Il Faut que la France Survive 6

And so we find ourselves in the twentieth century.

Those secularists, in particular Georges Clemenceau, set their minds firmly against the Church, expelling many religious orders, several of whom came to England and did wonderful work. The Grande Chartreuse, having scented trouble, built the great Charterhouse of Parkminster in West Sussex, just in case (though I don't think it ever actually moved there). The Solesmes Benedictines founded Quarr on the Isle of Wight, and actually did live there for several years. And many orders of women came too and founded schools where they insisted on teaching in French, not English, and this chauvinistic impulse made many Catholic Englishwomen bilingual, to their, and their country's, benefit.

Clemenceau was every inch a child of the revolution. After the devastation of the First World War (in which France suffered truly appalling losses) he set about building a new Europe. In this he was assisted by Woodrow Wilson, the president of the USA, who was determined to 'get rid of all those old Kings' (or something like that). No doubt the idea was that it was precisely this old alliance of throne and altar which had led to monarchs being able to devastate their own and others' countries for some abstract notion of glory. Gott mit uns was a common notion on all sides, and it probably was a major contributor to the advance of secularism.

For the French, the gulf deepened between those who held to the old vision, and the secularists.

………It's just occurred to me that I never mentioned de Lammenais and the Ultramontanes in my account of the nineteenth century. Another time! ……

Come the nineteen-fifties, there was a great division in French society; the Church and the integrists on one side, and the workers and secularists on the other. Everyone knew that something had to be done to heal this wound, and it was as a result of this that the Worker Priest movement was born. The Church reached across the gulf to embrace the working world and, some would say, was making progress.

And then Vatican II happened.

It seemed that the Church herself had leapt that gulf, and in 1968 embraced the working people. The windows had been opened and the world and the Church were joined once more. The whole aesthetic of the Church was no longer elitist and separatist, but vernacular in every sense, of the people. Priests abandoned the soutane and embraced the grey suit and blue polo shirt. Choirs were dismissed, and the people would do the singing.

The trouble is that the average workman wasn't that more attracted to this than to what went before. In fact, probably less. He was not convinced that the Church had anything to say to him, and certainly he wasn't impressed by a priest who didn't dress like one, who clearly didn't have the courage of his convictions.

And the old Integrists were horrified at this sell-out, this tawdry abandonment of the vision of a millennium and a half. So they embraced their Gallican heritage and went their own way. But the word Gallican is important; there was not, is not, and cannot be a notion of breaking Roman Communion: it is an essential part of the Gallican 'creed' that it is part of the Catholic Church; simply that it exercises a certain independence of action. It is entirely within the (Integrist) French psyche that

(a) France has a mission for the Church and the world.
(b) France is the eldest daughter of the Church, and has an eldest daughter's privileges and responsibilities to teach her younger siblings.
(c) France is a loyal daughter of the Roman Church, but not her slave.
(d) The appalling division within French society is the work of the devil who seeks to strike just where it is most crucial that there be unity. It is France's greatest shame, and the Revolution is the greatest manifestation of this shame. The perpetuation of the celebration of the Revolution (July 14th and all that) is rubbing salt in the wound.

And hence the insistence of the Society of St Pius X and its co-runners that it has never ceased to be Catholic; rather it is doing its best to make the rest of the Church properly Catholic. One does not need to obey the Pope's sillier decrees to be a proper Catholic, in other words. There is more than simple blind obedience.

Within France, the trouble is that the Integrists have not really found a message that will speak to the masses. Le Pen and his political cronies are willing to use the Integrists, but they are not Integrists themselves. They lay on the Old Mass for their supporters, recognizing that there are a lot of committed Integrists who might well vote for them, but it is really just a flag of convenience. They can speak to the masses, but their message is about immigration and all those other things familiar to our own National Front. They are as republican as the other parties, in effect. The alliance between the Integrist Catholics and the Front Nationale is at best an alliance of convenience; the two in reality have very little in common except conservatism, of a sort.

So what holds this riven France together? Simply, the notion of being French. In all the troubles that beset that fascinating country, every party has been intensely proud of being French. They have disagreed about almost everything else, to the point of copious bloodshed, but the spirit of Clovis and his Franks is still alive to that extent. All of them agree that France is, simply, THE country to live in. It is, to them, self-evident. They have none of that irritating smugness of the Italians about Italy; it is simply self-evident to every intelligent person that France is the best.

And that is why, to them, il faut que la France survive.

In one more post, I'd like to look at why it is necessary for the rest of the world, for us, that France survive.

Well, quite!

In last week's Tablet there was an interesting letter:

Discomfiting faith of the young?

Among some good coverage of World Youth Day I was surprised to read in Robert Mickens' 'Letter from Madrid' (27 August) remarks that implied that pilgrims had 'provoked' protesters by praying the Rosary. We must act in Christian charity, but this does not require us to hide the truth. While there may have been 'provocation' on the part of pilgrims, there was revolting conduct on the part of some protesters, which was not reported at all in Robert's letter.

Is it true that for an older generation we are simply discomfited by the very real faith of the young and wish they would join us bickering over the new Missal?

Well, quite!

Return

I don't know if you have ever seen the film Cristo é fermato á Eboli? It was a bit how I felt in 2005 when I was appointed to be the Pastor to the Valle Adurni.

This morning, celebrating Mass for the first time for a year in the main church of the parish, I put the Blessed Sacrament in the hands of a teenager, into the same place that I had put the same Lord for the first time some six or seven years ago. And I saw a rosary ring there on her finger.

I wept. I hope nobody noticed, though my sight was rather blurred for the rest of the Communion line.

These moments make every moment of being a priest, all the annoyances and difficulties, worth while.

I'm home.

The Big Weekend!

From the Adur Valley's newsletter this weekend:

The big news this week is, of course, the new translation of the Mass which begins today. There are few who like change, especially in the way we pray, and we have been using the now-past translation since 1975, most of a lifetime for most of us. Fr Dominic [the priest who kindly supplied my absence when I was on sabbatical] tells me that he has thoroughly gone through all the changes with you, so that it won’t be necessary to say anything further, but of course I am at your disposal as always, and if I can add anything, I will gladly do so.

Because of our natural resistance to change, I would ask one favour of you, and that is to hold back on criticism for a few weeks. As you know, I have been living in the seminary for the last year, and there we have been using the new translation since Ash Wednesday. All of us, down to the youngest student, found the transition back into the older translation when we went to parishes far more difficult than our adjustment to the new version. What I am trying to say is that I am confident that when we have all got over the hump of the newness and consequent strangeness of the new version, we will like it better. The prayers are much, much, richer; full of depth and meaning. And if words like ‘consubstantial’ bother you, well consider that if a four-year-old can manage a term like ‘Tyrranosaurus Rex’, a grown-up doesn’t need to only use words of one syllable either.

Decisions as to what things might have been translated differently, possibly better—even if we are correct—were never in our gift, so I respectfully suggest that we try not to lower the morale of our parish by grumbling about them. This wouldn’t help anyone, and, I repeat, I am very confident that within a few months almost everyone will feel happy with the new version. Let’s give it a proper try before passing judgement.

I think that for a few weeks we shouldn’t attempt to sing the Gloria or Sanctus or Memorial Acclamation, to give us time to acclimatize to the new words. Then we can learn the new music together.

God bless you all.

Sorry about the strange line-breaks: I'm not sure what happened there! 

Il faut que la France survive 5

The nineteenth century was probably the most traumatic and confusing period in French history—were you to include the last decade of the eighteenth century, you could remove the 'probably'. Politically, the Empire veered from republic at the beginning, middle and end, two Bonapartist imperial regimes, a Bourbon revival, and a King that tried to be both Bonapartist and Bourbon.

Religiously it was a period of revival. Benedictine Monasticism was got going again by the great Guéranger at Solesmes and spread rapidly, with other orders also being founded. There was vast number of instances of a relatively new phenomenon—women's active religious orders, some founded in the wake of the revolution to provide care and instruction to those who needed either, without the constriction of enclosure. It used to be said that even God did not know how many female religious orders there were in France (nor how much money the Franciscans had, nor what a Jesuit was thinking—no doubt there are others). There were saints, too, perhaps outstandingly St Thérèse of Lisieux.

The monasticism soon came to be what one thinks of as being 'real' monasticism today. In other words, a community dedicated to contemplation, prayer and plainchant. Guéranger unquestionably thought that he was reviving the monasticism of the Middle Ages, but really I think that French-style monasticism owes more to the Gothic Revival which was just as powerful in France as it was in England. It has long been my view that the English Benedictine Congregation, with its schools and parishes, is closer in spirit to mediæval monasticism than the various French congregations. Be that as it may, revival gothicism caught the spirit of the age more effectively, and Benedictinism flourished.

