Bioethics

 Why is the Anscombe bioethics institute being forced to close? Especially now? This article, from the Catholic Herald merely records the fact, though its reticence must have some reason.

https://thecatholicherald.com/britains-leading-catholic-bioethics-centre-forced-to-close/

Early days

 These are of course early days, but I am already suspecting that the College of Cardinals have been rather clever. They have elected a man who shares many of Pope Francis' views —which may well be a good thing — but not Francis' personality which could be, well, arbitrary, to use one word. I could use other words. From what I read, our new Pope Leo is by contrast eirenic, which is just what we need. A reconciler, someone who can pour oil on troubled waters, who will, God willing, right some egregious injustices. As a canon lawyer, I expect he will make sure that the law is obeyed, and not change it to use as a club to beat people he has gone off. As a curial cardinal for a few years, he will know some of the inner workings of the Roman Curia and will be able to sniff out where the bodies are buried. And, God willing, he will root out those abusers who have been hidden in the Vatican and protected. And if I'm allowed to ask for a cherry on the cake, he will continue the late Cardinal Pell's attempts to reform the finances of the Vatican. 

He has spoken against the ordination of women, saying that it would cause more problems than it might solve, and also has given no indication that he favours change on the Church's policy about LGBT matters

It would be nice if he were to repeal Traditiones Custodes, but I doubt he would do anything quite so dramatic. However, I do expect it to become a dead letter, quietly forgotten. It would be sensible to reappoint all the heads of the various dicasteries for now, but I hope that some of them at least will be quietly shuffled off into retirement soon and replaced by others.

Election

Today I have read a lot of articles from the mainstream press predicting the election of one liberal candidate or another, This is, of course, simply an attempt to influence the outcome. I don't imagine that the Sacred College will be taking their cue from the press.

My vote

 Erik Varden

One pope dies, another comes along

 Well, he's gone, God rest his soul. And whatever our feelings might be, it is time now to say with the ancients, De mortuis, nil nisi bonum. As I said in an earlier post, God will be his judge, and mine.

I thought the funeral was impressive for many reasons, not least the fact that the Sistine Choir seems finally to have got its act together; they performed very creditably. The choice of music was good, though some of the new compositions, for those responsories, were a little peculiar; polyphonic verses in sharply different styles. Even the vestments were decent, as was the dignified ceremonial.

Attention has been drawn to the large crowd present. Indeed there was a very large crowd; it seemed to me much larger than the late Pontiff ever drew in his lifetime. Many in the media asserted it was a popular endorsement of his reign, especially by the young, who were there in number. I'm not so sure; it is still Holy Year and the weekend of the funeral was to have been dedicated to the young, many of whom travelled to Rome for that reason, and just happened coincide with the funeral. Cardinal Kasper (yes, he's still going!) commented that the size of the crowd was a clear sign, vox populi, vox Dei, that the entire Church is calling for a continuation of exactly the style of Pope Francis. Well, he's entitled to his opinion, but he might have remembered the even larger crowds at the funeral of Pope St John Paul. Was that also the voice of God calling for more of the same? And, look as I might, I did not see a single banner saying Santo subito this time round. No, I think it was simply that the funeral of a pope is one of those occasions that will naturally draw a crowd; these things are some of the turning points of history, and naturally people want to be there.

Much too has been said of the humility of Pope Francis' simple burial and tomb, in contrast to the magnificence of his predecessors'. I fail to see a significant difference between his tomb and the original tombs of Paul VI, JPII and Pope Benedict, except that Francis is buried in the body of the church and not in a crypt. But one mustn't overdo this or read too much into it.

As for the guests, well really it was an extraordinary turn-out of heads of state and royalty. I gather that the only state that did not send anybody important was Israel: the Israeli newspaper Haaretz pointed out acidly that whereas countries like even Iran and the Gulf states managed to make a good showing, Israel cared little enough only to send its own ambassador who presumably had to be there anyway. We all know about the Trump and Zelenskyy meeting, which will hopefully bear some good result, but I'm sure that a lot of other meetings will have taken place; there can be few occasions when so many of the great and good are together in one place.

And now we await the conclave. Now the world knows far more about how these things happen, thanks to the movie. That should save us having to confront the stranger opinions about what the cardinals get up to. 

I read that some cardinals visited an ice cream parlour a day or so ago, and were bemused that the group of young people they encountered there dropped to their knees and asked the cardinals' blessing. That perhaps is a surer indication of the sort of pontificate they desire than speculation that their mere presence at the funeral could be taken as wanting to continue the policies of the late Holy Father.

 The Italian Post Office has produced a handsome new stamp, featuring Pope Benedict. He is not forgotten! You can read about it (in Italian) on Silere non Possum.

Calling Peggy Brosnan

 This is a very long shot indeed. For decades I have been trying to trace my godmother, Peggy Brosnan, about whom I know very little. It suddenly occurred to me that maybe (maybe!) she might have been looking for me. I have a keen interest in my own godchildren, even though I have lost contact with one. I think Peggy was a nurse in the South East of England in the late 1950s/early 1960s. Yes, I know it's a really, really long shot. But registering it here might cause it to attract search engines' help.

Happy Easter, everyone!

