East, which yields a few chuckles:

There is a part of me that wants to summarize (contemporary?) Orthodox readings of Aquinas with one word: Childish. But, of course, that accusation could be extended to most Orthodox readings of any Catholic theology that was penned after 1054. (Oh, heck, it could be extended to most Orthodox readings of St. Augustine, too.) Catholic (even Protestant) readings of Orthodox thought has been, to put it mildly, exponentially more sympathetic. Part of that could be attribute to the apparent “openness” of “the West” to other modes of thought. Part of it could just as easily be attributed to the near-constant boredom of Western Christian intellectual circles with their own tradition(s). The Christian East appears new and exciting, and nobody has promoted the “newness” and “excitingness” of Eastern theology more than the Orthodox themselves. When something doesn’t appear to follow in it, well, it’s “mystical.” When a Western Christian questions the premises of this-or-that mode of Eastern thought, they’re just stuck in “Latin rationalism”; they’ll never understand how 1,000 prostrations on an empty stomach can properly short circuit the brain in order to make it open to divine emanations (or what most scientists would call “hallucinations”).

That last is a dig at hesychasm.

Can you BitTorrent the Missal?

I mentioned the Catastrophe of Catholic Copyrights before. One of those energetic Americans (sigh, Americans, don't they realise you can't get anything done?) has set up a petition for the Holy See to lift copyright restrictions (not completely, under all circumstance, read the post) on many of the documents it owns.

I sometimes wonder if copyright is the reason for the constant fiddling. Is the 1962 Missal sufficiently innovatory to mean it is protected by copyright in the way that the 1570 Missal is not? Does that undercut any claim that it is traditional in the theological sense? Does anyone else care? (don't know; don't know, probably not).  

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 Chinese, Malagasy, 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. 

Well connected

From time to time I refer to Sandro Magister [updates 4 & 5] as one of a tiny few of "Vatican watchers"  worth reading. Why? Well one reason might be that he gets unsolicited letters from important Cardinals, correcting him on matters of detail but otherwise saying that an article demonstrates "your usual mastery and good understanding of the facts".

The end of the Middle Ages (again)

The last Beguine, Marcella Pattyn, has recently died. This being the Economist there is the usual oogedy-boogedy about the Middle Ages, sexism, heretic burning and so on, but it is an interesting article all the same.

These places were not convents, but beguinages, and the women in them were not nuns, but Beguines. In these communities, which sprang up spontaneously in and around the cities of the Low Countries from the early 13th century, women led lives of prayer, chastity and service, but were not bound by vows. They could leave; they made their own rules, without male guidance; they were encouraged to study and read, and they were expected to earn their keep by working, especially in the booming cloth trade. They existed somewhere between the world and the cloister, in a state of autonomy which was highly unusual for medieval women and highly disturbing to medieval men.

Rest in peace.

UPDATE: Obituary from The Daily Telegraph (UK).

Paying for Church music

I used to attend Mass at parish in a suburb close to the centre of a particular city. I nearly called it "inner city" but that would suggest poverty when, in fact, the suburb was inhabited by a number of well-heeled young professionals. The land was valuable and the parish leased off part of it in return for a lucrative income. Some bright spark thought it would be a good idea for the parish to spend some of that income on a drop-in-centre for young Catholics working in the city centre. The idea was that they would come in and socialise after work. It was an unhappy decision. The parish was not far from "downtown", but it was scarcely convenient for anyone to come after a hard day's work and before making their weary way way home. The plasma TV and attached games console were barely used and I think the centre is now closed. It occurred to me that, in the old days (at least as far back as the later middle ages), the money would have been spent on paying for a choir. There would be stipends, and clerks, and funny titles, and the rest of it. By now it would be the name of a style to which learned musicians would allude. It might be a famous choir school. At the Chant Café Jeffrey Tucker has a post on How to Have a Good and Stable Choir in your parish.