The close of the nineteenth century saw the secularists triumphant. But only just. The Third Republic that followed the Franco-Prussian war and the flight of Napoleon III to the safety of the Home Counties was on the one hand deeply in the hands of the secularists, increasingly dominated by the Freemasons (a much tougher, atheistic, breed than our home-grown kindly-motivated rotarian-writ-large trouser-rollers), but also traumatized by the events of 1870 when, besieged by the Germans, the poor starving people of Paris were driven to eat rats and the rich ate the exhibits from the Paris Zoo, to be followed by the anarchy of the Communards. In the Commune, the Archbishop of Paris was assassinated, and he became a sort of common focus of national angst which meant that the state was kind-of atheistic but with a religious twist.

The building of the great basilica of Sacre-Coeur on Montmartre was, in a way, the last flourish of the Ancien Regime, the alliance of throne and altar. In the late seventeenth century St Margaret Mary had given instructions that France was to build a great church in honour of the Sacred Heart, or else terrible tribulations would befall the country. This was later understood to be a prophecy of the Revolution and its attendant horrors. Sacre-Coeur was built with the active co-operation of the civil authorities, and even with a decree of the Assemblee-Nationale in 1910, saying that it was in reparation for the crimes of the Commune.

And yet while all this was going on, the arch-mason and secularist Georges Clémenceau was organizing the expulsion of huge numbers of male and female religious from France. Even Solesmes Abbey was closed, and the monks took refuge on the Isle of Wight, where they lived between 1901 and 1922.

So France, then, has this bifurcated understanding of herself: on the one hand profoundly Catholic, and on the other profoundly secular.

Help Save Lanherne

This is a letter from Mother Maria Rosa Pia of the Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate, who have a wonderful foundation in Lanherne. I will write no more, but let Mother tell you in her own words:

 Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate 

House of Contemplation “Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel” 

Lanherne Convent, St. Mawgan 

Newquay, Cornwall TR8 4ER 

Tel.: 01637 860423 

E-mail: fsi.lanherne@talktalk.net 

Ave Maria! 

July 2011 

Dear Friend, 

Please permit me to introduce myself. I am a Franciscan Sister of the Immaculate living the contemplative life at Lanherne Monastery in St. Mawgan, Cornwall. We are a community of 11 sisters from England, Italy, and the Philippines and we arrived here in the year 2001, 10 years ago. Prior to that, the Carmelites, who had been here since 1794, decided that they would leave Lanherne in order to amalgamate with another one of their communities. They therefore sought another religious order who would be able to continue the life of prayer and sacrifice which they had fulfilled here since their arrival. We were approached by the Mother Superior and a meeting was arranged between the Carmelites and the Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate. It was decided that we would come to Lanherne and begin our contemplative life here on 11th July 2001. 

However, following our arrival, the circumstances changed and it was decided that the Monastery should be sold together with its Estate. What happened, in fact, is that the surrounding buildings have been sold and all that remains now is the Monastery itself and St. Joseph’s Hall (which is used as a church hall). We have been asked if we would like to purchase Lanherne ourselves, but as Franciscans we are not allowed to own any properties, nor do we have the money to purchase it. What I ask is whether you know anyone (or a group of people) who would be interested in helping us to keep Lanherne as a place of prayer and who would purchase the Monastery and Hall, but at the same time permit us to remain here to continue our life of prayer. I do not know how much the property is estimated to be but I feel sure they would not be looking for more than £1 million. I do not think there are any other religious who would be interested in coming here and if would be a tragedy if it became a secular building as so many other Monasteries in England have become. We can think of Stanbrook Abbey and Darlington Carmel to name but two. 

Lanherne is such a special place and everyone who visits it says they find great peace and a facility to pray here. One year ago we started to have adoration of the Most Blessed Sacrament every day of the week after the 7.30 a.m. Holy Mass (10 a.m. on Sundays), ending with Benediction each day. You may be interested to know that the Sanctuary light before the Blessed Sacrament has remained alight for hundreds of years. Lanherne used to be the Manor House of the Arundell family who rose to high positions in the country, only to be reduced to gradual impoverishment during the times of the Reformation, due to their love of the Catholic faith. Lanherne became a place of refuge for many priests during this time of persecution and there are said to be nine priest holes where they hid from their persecutors. Tradition relates that one priest was hidden in one of these for eighteen months. St. Cuthbert Mayne often used to celebrate the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass here (using the altar which is now in our small choir) and ministered to the Faithful here. He was martyred on 29th November 1577, for the simple reason that he was a Catholic priest. The Franciscans of the Immaculate are now the very privileged custodians of the first class relic of his skull which is kept in our choir, and which the people who attend the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass here on Sundays are able to venerate. 

Just to tell you a little about our Institute of Franciscans of the Immaculate (friars and sisters). It was founded fairly recently by two Italian priests, Fr. Stefano M. Manelli and Fr. Gabriele Pellettieri, (both of whom are still alive) who were inspired by the life and teachings of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Maximilian Mary Kolbe. The distinctive characteristic of our Institute is the religious profession of the Marian Vow of Total Consecration to Our Lady and each of us desire to live our religious consecration under the protection and through the mediation of the Blessed Virgin Mary by means of this Vow. One very important thing in a world in which the number of religious vocations is dwindling rapidly, is that our Institute does have many vocations both for the friars and sisters and these are now coming from all parts of the world. We have communities in many countries and four Houses of Contemplation, one of which is Lanherne. 

May God and Our Lady reward and bless you for reading this letter which I send to ask if you are able to help us in any way to keep Lanherne a place of prayer (which has been our most special intention for so many years). I would be most grateful to hear from you in this regard and assure you of my prayers and that of the whole community. 

in Jesus Mary & Joseph 

Mother Superior 

Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate 

Lanherne 

Home!

The Pastor is in his Valle.

All's well with, well, at least the Pastor.

Home at last.

Il faut que la France survive 4

The revolution is the 'other' foundational event for France. It is as important to the non-religious side as the baptism of Clovis is to those with a traditional religious faith.

The American revolt was in some ways the inspiration, but it was a very different event. The American affair was not exactly unbloody, but on the whole was a fairly civilized happening (unless you believe Gibson's The Patriot version of it). The French brought all their passion to their revolution, and it must have seemed like the end of the world. The nightmare that was the Terror was truly appalling. In the Conciergerie museum, on the Ile de France, you can see a list of all those executed in Paris during those violent months, some for the crime of merely being a driver, or a baker to 'The Traitor, Capet' (aka King Louis XVI). The list goes right round a room, in small print. It makes sobering and sad reading.

When crimes so massive as those judicial murders have been committed, those connected in any way have simply to go on with it. There can be no going back; any weakening can only result in a possible victory for one's opponents, and then one is certainly going to be a victim of revenge and punishment oneself. Having committed atrocities, the only thing is to stay in charge, and be proud of what has been achieved. You brazen it out. This is the foundation of secular France, whose anthem is the extraordinarily bloodthirsty Marseillaise. Its motto is Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and by and large it (eventually) succeeded in establishing just that. Bourbon France may have been Romantic, but it was Wrong for all the reasons I have alluded to in previous posts, plus a lot more. 'Let them eat cake' (or brioche) may have been a calumny in the case of Marie Antoinette, but it was a common enough attitude before the Revolution. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, on the other hand, have led to the liberal France being really very illiberal, imposing a sort of one-size-fits-all policy (of which the laïcité argument is a part) that denies divergence or differentiation among the countless nationalities now to be found in France. The argument about the hijab, for instance, is not so much an objection to either religion in general or Islam in particular as a determination that no Frenchman or Frenchwoman should stand out in any way from the common notion of Frenchness.

So, you have two strands of self-understanding in France. The traditional religious standpoint adheres to the Clovis moment as being the decisive moment of French self-understanding. Here you will find many monarchists and right-wingers, many, if not most of whom are also Catholics of a traditional persuasion, going regularly to the Extraordinary Form of the Mass. These have a traditional notion of the Glory of France, so it is not to be wondered at that many of these families' sons end up in the army. I heard somewhere that a few years ago, one of the great military schools (?St Cyr?) actually appointed its chaplain from the Fraternity of St Peter because so few of the students wanted the Ordinary Form of the Mass. So, in France, traditionalism in religious matters more often than not involves all these other things as well. It is a culture, an outlook entirely of itself, and not well understood outside France. in the States, in the UK, traditionalism is mostly about religion (though in the US there can be associated matters like Republicanism, opposition to big government, the right to bear arms and the rest, but they are not essentially linked, just the same sorts of people tend to hold the same sorts of views). In France, the linkage is a real one; this school of thought is usually called Integrism; a complete vision for France, one might say, honouring her glorious past (but not, of course, the revolution and all that stands for), and working to make it her future too. Il faut que la France survive!


Having been held by a large proportion of the Church, this all went pear-shaped in the 1960s. France was profoundly shaken by the events of that era (Algeria, De Gaulle, Student riots and all that), and the Church was no exception. Liberal ecclesiastics were enthused by Pope John's opening to the world, and embraced secular France with a will. Broadly speaking they turned their back on Clovis, and embraced the revolution instead as the cultural and meaningful moment of French history. What in English we call a 'trendy' or a 'liberal' is in France known as a 'Soixante-Huitard', a Sixty-Eighter, a man of 1968.

Imagine the impact this had on those to whom the vision of Clovis, the union of Throne and Altar, meant everything! It seemed like the basest treachery and betrayal to embrace the atheistic, masonic liberalism of the state, of Clemenceau, of the Marseillaise; it was like joining the tricoteuses as they jeered the Carmelite nuns of Compiegne ascending the scaffold singing the Salve Regina.

And if you ever want to see a grey-shirt French priest get apoplectic, just mention integrism to him.

I'd like in the next post to look at the nineteenth century in France, and what it had to contribute. But I hope today that I've helped explain to English speakers a little of what went to make Archbishop Lefebvre do what he did, and why his movement is so strong in France, more than anywhere else.

Il faut que la France survive 3

So, by the time of the Revolution, we see a French Church:
1) Divided emotionally from the mainstream West by an firm and principled independence—Gallicanism.
2) Weakened by the abuse of the Church's resources, material and spiritual, to benefit the crown and state.
3) Weakened by the Wars of Religion, and the legacy of blood and bitterness.
4) Despised by the intellectual classes of the 'Enlightenment' who find different ways to express religion: Deism, a sort of Roman Revival Classicism, Agnosticism or even Atheism. This group felt themselves profoundly to hold the moral high ground.
5) Internally divided between Jansenism and orthodox Catholicism.
6) And yet still capable of producing saints.

This is what I call the French paradox; that you can have a situation that is from one perspective disastrous, and yet from another perspective, vibrantly alive and functioning. It is as true today as it was then, and I will be returning to this. I think that perhaps it has something to do with the French character, which, simply, is never lukewarm, but is always passionate and tending to the extreme. Rabbi Lionel Blue once described his mother (or perhaps his grandmother) as being the kind of woman who never had a headache; it was always a brain tumour. I don't think the lady was French, but the French, like her, tend to adopt radical positions and defend them passionately.

We see this most clearly in the spirituality of that pre-revolutionary age. On good Gallican principles, France had never implemented the decrees of the Council of Trent, or at least only did so very slowly. But that didn't mean to say that the spirit of reform had passed France by; it just wanted to implement reform in its own way. Dioceses retained their old mediæval rites, but instead of Romanizing them, they further distanced themselves from the mainstream. Inspired by Jansenism, they, for instance, removed from liturgical texts anything that was not strictly scriptural, and warmly approved the findings of the (Pseudo-) Synod of Pistoia, which advocated an awful lot of things that we would be familiar with today.

If you want to know more about Jansenism, Fr Anthony Chadwick has a very good trot-through the subject here.

French spirituality was very popular even outside France until quite recently. Mgr Ronald Knox famously remarked that he needed to read spiritual books in French; no other language would quite do. Sometimes its severity and austerity were characterized as Jansenist, but really I am not sure that all schools of French spirituality didn't have that mark.

As in all other things, the French wanted to do spirituality their own way. International religious orders, like the Jesuits, were not popular in France, and even the (itself very independent) Oratory would be transformed to French taste. The founder of the French Oratory, Cardinal de Bèrulle, approached St Francis de Sales and begged him to lead the new Congregation. St Francis refused, though he professed admiration from afar. One can scarcely think of a wider gulf between his spirituality and that of the French Oratory! One of its greatest luminaries, Père de Condren was described by St Jane Francis de Chantal as having a spirituality more suited for angels than human beings.

Seminaries were finally beginning to be founded at this time (priests were still being formed according to the pre-tridentine model), and the movement for seminary formation took on a huge momentum. Two whole religious congregations were founded to do this job (itself a strange concept of the time, that Religious should form secular priests), both influenced by the French Oratory, one by St Vincent de Paul, and the other by Père Olier, the Sulpicians.

Olier was a hugely apostolic and holy man whose foundation and inspiration provided generations of good and even saintly secular priests in France and Canada. I myself was formed in the only English seminary founded according to Sulpician principles. But the principle was a very strict one indeed. Again, we experience that French extremity.

Corporal mortification, for instance, has always been considered a healthy remedy for sin. But in French spirituality it became almost a good in itself. One would withdraw from every pleasure and comfort, deny all joy unless it be in God alone. Olier taught a strict custody of the eyes, and one day taking seminarians to Chartres on pilgrimage, one lad dared to lift his eyes to the great windows there and involuntarily gasped, expecting a harsh rebuke. But for once Olier said that it was all right to have a quick goggle, as Chartres was built to the glory of God.

This seems to me somewhat inhumane, and very alien to the Irish school in which I was brought up. That one might not look at a tree or a sunset lest it give one pleasure, it seems to me, is contrary to the evidence of God's goodness in his creation. It reflects a real pessimism about creation, that it is somehow totally depraved and incapable of leading us to God. Trent taught that nature (including human nature) was 'in deterius commutatur', changed for the worse, but its inherent goodness was not wiped out.

For the same reasons, extreme forms of mortification were encouraged and admired. This has often been called 'Jansenist', and I'm sure that the Jansenists were very enthusiastic about it, but I think that it also had widespread currency among those who would not call themselves Jansenists. Fr Chadwick in the article linked to above mentions that Jansenism is alive and well in the Society of St Pius X. I wonder, really, if it is really classical Jansenism, or whether it is simply this traditional French extreme approach to spirituality?

A friend, who was for a time a seminarian in the Society, was taken with his year group from Ecône to visit the new preparatory seminary at Flavigny, sited in a former religious house. There they inspected the cemetery and found many graves of men in their late teens and early twenties, worn out, it was explained, by the extremity of their mortifications.* The Rector smacked his lips with satisfaction: 'c'est bon, ça!' he said, 'c'est Catholique!'


* More likely tuberculosis, which was rife in such institutions.

Il faut que la France survive 2

It will be clear that French Christianity was going to be quite different, largely because the culture that was baptized with Clovis was so very different from the 'civilized' Romano-Gallic culture which had preceded it. At one level, the Arian Goths in the south and in Iberia were more 'civilized', to the point that when Clovis announced his intention to liberate the Catholic Gauls from their oppression under the heretical Goths, those same Gauls preferred to fight with the Goths against the Franks. They lost, though, and willy-nilly found themselves part of a new, Catholic, France.

The Romans thought that the Franks were rough, uncouth and bellicose. They had a point. It took nigh on a millennium to arrive at the court of the Sun King. There is little to be astonished at that Eastern Christianity looked with barely-concealed or even open contempt at the Western Church, so deep it was in the arms (in both senses) of barbarians.

But we mustn't let the East get away with it altogether; its history, too, was brutal, and Christianity did little to ameliorate that. But the East had both subtlety and scholarship, and it took the Franks a few hundred years to acquire these, beginning under Charlemagne who initiated a deliberate policy of recreating the Western Empire, and began it by himself learning how to read, and of importing all the finest scholars he could find (like Alcuin of York).

One curious difference between East and West was that the East was in a fairly constant state of war; first with the Persians, and then with the Moslems. The West was (comparatively) peaceful; it has sometimes been said (and I'm not really sure how much credence to give this) that, lacking a great deal of real all-out war, the Franks' friskiness was in due course to be channelled into the Crusades, rather than being wasted in beating each other up.

The creation of the Holy Roman Empire had another curious side-effect. Until this point, the Western Church had been fairly undisputedly governed by the Papacy. But in time the Holy Roman Emperors came to want the same sort of influence over the Church that their opposite numbers in Constantinople exercised. In the middle ages, it developed into almost a dual authority structure in the West; some Christians looking to the Emperor, others to the Pope, for ecclesiastical leadership. It was to cause the 'Investiture Crisis', concerning who had the right to appoint bishops. There were even different theological schools. Sometimes the Imperial Church (as it were) seemed in the ascendent, and sometimes the Papal, as when in 1076/7 the Emperor Henry IV was reduced to kneeling barefoot in the snow at Canossa to beg the Pope's forgiveness.