You need four strong singers who are committed. If you do not have that, you will not have a consistent provision of liturgical music. That’s just the way it is … People with this skill set are not willing to sing consistently without any pay whatsoever. They might do so for a while but they burn out, feel used, and eventually give up. It is all the more annoying that the priest and others look down on them when they throw in the towel, completely forgetting about the countless hours they have spent in the past without pay.

The whole post is interesting, but what really struck me were some of the comments. First some more of Tucker's post:

If you talk to any professional or just experienced music who knows the world of churches, you will find one consistent complaint about the Catholic Church: it does not pay its musicians. Parishes will sometimes pay an organist (not often a full-time salary) and sometimes pay a nominal fee to a director of music (many parishes even expect this to be done by volunteers). But very few pay singers … It is not necessary to pay ever singer. What every choir needs — and here I’m only reporting what every musician knows but very few priests understand — is four solid singers who can lead each sector. These solid singers are called "ringers" or just "section leaders."

These people also make good solo cantors. These can lead the other singers. This doesn’t mean getting rid of volunteers. The amateurs can be great. In fact, I’m constantly amazed at how good non-readers are at mimicking the sound of those they stand next to. They can’t sing a note alone but sound great as part of a section. They desperately need strong singers around them to give lift to their talents … The parish should employ four singers to play this role, chosen mostly by the director. Each singer can be paid $50 per Mass plus rehearsal once per week. This is terrible pay, to be sure. But it takes the sting out the time commitment. It makes people feel valued. It allows the parish to expect things from the singer. Everyone is happy. The music problem goes away — or perhaps the biggest problems in the music area go away.

One commenter suggests that ringers might encourage laziness and that volunteers are probably the way to go.

But the best solution is also the hardest: a cheerful, welcoming, religious, and encouraging director with the Holy Spirit willing to invest several years to develop, and willing also to be patient with the journey to get there. 

And you hope this Music Director you have been lucky enough to find, doesn't have to move away, get sick, die, lose the faith. Because if any of those things happen you have to try your luck again. Another suggests that Tucker (as the Germans say) sucked this one out of his fingernails.

Have you ever managed college kids at a McD's or KMart? Their work ethic, voice or music majors or not, isn't exemplary. Imagine you've planned and rehearsed all year for Allegri's MISERERE for G[ood] F[riday], and your section leader soprano has the C3 [i.e the top C which occurs several times in that piece, starting just before the two minute mark in the linked video], and you've got the rest of the quire all pumped up to do this high water mark. And Wednesday, she calls you and informs you her mom wants her in Reno on Thursday for Easter weekend. This kind of thing goes on with our volunteers, for sobbing out loud, not to mention kids getting a paltry 50 for Sunday AND a rehearsal? Oh, and they tend to move around a lot, whether in 2 or 4 year programs. Oh, and some of them never pass Theory 1A or sight singing because they've skated by in MS/HS being coached and coddled by teachers who don't teach and parents that know they'll be on and WIN American Idol, the Voice, or the X Factor.

And then there is this.

I have always found it ironic that the church expects musicians to spend thousands of dollars getting trained and then volunteer their services. The guy painting the sacristy is not volunteering ... the plumber? the person who shovels the snow? There is also no expectation on the numerous people the church regularly hires to prepare for two or more hours prior to coming to work today. Maybe if I had to haul my voice around in a truck with a sign painted on it, or bring it out of a special carrying case so that it looked as expensive as it really is. 

Unless your parish has a large stable income through historic real estate acquisition or something (see Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (1992), passim) the answer is probably monks and lots of them. Mind you that seems to be my answer to everything at the moment.

What if Pius XII had spoken out?

At the time, in the 40s, people had a firmer grasp of what was possible. Father Rutler cites The Tablet.