In some ways, this 'Imperial' church survived in France where (as in some other countries) the King appointed the bishops and governed the Church as every other aspect of the country. I think that perhaps you could make a case that this Imperial-style was what Henry VIII was aiming at in his break from Rome. Not a new Church, as such, but independent and secular government of the Church in England. To many a Frenchman, the 'alliance of throne and altar', which essentially dates back to Clovis, is of the very essence of France. France, in this view, is not truly herself without the twin pillars of the monarchy and the Church. They will not disagree, however, that it went very wrong. From the late middle ages, the state began to exploit the Church for its own ends. Abbacies (and of course their incomes) were conferred on laymen whom the King wished to favour. Consequently monastic life went into steep decline. Bishoprics were conferred on politicians and civil servants for the same reasons; and it did not seem to matter much whether the man was a good one or not. Talleyrand, for instance, was, though a known unbeliever, appointed to the bishopric of Autun in the fateful year of 1789 for political reasons. This effective, principled, autonomy of the French Church is what is known as Gallicanism.

There were other negative influences also. The wars of religion during the Renaissance were truly terrible. Catholicism triumphed in the end, but it waded through seas of blood in order to do so. The famous cynical comment of Henry of Navarre, a Protestant who converted to Catholicism when confronted with the resolute Catholicism of Paris which was the the only obstacle preventing his taking the crown as Henry IV, that 'Paris was worth a Mass' suggests that, really, the wars had done much to wipe out the fervour of the high middle ages.

Some fervour did return, of course. There were saints, great saints like St Vincent de Paul, St Margaret Mary Alacoque and many others, but much of the fervour was found in the new half-Protestant and 'charismatic' heresy of Jansenism. It, too, was ruthlessly stamped out, but, like Gallicanism, its ghost continued to haunt the French Church for many years. Some would say that it still does.

Il faut que la France survive 1

'Il faut que la France survive' These words are a kind of motto for a certain kind of Frenchman: it is necessary that France survive. Not just necessary for France, but for the world, for humanity. France, this motto suggests, has a message for mankind. And it isn't Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, either. In this view, the France that was born at the conversion of Clovis in 496 created something deeply important. I'd like to explore that a little.

The Roman Empire disintegrated in the West incrementally between (very roughly) the fourth century and the sixth. The low point was the sack of Rome herself in August 410, and the main agents of this disintegration (besides the internal problems of the Empire) were those groups of peoples the Romans called 'Barbarians' (because they couldn't speak Latin, going 'ba-ba-ba' instead). The Christianized Roman Empire had come to identify itself in some way with the Kingdom of God. The degree of identification can be disputed, but the Emperor had become a sort of Ikon of God and the Empire a sort of Ikon of his Kingdom.

This means that those who would wish to profess the Gospel must put themselves under the governance of the Empire. In later centuries there was an amusing sequel to this, when the Bulgarians, who wished to join themselves to Byzantine Christianity, were told that they must first take their trousers off. They were considered a barbarian thing, you see. But it also resulted in almost no missionary work being undertaken outside the Empire's borders for a very long period. Indeed, the only significant example that I can think of was the mission to the Goths by, er, the Arians! Which is why the Goths became Arians. I think that, arguably, the mission of St Augustine to Canterbury (sent by St Gregory) was the first real example of the Empire doing its duty. Perhaps some of you know others—there was the work of Frumentarius among the Ethiops, of course. But that was rather an independent scheme.

The sack of Rome in 410 brought profound heart-seeking among orthodox Christians, for it seemed that God had abandoned his Kingdom. In the shadow of this, the increasingly pessimistic St Augustine wrote his monumental work The Kingdom of God, in which he worked his way round to his insight that God's Kingdom cannot be identified with any earthly state. It is a fascinating work, and really I can't do it justice here, so I won't try.

The baptism of Clovis represented a new way. A despised, barbarian kingdom accepted the Orthodox Catholic Gospel, in contradistinction to the Arian Goths who were in Southern Gaul at the time, and this seemed to signal a change in their fortunes, and its king and its people were baptized by St Remigius in 496.

Get that: God's kingdom does not require a particular earthly political allegiance.

Now, there were political reasons for this, without doubt. And one cannot deny the appeal of wanting to be like the classy people in Rome. (Forgive this analogy). Revolutionaries may begin by living on onions and sleeping on straw, but before long their leaders find the palaces of those they have overthrown very attractive. Clovis clearly wanted to hitch his wagon to the glorious history (not to say lifestyle) of Rome. But he did so in a very different way. He and his men didn't really stop beating other people up, for instance, or (probably) putting their feet onto the table at dinner. He didn't stop being a Frank: he was just a Christian Frank. Or Frankly Christian.

(Has it ever crossed your mind to ask where we get the word 'frank' from?)

To those in the Roman Empire, Clovis remained a barbarian: the problem was all the more acute because he was very successful in his enterprises, thrashing the Arian Goths in the south of Gaul. But the Church had to decide what best to do. Should it applaud, or should it tut-tut?

It did what it does best; it havered, and waited a few centuries. The Emperor was distant, in Constantinople (he regarded the Pope as his viceroy for the West for much of this time), and Rome herself was in a pretty awful state, with various strong families dominating the scene, and the Emperor so far away that all he could do was demand taxes without fulfilling his part of the bargain to provide the necessary defence that was required.

This all came to a head in the reign of Pope Leo III (reigned 795-816). He was a surprise election, a nobody, really, who was bullied quite egregiously by the Roman families (one account has him castrated and blinded by them), and (to cut a very long story short) threw himself into the arms of the Frankish monarch, whom we know as Charlemagne. He got the support he needed, and in return, on Christmas Day 800 was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Rome.

To be continued………

A Tea-light…

…for the Beaker Folk of Husborne Crawley.

They keep me smiling.


(and for the sake of those already clenching their theological gussets, no, I am not about to become a liberal Anglican. I just instinctively like some people.)

A Question

I'm now at the end of my sabbatical and will be returning to the Valle Adurni in a matter of a few days. Naturally, especially once the book was finished, I have been reflecting on all sorts of things to do with the parish, and one of them worries me particularly. I would like to solicit your advice, and that of my clerical brothers especially.

A phenomenon that seems to be on the increase is that of the 'temporary convert'. What I mean is that somebody approaches me with a view to becoming a Catholic. For a year or so, he or she regularly comes to Mass, and attends all the preparation sessions where I myself do all the teaching (and I can assure you that it is thorough). I do my best to ensure that each convert has a 'friend base' in the parish; if he or she knows nobody, I try to introduce him to others and make sure that he never feels at sea. The time comes for the reception; he makes his first confession; he professes his new faith with fervour, he receives his first Communion with devotion…

And next Sunday, he's not there. He's already semi-lapsed. From time to time one may see him around; he might appear at Mass when there's nothing more interesting to do, but with decreasing frequency. Not all are like this, of course, but the proportion is scary.

I know very well that other priests experience the same thing, and no doubt they beat themselves up about it the way I do, which is why this matter is not addressed on blogs and things.

A few Sundays ago, we listened to the Parable of the Sower. And it struck me, for the first time, that this parable is mis-named; by thinking about the sower and the seed, I had missed the point that the parable is actually about the soil. If our potential converts are the seeds sown by the sower, we, the Church, are the soil in which they are planted. And is our parish thorny, stony, rich? Are we good soil in which they might grow?

So, I think that I might rejig things a bit. What if I were to begin the course with a retreat? To take people away to a monastery for a weekend, to learn how to pray before they learnt the content of the faith. I think that perhaps it is too much to assume that people will pray without lots of encouragement. And maybe if they pray, the faith will root more deeply in them. The new Catechism ends with prayer, and I have followed that pattern until now. What if I were to begin with it?

And has anyone else any good suggestions?

Interlude

Do please go and read what Fr Tim Finigan has said about the riots here. He is right on the money.

"Just showin the Police and the rich people we can do what we want" about sums it up, I think. "I can do what I want" is the net result of moral relativism applied by the ordinary teenager affected by original sin and educated in a system that undermines any real foundation of duty to God, country or neighbour.

Few people have noted the irony of the appeals by the Police to parents to "contact their children." For several decades our country has undermined marriage, the family, and the rights of parents. Agents of the state can teach your children how to have sex, give them condoms, put them on the pill, give them the morning-after pill if it doesn't work, and take them off for an abortion if that fails - and all without you having any say in the matter or necessarily even knowing about it. Now all of a sudden, we want parents to step in and tell their teenage children how to behave.