In Belgium at the start of 1943, the Germans would not let Cardinal van Roey publish the Pope’s Silver Jubilee address, and the Italian government banned the film Pastor Angelicus about the life of the Pope. In that same January, the London Tablet commented on the tendency to think that more would have been accomplished by a louder protest from more bishops: "If there exists a vague atavistic memory that once Popes and Bishops spoke, and wicked Kings trembled, that salutary thing happened because the public opinion of the day had a much fuller and deeper sense of the rights and importance of spiritual authority.  Modern men, who have for so long applauded the narrowing down and emptying of that authority as the emancipation of mankind from the thralldom of superstitions, can hardly be surprised if, as a rule, prelates in the modern era tend in prudence to limit themselves to the field indubitably conceded to them by public opinion."

Be careful what you wish for, you might get it. Rutler also gives evidence of Pius' actual policy.

In a letter to Bishop von Preysing on April 30, 1943, Pius XII described with unusual candor the theory behind his subtlety "We give to the pastors who are working on the local level the duty of determining if and to what degree the danger of reprisal and of various forms of oppression occasioned by episcopal declarations…seem to advise caution. Here lies one of the reasons, why We impose self-restraint on Ourselves in our speeches…The Holy See has done whatever was in its power, with charitable, financial and moral assistance." The U.S. diplomat Harold Tittman recorded how anti-Nazi resistance leaders consistently had urged the Pope to follow this policy.

On at least one occasion Catholic Bishops in occupied Europe spoke out against the actions of the Nazi government. This was in the Netherlands and the result was the rounding up of Catholic Jews. On 26th July 1942, the Dutch Bishops had a letter read in all Churches denouncing Nazi policy. On 2nd August, two weeks later, the Nazis began rounding up Catholic Jews, including Edith Stein. By 9th August they were in Auschwitz and by 30th September most of them were dead. When they were arrested they "were told that they were rounded up in direct retaliation of the condemnation of the Nazi "final solution" by the Dutch bishops".

But some would rather be hoodwinked by the KGB.

The framing of Pius XII

In 1938 Pope Pius XII called a meeting of Bishops from all over the world to discuss what to do about Jewish refugees from Germany. The attendees were all sympathetic to the Jews but instead of doing something practical to help, they offered excuses as to why they could do nothing, with the result that we all know. Actually that is not quite what happened. There was a conference, but it was called by someone in a position to make a real difference (separation of Church and state you see), the secular saint Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States of America.

In the summer of 1938, delegates from thirty-two countries met at the French resort of Évian. Roosevelt chose not to send a high-level official, such as the secretary of state, to Évian; instead, Myron C. Taylor, a businessman and close friend of Roosevelt's, represented the US at the conference. During the nine-day meeting, delegate after delegate rose to express sympathy for the refugees. But most countries, including the United States and Britain, offered excuses for not letting in more refugees. Responding to Évian, the German government was able to state with great pleasure how "astounding" it was that foreign countries criticized Germany for their treatment of the Jews, but none of them wanted to open the doors to them when "the opportunity offer[ed]."

I only heard about the Évian conference recently. I knew there had been handwringing and inaction by the leaders of the free world but I did not know they had bothered with an international summit to achieve this.

But of course it is the Pope who gets the blame.

Scholars speaking in favour of Venerable Pope Pius XII and his wartime record managed to convince a significant number of people that the Pontiff did the best he could to save Jewish lives from the Holocaust, even if they failed to win over the majority of the audience at a recent lively debate in London…Speaking for the motion were the British historian Viscount John Julius Norwich and UN jurist Geoffrey Robertson. Speaking against were William Doino, a leading expert on Pius XII and his wartime record, and Professor Ronald Rychlak, a law professor at the University of Mississippi and also a leading scholar on Pius.