Thank you, Fr Tim. Excellent as always.

500 (h)

I think I'm getting near to the end of what I want to say about Ireland. There is a very interesting comment by GOR in the last post which provides me with a good link to this comment, which I promised some posts ago.

The parish priest in Ireland was more than just a religious functionary. In many ways he substituted for local government. Different nations react differently to occupation. The French, for instance, either resisted or collaborated. The Irish (as I have suggested some time ago) simply circumvented, and went on with business in their own way. The parish priest, their own man and public figure, in many ways became the mayor and the magistrate of a town; someone whose authority all the local Irish acknowledged. In some places, he was the 'clerk'; the one who could read and write, who could speak up for the local people and if necessary represent them to higher authority. The Irish preferred not to deal with the English establishment except where it was necessary: the parish priest, with his mutually accepted authority, performed almost all the necessary functions of government. As for religion; well, as I have suggested, the people did it themselves, except for the necessary administration of the Sacraments.

With the coming of independence, Ireland had its own governors, and the parish priest no longer exercised civil authority. But his moral prestige remained as it had always done. It's just that he didn't have so much to do. From the Renaissance onwards, the notion of pastoral practice was increasingly becoming important. No doubt it would be interesting to do a post some time on what is really quite surprising; pastoral work on the part of priests is quite a new phenomenon, championed by figures such as St Vincent de Paul, St Philip Neri and others. I'm not convinced that this aspect of priestly life ever really took hold in Ireland. When the business of government moved from the Parochial House, all that there was there to fill the void was the G.A.A. and the golf course.

Hence the anger of the Irish people. The prestige of the priesthood has been enormous in Ireland. Now people are asking just what those priests have done to earn it, and to some of them it seems that as a body they have treated the Irish people very badly. Again, of course there are exceptions, many many exceptions, but there are more than enough of those who barely deserve the name of pastor.

In the early autumn, the breviary sets out at length (it seems to go on for ever) the great sermon of St Augustine De Pastoribus, On the Shepherds. In this sermon Augustine excoriates those people called shepherds who take the sheep's milk and wool but deny those same sheep the care that they need.

Beware, they say, the wrath of the lamb!

500 (g)

I hope that by this stage we have established that the Irish have traditionally had their faith nurtured in the home, rather than in the parish. This has enabled the faith to survive very adverse conditions, including the total alienation of the parish buildings and assets to Protestant worship.

Since the home cannot furnish sacramental worship without the help of a priest, the devotions of the Irish tended to be centred around other things, like the rosary, pilgrimages &c. The peculiarly Irish custom of the Station Mass (not to be confused with the Roman custom) can be seen as an extension of that. To this day, families in a parish will announce a Station Mass, when Mass will be celebrated in their home for all their neighbours. Put aside all thoughts of sixties house Masses: these were, and are, major devotional occasions and a real mainstay of the life of the parish and people. Fr Hunwicke and others might care to wonder whether this, too, connects to the paleo-Christian worship of the Irish.

So, by the end of the nineteenth century, Irish religion was concentrated largely on the pursuit of holiness expressed in ways other than the formal parish liturgy more common to countries who derived their spiritual practices from the old Roman Empire.

That the clergy were mostly formed in France during the penal times also may have had its effect. France was given to both Gallicanism and Jansenism, and I think we can see the effects of both these in Irish spirituality. The anti-Jansenistic remedy of devotion to the Sacred Heart of our Lord can also be seen in abundance in Ireland, as could the anti-Gallican profound devotion to the Holy See deriving from the Ultramontane movement. Even the custom of the red sanctuary lamp which we are all so familiar with is, I am told, an Irish custom derived from the Gallican uses of France, which used red as the liturgical colour for the Blessed Sacrament. Rome has always used white.

The introduction of the Liturgical Movement into Ireland was patchy. Certainly there were places where the liturgy was done splendidly, but they were rare. Clergy, however, understood that it was the mind of the Church to encourage good liturgy, and tried. But the heart of the people continued much as it had always done. And the priests themselves pursued holiness as they had learned at their mothers' knees, which is to say in personal prayer, in devotions, pilgrimages and all that.

The traditional rite of Mass, with its long periods of prayerful silence, hid the fact that the priest could scamper through Mass in 15 minutes. It used to be said that all the people heard of the Mass was 'SCUM!' as the priest whirled round to say 'Dominus vobiscum'.

Hand in hand with the liturgical movement was the disapprobation of other devotions; people were supposed to focus their prayer and devotion on the Sacred Liturgy. In many parts of France, this worked very well. There were many parishes which, up to the Second Vatican Council not only celebrated the regular Sunday Masses with as much solemnity as they could muster, but also celebrated parts of the Office too, the laity assisting at sung Vespers in Latin with gusto.

Not in Ireland. Even at Mass, the people, attending in huge numbers, continued to pray the Rosary—not even together, except in October, when the curate would stand in the pulpit and lead the rosary while the parish priest celebrated Mass at the altar. This is fact; I am not exaggerating.

Then came the Second Vatican Council, when the Mass was no longer something mysterious and esoteric. It was patent and vernacular. So, no need for those other 'unliturgical' devotions, then.

Father stopped saying the rosary.
Father encouraged the people to attend to the Mass, rather than say the rosary.
So people stopped saying the rosary. And all the other stuff.
Father didn't stop saying Mass at ninety miles an hour.
Father's job was to say Mass. Nothing else.
(anyone see that funny Fr Ted episode when Fr Dougal got stuck on a milk cart that he couldn't stop? Fr Ted's reaction was to say Mass alongside the milk cart)

Mass, Mass, Mass, Mass, Mass, Massy Mass Mass.
(Not that I'm against the Mass, you understand……)

And the Mass as celebrated was extremely unsatisfying (ex opere operantis, I mean, of course). Gabble, gabble, gabble. Bad homily. Gabble, gabble, gabble. Communion (given by lay people). Guinness.

The Irish spirit, as I have suggested, will find other outlets for its devotion. One good example of this is the (excellent) proliferation of Eucharistic exposition. This happens probably in most parishes now. But I have yet to see a priest present. An extraordinary minister will expose and repose; lay people will take their turns to watch. The rosary and other devotions the same.

I should here say that I do perfectly understand that there are excellent priests in Ireland. I know several.

Most priests will not engage themselves, because the prayer is 'not liturgical'. Priests aren't actually necessary to its functioning. They don't see that they have a much wider importance than the mere performance of a function. They have spent their seminary career being educated to despise that devotional life which their grandmothers so cherished, and which gave them, themselves, the faith. The liturgy can nourish the faith well, when it is done well ex opere operato. Nothing better, naturally. But when it isn't, and when the very devotions are discouraged and despised, and shunned by the clergy, then one may ask what is there that is actually nourishing the faith of the Irish people these days?

And can you wonder that ordinary people are asking just what use is a priest, and why he deserves the status he has been given?

500 f

This is really a sort of excursus or clarification. I speculated several posts ago about the worship in early Irish Christianity. I knew, of course, of the Stowe Missal, but nothing much about it. It turns out that the Patrimonial Doctor, Fr Hunwicke has written a paper on it, which I have ordered. However, I thought I should give you the great man's ipsissima verba:

 I published a piece in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (Vol 102C, Number 1, 2002), which I am told is on the internet somewhere, showing (in my view) that the people stood around the Oratory, different categories (monachi, penitentes ...) often on different levels/terraces; that even the clergy only entered the oratory at the Offertory.
I suggested that perhaps the 'mass stones' of the penal period were a continuation of the same culture ... the idea that there were British troops with eagle eyes on every hill in Ireland throughout the 'penal' period seems to me improbable. Presumably some sort of shelter was erected around the mass stone.
The very extensive chants 'covering' the Communio in the Stowe Missal would suggest that this was, in fact, an extremely long part of the service.

I'm not sure about the Mass rocks: does anyone out there know more about them and how they were used during the penal era? That the early Irish were far happier out of doors than inside is commonly understood, and no doubt they were happier attending Mass in such a location than their English co-religionists might have been.

500 (e)

Right, back to the fray.
In earlier posts I have tried not to defend Irish illiturgicality, but to explain it. Like many of you, I believe that sorting this question out is part of the answer to the Irish Question. It just isn't the whole answer, and it has to take account of the Irish point of view.

I am now going to give an account of a celebration I attended a few weeks ago: it will highlight many of the things I have been writing about. It will horrify many of you, but I would ask you to contain your reaction and try to understand it.

There is a monastery in the Irish midlands where monthly Sunday afternoon religious gatherings (I don't really know what I ought to call them) have taken place for many decades; these have been very popular, but are now being wound down for external reasons. I attended one of these, but sat in the congregation (and yes, I was in uniform) as I was feeling unwell.

It all began in a chapel entirely devoted to the Divine Mercy devotion. There is a large picture—you know the one, with rays coming from our Lord's heart—behind the altar, and confessionals all around (unused on this day, though I understand that confession was a usual part of these afternoons in the past). Two elderly priests entered. One of them had a smoking thurible, and this was waved at the picture. Then we all sat down and recited the Divine Mercy Chaplet, five decades. This being done, we all decamped to the main chapel. Here Mass was celebrated at breakneck speed—not irreverently, I mean, but very very quickly. I suspect that the celebrant was simply saying the English Mass in the same way he used to say the Latin Mass. When Communion time came, the concelebrant stood at the microphone and sang a traditional hymn, while the main celebrant gave out communion at the head of a side aisle. Meanwhile a woman grabbed a ciborium and headed off to us at the back of the chapel. There was no queue; she came to each person in his or her seat. When she came to my aunt and me, she demanded 'do yez want the bread?' and, I am not exaggerating, flung the Blessed Sacrament at us. When she had finished, she stumped back off to the altar, tabernacled the ciborium, bobbed a half-genuflection and went back to her place. Mass over, the concelebrant again crooned a hymn to the Blessed Sacrament into the microphone and the main celebrant proceeded to expose the Lord in a monstrance. There was no pause for prayer, but he took a humeral veil and proceeded down one side aisle of the chapel stopping every few feet to bless the people kneeling there as he passed. He went out of the chapel door, and blessed the (no doubt confused) visitors and tourists in the bookshop outside. Then he returned inside and proceeded up the other aisle, blessing as before, and back to the altar. The Lord was reposed, and the service was over.

That's it. You'll probably agree with me that it was pretty awful and the distribution of Communion even sacrilegious. But what you must understand is that in some bizarre way the whole thing (except Communion) was both genuine and nourishing. What I mean is that, well, I have sometimes said that the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. Nobody was indifferent there; there was a lot of love, and a lot of real piety. It was full of prayer, almost tangibly. It was just very untidy and very unliturgical. And they should not have allowed that woman to distribute the Blessed Sacrament.

It is ideorhythmic religion again.

I would certainly like to see liturgy in Ireland tidied up and made reverent and far more focussed. I really think it would help. However it won't be easy to achieve, because the current style is so widespread, at least in the Republic. There is little experience, no tradition, of solemn liturgy in the parishes. Things like the recent FOTA conference are very encouraging, and as people get some experience of better liturgy, I should think that other things will improve too.

But one mistake must not be made, which is to despise or remove the devotional aspect altogether. The liturgical movement from the nineteenth century did make this mistake, and to some extent we are reaping the whirlwind. Prayer needs to be affective as well as effective; if it does not engage the heart, then it will not awaken the soul. The encounter with God, whether in the Sacred Liturgy or in other devotions has to be a real encounter with Another; it is not an intellectual or an æsthetic exercise.

What I mean is that even the liturgy is not an end in itself, not a form of entertainment whether a splendid Extraordinary Form Solemn Mass or a happy-clappy feel-good let-it-all-hang-out celebration. The liturgy is not for looking at, it is for looking through, to God, to heaven, to Calvary and even (properly understood) to each other.

500 (d)

This is getting to feel a bit like surfing. The longer one stays on this particular wave, the less secure one feels. But be that as it may, I think there is still more to be said.

One element in Irish Christianity to which I have alluded is what one might call the folk element. I watched a programme on the Electric Television some months ago. Three men shared a boat in Ireland; one of them was Dara O'Briain, the other two were British—Griff Rhys Jones, I think, and an irritating Rory. Somewhere in the sticks they came across a holy well, and there was by it a sight familiar to those who frequent such places. A tree stood hard by, festooned with rags of cloth. One of the Englishmen opened his mouth to say something caustic, but was forestalled by Dara O'Briain who said 'I want to mock that, but I don't want you mocking it.'

Here we have the Irish paradox. Ireland is a country that is intensely proud of its own culture, not least that it has managed to keep it alive under the most unpropitious circumstances. It is highly tenacious of it, but also aware that other cultures have despised it, and non-Irish educated people these days are at best patronising about it. Irish people, especially intelligent and educated Irish people (and there are still plenty of Englishmen who think that that is an oxymoron) feel this tug within them. The same Dara O'Briain, when a guest on that smugfest quiz Q.I. was asked by the host Stephen Fry to comment on various patron saints, among superior chortles from guests and audience. O'Briain got right up on his hind legs and objected to what amounted to the racism being expressed. He is not, I understand, a practising Catholic, but he is very sensitive to the fact that the chattering classes are allowed to be as patronising and contemptuous as they wish about Catholicism and Irishness without the slightest need to devote any energy to understanding what they are criticising. Both are self-evidently beneath contempt.

'But, but……' —I can hear people protesting right now—'surely Irishness has never been so popular. Look at all those Irish pubs, look at Riverdance, look at Enya, look at 'Celtic Spirituality'. This kind of Disney view of Ireland, sometimes called 'Oirishness' has substituted in many (non-Irish) people's minds for the real thing. A charming, out of touch, mediæval cute little land of leprechauns, shillelaghs, and Guinness keeps people from engaging with the reality of a land whose people are peculiarly articulate, with high standards of education (in everything but religion) and a unique and valuable culture which is itself in danger of being Oirished out of existence.

The Irish are keenly aware of how they are viewed, and it makes them somewhat allergic to the somewhat stranger manifestations of folk religion, like rag-festooned trees (and yes, I know that in the past, and even here and there today, such things could and can also be seen in England). This in itself distances the educated Irish from Catholicism, because the dearth of serious catechesis in the last 40 years has exposed them to the stranger elements of folk religion without the intellectual apparatus to understand the real depths of the faith. All they have got has been weak hymnody, poor sermons, inadequate religious instruction—and now clerical child abuse and irresponsible bishops.

That is one result. There is another, which is no less dangerous. I don't think that the Irish have any problem at all with the spiritual dimension of things. It was what (real) Celtic spirituality brought to Catholicism in general. The drive of the Platonic element in Christianity, vitally important though it is, tended to create an attitude to the material creation that was ambivalent at best. Matter was at the other end of the spectrum to Spirit, and the closer one wanted to draw to God, the more one should despise matter. The great Christological crises of the first centuries centred mostly around this strange fact that God, pure Spirit, could take a material nature without diminishing what He was.

I alluded in an earlier post to the (probable) fact that St Patrick never studied Plato in any thoroughgoing way. His education stopped in his mid-teens, and only restarted when he trained for the priesthood in Gaul. At any event, the Irish have never seen any problem with finding God in the material. They have seen wonders all around them, all the time. Sacraments make total sense. The old Celtic gods were primal forces in nature, unpredictable. Christianity (which spread throughout Ireland without any real opposition within a single generation, it is said) gave a whole new meaning to the world around them, and the introduction of the Latin script gave the a means to articulate this joy. The introduction of Egyptian-style penitential monasticism to Ireland was also deeply creative. The desert is a tough place to live, without much to look at, but Ireland is deeply beautiful. Even that monastic rock in the Atlantic, Skellig Michael, lifts one's mind to God. Imagine looking at a sunset from there and not wondering at the might and glory of God who could create such a thing. St Kevin stood up to his neck in the freezing water, but he did so at Glendalough, a truly lovely place. The Christian Romans didn't really look much at scenery, (many pagans did, though—think of Horace, or the villas around the Bay of Naples) but the Irish enjoy looking at everything and everyone with a perpetual and vivid curiosity and see nothing wrong in it.

What I'm trying to get to is that, deprived of proper orthodox catechesis, many Irish people will continue to look around them for the spiritual, because they expect to find it in the world around them. So they will hare off to Ballinspittle to look at moving statues, they will go to Achill Island to hear the latest message from God through Christine Gallagher, they will listen to John Bird's latest predictions concerning the end of the world……

So, there are two results from the atrociously poor catechesis of the last fifty years. The first is a tendency among the more highly-educated elite to throw everything to do with Catholicism over (though with a rather uneasy conscience, because the Irish are naturally spiritual). There's no fear of them becoming Protestants, because that would be to deny their own history. The other result is to flee after signs and wonders.

To believe nothing, in other words, or to believe anything.

For God's sake, for the people's sake, serious catechesis, well adapted for the intelligent, inquiring, mind in the modern world must be reintroduced without delay. But how, and by whom? There is a long path ahead.

500 (c)

It needs saying again: Irish Christianity/Catholicism is not, and never has been, like that of any other nation. Its roots do not lie really within the Roman Empire, but has other influences, many entirely its own.