This Rychlak chap is one to watch since,

despite being a defender of Pius XII’s wartime record in saving Jewish lives from the Holocaust, the American law professor at the University of Mississippi was initially skeptical of claims, first disclosed by former Romanian intelligence chief General Ion Mihai Pacepa in 2007, that efforts to blacken Pius’s name were driven by a Soviet plot. Yet after two years of research and regular contact with Pacepa, his perception changed, and he is now convinced that the KGB played a key role in framing Pius XII by promoting The Deputy – Rolf Hochhuth’s 1963 play that gave birth to the "Black Legend" of Pius as a Nazi sympathizer.

Zenit carried an interview with Pacepa.

"In KGB jargon, changing the past was called framing," Pacepa explained, "and it was a highly classified disinformation specialty" which were "like mosaics made up of hundreds or even thousands of tiny pieces fitted together. Only a handful of master designers know how the final image will turn out," he said. "I was peripherally involved in changing the past of Pius XII, but at that time, even I did not know what the final image would look like." He gave examples of how such framing operations worked, such as Stalin’s ruthless methods to falsify historical facts to fit into his own plans in the 1930s, and Pacepa’s own disinformation operations as head of Romanian intelligence in the 1970s. He recalled how he successfully managed to hoodwink Western heads of state, intelligence officers and others into believing that Romania’s dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, was an admirable, pro-Western leader when, in fact, "he was a two-bit Dracula." So effective was this disinformation operation that US President Jimmy Carter described Ceausescu as a "great national and international leader" and Queen Elizabeth II granted him a state visit to Britain in 1978. Pacepa defected soon afterwards, revealing the lies to Carter and the Queen. Ceausescu was executed by his own people in 1989, but Pacepa says that few in the West "looked back to speculate about how they had been so misled."

Part one of an interview with Pacepa on the National Catholic Register.

Stalin took Pius XII’s encyclical [Orientales omnes ecclesias, on the Ukrainian Catholic Church] as a declaration of war, and he answered as was his wont: framing Pius XII as a Nazi collaborator. On June 3, 1945, Radio Moscow proclaimed that the leader of the Catholic Church, Pope Pius XII, had been "Hitler’s Pope," mendaciously insinuating that he had been an ally of the Nazis during World War II. Radio Moscow’s insinuation fell flat as a pancake…The Kremlin’s attempt to frame Pius XII as Hitler’s Pope was rejected by that contemporary generation that had lived through the real history and knew who Pope Pius XII really was. The Kremlin tried again in the 1960s, with the next generation, which had not lived through that history and did not know better. This time it worked. 

Part two covers the second, and successful, attempt to smear Pius xii using Rolf Hochhuth's play, The Deputy, to do so.

Critics say that your evidence of a plot has never been corroborated. Is this true? 

If by "corroborated" you mean a written order signed by Khrushchev or some KGB-written operational plans for framing Pius XII, my answer is a flat: No. We do not have — and to the best of my knowledge, there is no hope to find — such corroborating evidence for any post-1962 KGB framing or assassination operations abroad, even if the KGB archives are someday really opened…We do not have Khrushchev's written order to the KGB to frame Pius XII. Just as we will never find [current Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s written order to the KGB, now rechristened FSB, to assassinate Alexander Litvinenko, who in 2006 was killed in London with radionuclide polonium-210, which was later identified by the Scotland Yard as having been produced by the Russian government. But we have something else which is as good as corroborating evidence: the KGB’s operational pattern. All intelligence operations, framing included, follow predictable patterns generated by the idiosyncrasies of the perpetrator. Soviet espionage, like the Soviet government, had an unusually strong penchant for patterns.

My Yoke Is Easy, My Burden Light.

From time to time I have been invited to weddings on Sundays – typically in the early afternoon – at which a Nuptial Mass is celebrated. All Catholics are obliged to attend Mass on Sundays but, by a special rule, one can fulfil one's obligation by attending Mass on Saturday evening. The propers of that Mass (readings, changeable prayers etc.) are almost always the same as those of the Sunday, even though it is on Saturday evening. Mutatis mutandis this applies for those Feasts designated "Holy Days of Obligation" ("Days of Precept" in the old terminology) which happen to fall on a weekday. In Australia such occasions are limited to Christmas Day and the Solemnity of the Assumption on August 15th.