It has long been suggested, with a pretty fair degree of certainty, that there are strong links with Egyptian monasticism. This makes enormous sense to me, and explains so much. It explains the strong penitential tradition, for instance, and it also explains the unliturgical expression of the faith.

When St Anthony the Abbot walled himself up in the old fort at Pispir for twenty years, has it never occurred to anyone that he must have gone those twenty years without once receiving Holy Communion or even attending Mass? Those early monastic communities expressed their faith in extreme asceticism, in the recitation of the psalms. They were not coenobitic monks, but hermits or at least ideorhythmic monks, and this is the idea that they took to the far coast of Ireland.

St Patrick was educated as a child but abducted before that education was complete; he never went on to study philosophy, and so Irish Christianity developed its own outlook on the world; free of that platonic distrust of lowly matter it embraced the material world and loved it as God's (albeit fallen) creation.

Ireland never really developed that Imperial system of dioceses and bishops; many think that Ireland never even had a secular clergy until the coming of the Normans. There were simply monks, and there were lay folk. Enormous monasteries might have had one priest to do the sacramental things: it is not impossible that this one priest may even have been in Episcopal orders; at any rate, the bishops were monks living under the authority of the abbot. When Columbanus set up a monastery in Gaul, the local bishops were spitting feathers because of his amused disregard of their authority; he clearly saw his own authority as greater than theirs.

And then there's the liturgy. Have you ever looked at any of the most ancient Irish monastic sites? There are churches, but it would be more accurate to call them tiny little chapels. For the most part, these buildings could have just about accommodated an altar, a priest and a server. Where did the laity go? Where, even, did the monks go? In those early days, did they go to Mass much at all?

With the coming of the Normans, churches got a bit larger, but not much. An Irish Cathedral (outside Dublin anyway, or the Pale) was a small affair. And for the most parts, the Anglo-Normans assimilated to the Irish culture rather than the other way about.

So, if not in the parish church, where was the locus or perhaps focus, of the faith of the Irish? Well, for one thing, it was in the home. Like that of the monks, even the Irish laity's spirituality was ideorhythmic; rosary, holy wells, saints, pilgrimages, penances (Lough Derg, Croagh Patrick), and enthusiastic going to funerals, even those of strangers. They learnt to go to Mass, surely, and developed a love for the sacraments, but an Irish congregation at Mass is a very different thing to a congregation in any other land. They pray, fervently, at Mass, but I do not think, in general, and surely there must be exceptions, that they could be said to pray the Mass itself, even now. The Mass is something that is done in their presence, but even now any idea of direct communal participation is foreign. The responses are muttered by each person at his own speed, the Creed or Gloria being a sort of subterranean murmur that begins, and vaguely ends. People stand, kneel, sit, more or less at random. Mass is rarely more than Low Mass, celebrated quickly. 'High Mass' is a low Mass with a choir singing hymns; it's a very rare parish where the congregation would join in.

Foreign visitors are often shocked at this. But it would be a profound mistake to read into it—as far too many do—that the Irish are entirely unserious about their religion. That is absolutely not the case; it is just that the accent is (very) different to most other places.

And it is not without its advantages; for the Reformation to (largely) succeed in England, it was necessary only to change the liturgy. For English Catholics, 'it is the Mass that matters', and to deprive them of the Mass was to deprive them of the faith. For the Irish it worked differently. The churches were all taken, the liturgy changed, as in England, but people still carried on much as before. Their faith had enough sustenance coming from where it has always come: they continued to go to holy wells, say the rosary, go on pilgrimages, and, when they could, attend Mass at a Mass rock. They educated their children in the home or in hedge schools, just as they had done for generations.

The religion did not depend on the priest: in some ways, one might say that the priest was more of a political figure; a sort of alternative jurisdiction in an occupied country. I'll say more about this in another post.

Suffice it to say that Irish Catholicism has it in itself to survive this present crisis. But for something like a hundred and fifty years people have been badgering the Irish Catholics to adopt the Liturgical Movement. In the last forty years, all the things that have kept them going through the ages have been decried. I was at St Kieran's Well in Co Meath a few weeks ago; my elderly aunt commented sadly to me that when she was young, there were always crowds of people there; on that day it was only she and I. To some extent, the Irish themselves have been keen to abandon all this. For centuries this stuff has been dismissed as 'peasant religion', fit only for uneducated people, and if there is anything true, it is that the Irish value education. That charge, though, would be a telling one, particularly as there are aspects of this 'folk religion' which really do tend to the superstitious.

I have a lot more to say on this, but I'll leave it till the next post.

500 (b)

The 500-strong Association of Catholic Priests are riding high right now for all the reasons that I mentioned in the last post. They are conscientious priests who probably do not spend all their time on the golf course, or else they would not be getting so generally upset over these issues. They do actually care and want real solutions to the terrible problems that they see in the Irish Church.

On the whole, they see the problem as being largely one of a conservative Vatican reining in on all the good things that the Second Vatican Council had brought and returning to a model of 'you will take what we give you, and you will like or or lump it'. Hence their opposition to the new translation of the Mass, and hence their outrage at the insufficient reaction of the hierarchy to the pædophilia crisis.

Here the reader will not be surprised to learn that I part company with them. Not all the way: in the last post I too deplored the way that the bishops have been left undisciplined.

The trouble is that you can't keep your cake and eat it as well.

• You can't abolish sin (original and actual), hell, penance, confession, and the rest, for forty years and then reinvent them for the special case of pædophiles and complacent bishops.

• You can't (in the spirit of collegiality and Vatican II) for forty years protest Rome's interference with local bishops, and now complain that it hesitates to interfere and discipline them.

It really is all of a piece. The Church has two millennia of experience of dealing with sin, but if you are going to tie her hands behind her back and then expect her to deal decisively with a wolf when it descends on the fold, then you are going to be disappointed.

That is why I think that what the Church needs is not bishops like Willie Walsh, much-loved and kind man as he is, but men like Charles Chaput who really get it.

There are not a lot of places in Ireland where what is sometimes called the New Orthodoxy has been attempted. Parishes on the whole are very much what they were in 1970, only not quite so full. Young people have not received the opportunity to encounter the genuine faith and see its power. They just find the 1970s model unconvincing, and its strictures incomprehensible in the light of the fact that it would appear to have so little else to offer them.

I wonder whether something like World Youth Day might not do some good if it were held next in Ireland.

500

The debate raging in the Irish Church brings me little surprise.

It is my honest belief that the episcopate and the presbyterate in Ireland have been riding for a fall for perhaps half a century, perhaps longer.

I remember a funeral luncheon for an uncle of mine. It was on a Monday; the funeral had been exceptionally deferred from the traditional third day after death to enable me to attend and officiate. I was sat next to the parish priest—actually the Vicar General of the diocese, now deceased—and listened with scant sympathy as he grumbled about his extremely busy weekend. He lamented that that Sunday he had had to celebrate Mass twice, imagine!, and now with this lunch to attend, it might be another hour or two before he could get off to the golf course.

I quietly commented that I had had a relatively easy weekend, with only three Masses on the Sunday and five baptisms (admittedly done in one ceremony), plus the flight to Ireland.

The town is a big one (by Irish standards), with an enormous church (by any standards). In those days (no longer!) there were four priests, and the entire town could be squeezed into the church for four Masses, no more. And all four on Sunday morning. As far as I could work out, there was no pastoral work of any sort done which was not celebrating Mass. There were no youth clubs, no sacramental preparation other than that done in the schools, no care of people because that was the government's job…… you get the picture.

Money, now: that was collected regularly. Giving at Mass has never been good, so there were, and are, 'outside collections' of various types. When my father was young, the names and amounts contributed of all these collections was solemnly read out at Mass.

The only half decent cars in those days were driven by priests.

One place you would regularly see the clergy was at the GAA, the Gælic Athletic Association. The sports pages of the local papers would be covered with photographs of the Parish Priest presenting trophies to the various local sporting gods of the town.

It is little wonder that the same uncle that I buried that day had been disgusted when he heard I wanted to be a priest. He assumed that it was for money and status. He had thought that I was better than that. Though in the past we had been close, he wrote me out of his will, and, a widower having no children himself, he left everything to neighbours. This was some eighteen years ago.

Do not underestimate the anger of the Irish people right now. In the context, it is entirely understandable.

Now let us look at the bishops. Before the 60s, it was normal that episcopal appointments would be finally approved by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (or 'Holy Office'). Pope Paul Vi changed this to final approval by the Secretariate of State. This is because he wanted to pursue a policy of detente all round; ecumenism and Ostpolitik were the watchwords. So henceforward bishops would be diplomats; nice guys, people who could pour oil on troubled waters, men who would not rock the boat.

These are the men who would not pursue child abusers, for fear that a storm might arise. They are good men, nice men; they are just not what is needed now, if ever.

There has been criticism of the '500' priests. There is much I disagree with them about; however, I think that they are men of integrity who don't always actually understand what is going on.

They are right that the Vatican is not appointing the right men to be bishops in Ireland (with some exceptions). And they are right that serious surgery needs to happen if things are to be rectified. If the Vatican does not hear that the Irish people are seriously angry and need to see justice done, it will not recover the trust of what has been until recently one of the most Catholic nations on earth. Expressions of sorrow on the part of the bishops are not enough; these can be dismissed easily as crocodile tears.

Questions of the new translation of the Mass are entirely secondary right now. Ireland needs bishops of unimpeachable integrity and orthodoxy, and it needs them yesterday.

The Taoiseach's speech had a lot of this anger in it. The reference to the confessional speaks more about clerical unaccountability than demonstrating a real understanding of the issues. People need to grasp that before they get worried that Ireland will place police microphones in every confessional. 

Throwing petrol on embers

I am a great fan of the Catholic Truth Society—at least as presently set up. It has really found its feet, and is producing some first rate material to promote and explain the faith. And, not least, to produce a new Missal which really looks like, well, a missal.

But I am disturbed at this report  of a work published by the CTS; it's a new 'explanation' of Catholic Traditionalism. I rather suspect that CTS commission all sorts of works, and then run them without reading them too clearly–they even once published something of mine, though they never approached me again.

I know and greatly respect Dr Joseph Shaw, the writer of the critique, and the fact that he wrote his article on an iPhone, no mean feat for such a long critique, suggests the depth of his feeling on the matter.

Summorum Pontificum was a watershed. It suggested to all sides that they bury the hatchet, and even laid out an ingenious strategy that would make it possible for almost all protagonists to do so without loss of face. Dr Edwards' reportedly intemperate booklet Catholic Traditionalism would, if Dr Shaw is right, appear to be grubbing up the imperfectly-buried hatchet again (as E.F. Benson put it). Why?

 Dr Edwards even seems to be just as intemperate in his criticism of the traditionalists' opponents—I think this must be the first instance of Annibale Bugnini's honour being defended by a committed traditionalist!

If Dr Shaw is even half right (and I have not yet seen the booklet, though I shall strive to get one a.s.a.p.), this work really needs to be withdrawn. As he says:

The point I wish to make is not about the truth or falsity of these claims, but about the appropriateness of this polemic and speculation in this booklet. Just at the moment when Traditionalists and their various historical opponents are having to learn to live with each other, to share churches, to cooperate in parish life and in Catholic institutions of all kinds, is this spewing of vitriol in all directions really what we need? Wouldn't it be better, as well as more historically accurate, to admit at this point that these old divisions were caused by Catholics who were sincere, intelligent, and serious, but who came to different conclusions about the needs of the time, and the implications of timeless theological and liturgical principles?

This is precisely right. This is not the time for slinging mud. For heavens' sake, can't we live the bitter past behind us now?

The First Person

This last weekend, I celebrated Mass for a small but enthusiastic parish in Sussex while their priest (ordained the day before I was born) was taking a well-earned post-Jubilee break. Before the Mass, I was informed by the musical directrix that it was to be a 'Folk Mass' that Sunday. Not really my cup of tea, as any reader of this blog will quickly understand. But the whole thing went with a swing; the singing was enthusiastic and there was a very positive atmosphere in the little church. I enjoyed my visit.
Some of the hymns sung have been going round in my head since. So many of the things sung in the folk-idiom use the words of the Lord in the first person; 'come, follow me…' 'I am the bread of life'. Of course these things are quotations from or paraphrases of the words of our Lord in the Gospel, which the priest or deacon reads in the first person, but I don't really feel comfortable with what feels to be taking a liberty with our Lord's words. I don't feel happy singing that I am the bread of life.

Anybody who has even a cursory familiarity with the Church's history will be aware that the phenomenon sometimes called Pentecostalism recurs from time to time. St Paul notes speaking in tongues, for instance, though he gets a bit unsure about it, perhaps later, when he insists that there must always be an interpretation. After that, the phenomenon acquired a dodgy reputation under a Phrygian called Montanus who with his two charming young lady assistants believed themselves to be 'channelling' the Holy Spirit, and would indeed speak in the first person—not quoting scripture, though—adding to it, as it were. Now here we come to another aspect of this pentecostal phenomenon: quasi-authoritative private revelation. The leaders of these groups believe themselves to be in some way divinely appointed to teach and lead. They speak with an infallibility that the Pope could only dream of and their pronouncements must be treated as divine revelation. For the most part these pronouncements are harmless 'I have a word from the Lord: I love you with an endless love' for instance, but they can also be used against individuals 'The Lord says that Mary-Lou Whaletrouser is a disturbing influence in the community, and we should all lovingly treat her like dirt until she repents'. And in some cases these leaders behave as an alternative magisterium teaching doctrine which might be at variance with official teaching (I have experienced this), but which is required to be accepted by the community as the ipsissima verba Domini.

Mgr Ronald Knox's remarkable book Enthusiasm tells the tale of this strange phenomenon in Christianity throughout the ages; it's a bit of a tough read, but very illuminating.

I should, naturally, say that the little parish where I said Mass on Sunday has none of these weird characteristics: they were charming and devout. It was just the 'first person' nature of some of the hymns that got me thinking.

And it's why I feel uncomfortable about using the Lord's words directly like that.

On Being a Blogger

There are a number of things that go with the territory of being a blogger. One is the fact that one will never rise in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. That to many is, of course, a relief, but it can be a bit disconcerting. A priest friend of mine had an excellent blog, which personal circumstances caused him to suspend. Having at the time been a curate, he was immediately made parish priest 'now that you've stopped writing your blog'. The blog, regrettably, hasn't re-started.

Another thing is being importuned by other blogs, sites and even advertisers, for free publicity on one's own blog. That makes me quite cross; a blog is one's personal thing, and being pressured to recommend something naturally inclines one the other way.

Or it does if you're me.

If someone asks me to recommend them, the first thing I do is to look at their site and see if they recommend my blog, or even mention it. Quid pro quo, after all. If I see nothing, I conclude that they are insincere, though I still feel guilty for ignoring the request. It doesn't imply that I don't agree with their aims, or think that their blog is poor. I just think that some good manners are as appropriate on the internet as in other parts of life.

Not knowing what to think

At the weekend, term ended here at the Seminary with the Diaconate Ordination; a very splendid occasion when Paul Andrew, a former Anglican clergyman, was ordained (transitional) deacon for the diocese of Plymouth. Deacon Paul has his own website and journal here. The other members of his class were ordained deacon in the autumn.

Still for such splendid occasions, an organist is required, and I was approached. I was surprised, because I am far down the pecking order of organists here (quite rightly, as all the others are much better than I am), but pleased to be asked. I played for many such ceremonies in the past, before rust began to gather in my joints (and I've passed the half-century mark since I wrote the last post). And though I'm a moderately competent service accompanist, these days I get very nervous playing proper pieces for voluntaries &c, and so generally make a hash of them.

So why did they ask me, then?

The usual organist, an external professional who lives on the south coast, had married a wife and could not come. Or some other reason.
The number one internal organist suddenly had to make a retreat in Canada, and couldn't wait for the last day of term.
The number two internal organist was directing the schola cantorum and preferred not to have to be rushing from one place to another, as he said to me.
The number three was needed to sing in the schola.

So, it was explained to me, that left me, and would I kindly do it?

I was flattered but, yes, you're right, I should have been suspicious.

It turns out that Carlo Curley was on the guest list; a major professional organ recitalist, who describes himself as 'The Pavarotti of the Organ'!

No wonder all the other organists headed for the hills! They all knew about it, but did they tell me? No they didn't, because they knew that if I knew, I too would have found an unbreakable subsequent engagement in Wagga Wagga or the Falkland Islands.

Mr Curley must forgive me if I say that God rushed to the defence of his priesthood and struck the Pavarotti of the organ in the foot, making his attendance at the ordination impracticable. He didn't come. Thank God.

And now I don't know whether to be furious with my colleagues for not telling me, or relieved.

On a happier note, I noticed that the Holy Father initiated the new Vatican news service with a click on an iPad. Good to know that Apple Mac Technology has reached the highest quarters. Catholicism and Apple Mac: an unbeatable combination!