I had always assumed that, to fulfil an obligation to hear Mass on a given day, Catholics must hear the Mass of that day. Wedding Masses have their own prayers and readings, therefore a Wedding Mass on a Sunday would not fulfil my Sunday obligation, and so I would still have to attend Mass elsewhere on Sunday morning or Saturday evening. With the children, and dressing for the wedding, and so on, this can be quite tough.

It turns out my assumption is false. Edward Peters (whom I mentioned the other day) explains things.

…a few folks who correctly remind others that there are two attendance obligations coming up seem also to assert that the type of Mass attended determines which attendance obligation can be satisfied thereat, as in, for example, a Mass of Anticipation for the Second of Advent, celebrated at 5 pm next Saturday, can only be applied toward one’s Sunday obligation, not toward Immaculate Conception. That’s an error arising from confusing the canonical obligation on people to attend Mass with the liturgical obligation on priests to celebrate the Mass called for by the rubrics. The people’s canonical obligation to attend Mass is satisfied by their “assisting at a Mass celebrated anywhere in a Catholic rite on the [day required] or in the evening of the preceding day…” (c. 1248 § 2). The law says nothing about what type of Mass is celebrated, only, that it must be a Mass in a Catholic rite.

A Canon Lawyer on the Catholic Answers forum came to a different conclusion. Peters responds to his arguments (references at the link).

The Church imposes an obligation to attend Mass-on-Sunday (a phrasing I prefer because so many people take the requirement “to go to Sunday Mass” to mean “to go to Mass as celebrated on Sunday with the Sunday readings etc.”, which is to prejudice the very point in question) and recognizes the 24-hour period known as Sunday as being available for one to fulfill that obligation. In that respect, then, not only have we an obligation to attend Mass-on-Sunday, but we have a right to fulfill that obligation within a set 24-hour period. Now, just very recently in Church history, the Church has offered us the option of fulfilling our Mass-on-Sunday obligation during some hours on Saturday. We now have extra time in which to fulfill an obligation, but—and here’s the key—having the option of satisfying one’s Mass-on-Sunday obligation on a Saturday in no way deprives us of the right to fulfill our Mass-on-Sunday obligation anytime during the 24 hours of Sunday. Else, the granting of an option with one hand would be to deprive us of a right with the other. Canon law does not work that way.

Newman's hymns updated

Once upon a time on The Daily Telegraph blog of Damian Thompson, called Holy Smoke (now folded into his current blog, same stuff, different name), which was mostly to do with Catholic matters, there was a trolling anti-Catholic commenter called Bosco. Another commenter called Eccles sprang up to poke fun at Bosco. He claimed to be Bosco's dimmer half brother. Together they caused trouble for the moderators. Eccles soon got his own blog.  In one post, Eccles interviews Cardinal Newman and gets him to update some of his works.

E: Gerontius? I suppose it's too late to give him a more with-it name? The Dream of Dave, maybe? Well, let's see how it starts:

Praise to the Holiest in the height,
And in the depth be praise;
In all His words most wonderful,
Most sure in all His ways. 

E: I think the problem here, John, is that there are at least four different ideas in that verse. And later on you get very involved in sin and redemption, and all that sort of Jesus-stuff, whereas modern congregations should be singing about how happy they are.

JHN: Yes, I think I'm getting the hang of this now. Could I use the tune of "Follow me, follow me?"

When we're up in the heights, or we feel a little blue,
Oh we like to praise our holy holy Friend,
For He sorted us out, yes He did, for me and you,
So we're saved, yes we're saved, and that's the end.
Chorus: Praise the Lord, praise the Lord,
praise the holy holy Lord... (ad libitum)

Eccles has lots of posts on hymns, e.g. "Colours of Day", "I the Lord of Sea and Sky" ect ect.

Via Chant Café.