 

Shibboleth

 I strongly resent being lectured that I must 'accept Vatican II' by people who believe less of what that council teaches than I do. They don't, of course, mean that I must give assent of the mind and heart to the many doctrinal and disciplinary teachings of the council. They do not, for instance, think that Latin must be maintained in the liturgical rites; they don't think that the Church is of its nature hierarchical, many would not accept that abortion is an abominable crime, nor much else. What they really mean is that I must 'get with the programme' and sign up to what Pope Benedict called the hermeneutic of discontinuity. I must disavow the past and embrace the Brave New Church about which the Second Vatican Council said little or nothing, but which emerged in its shadow. Vatican II itself is not for these people a test of the new orthodoxy (for the council expresses more or less—though not entirely— the old, or timeless orthodoxy), but rather a shibboleth, a password for Those Who Are Acceptable to flash at one another.

I knew a priest whose literal password on the computer was VATICAN 2!!! and another was PEOPLE POWER!!! And never was there such a tyrant, who did bestride the narrow parish like a Colossus, governing it in splendid isolation and caring not a jot for what others thought.

Part of the point of being a Catholic is that Sacred Tradition is a law to which all, from Pope to Catechumen, must bend. Once you sever the link with Tradition, then all you have is power. Those in power can do what they like. Popes, bishops, parish priests, lay men and women who have read a book once can set themselves up and govern by decree, moderated by nothing by the latest trend or their latest notion and claiming 'the Council' as their mandate. That is tyranny. Vatican II means as little to these people as Trent. What they want is their own opinion to be enforced on others and taught as divine law.

For them, Vatican II means women priests, gay marriage and number of other things that would have amazed the fathers of the Council. But then, the Council is only a shibboleth to them.

Some of these people would not know the smell of the sheep if it came in a bottle marked 'Sheep Stink'. In my thirty years as a priest, my experience is that people simply want to be left to pray in the way that they are used to. If Father insists, they won't protest when he mixes things up, but when things are made more Catholic, there seems to be a sort of collective sigh of relief, of the sort that many of us experienced during the reign of Pope Benedict.

In the 1980s, with a friend I visited a little hamlet in the Black Forest, called Sägendobel I think. Each evening almost the entire population gathered in their little church to say the Rosary together. It was so beautiful, and no doubt they had done this for years, if not centuries. But on our second evening, a lady with a guitar announced that this was all to change. There was Mass instead, celebrated by a Monsignor from Cologne; they—or rather the lady with a few disconsolate children—sang hymns accompanied by the guitar to tunes that were all too familiar to me from the 1960s but set to German words. Nobody but they joined in; there was a sort of stunned silence. Returning the following year, there was no Rosary, and there was no Mass either. 

Do I think that if the Latin Mass were imposed once more on the Church that everyone would welcome it? No, of course not. People have got used to the English Mass, and broadly have come to like it. Any priest who knows the smell of his sheep knows that. And I think that this is a subject to which I should return.

La Suprema

 This German Synodaler Weg stuff is, I suspect, the result of Paul VIs shake-up of the Roman Curia in the sixties and seventies, something earnestly desired by almost everybody in those days. The Curia was perceived by many as being responsible for most of the Church's woes (they really had no idea what woe was, did they?) and it was felt that instead of being legalistic and hidebound, it should be 'pastoral'. The particular change that worked the most mischief, I think, was the downgrading of La Suprema, the then Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Holy Office, now the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, and what it is to be in the future, we must wait and see). Or rather the removal of one of its functions. It is my understanding that in the past, the Holy Office, La Suprema, would give the final stamp of approval to the appointments of new bishops. Now that job was to pass to the Secretariate for State, who would give the nihil obstat to whomever they thought sufficiently one of themselves. Diplomats, nice guys, men who wouldn't rock the boat. Think the late Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, an extraordinary charming man (as the bishop who ordained me, I knew him quite well). Ostpolitik needed such men, not pugnacious Lions of Münster or Mindszentys whose evangelical intransigence was seen as an obstacle to what diplomacy might achieve.

And so here we are. A church of charming diplomatic bishops who want to get a) on with everybody and b) ahead.

One thinks of Knox's (Ronald, that is, not John) Absolute and Abitofhell (quoted from memory; I don't have the text here):

When suave politeness, temp'ring bigot zeal

Corrected 'I believe' to 'One does feel'

So we have a Church of bishops who for the last fifty years have thought that stoutly defending the faith is not quite gentlemanly; even though they might privately believe the faith, they wouldn't want to be seen to ram it down anyone else's throat. And this has encouraged others to think the same way. Diplomats promoted, believers sidelined. Do they ever wonder what our Lord might make of this?

And so here we are. Germany again leading the Church into schism. 

Tempus adest

 Nearly four years! I do not think that anyone can accuse me of logorrhrea! But with Traditiones Custodes, and still more with the recent Rescript, things have to change. I retain all my reverence for the Petrine office, but its present unworthy occupant is a different matter. Dear God, I have tried to defend him! But no longer. 

So why no posts

My dear friends; I have picked up on the internet that there is a certain sadness that I no longer post regularly on this blog (formerly Valle Adurni). I'm not the only one to cease posting, and I'm sure the reasons are largely the same.

Way back when, Pope Benedict had (in my view) galvanised the Church at a local level. Vocations began to rise, Mass attendance was increasing, and there was a sense that blood was pumping from the centre to the peripheries. I and others wanted to be a part of that.

Then everything went dead.

I don't want to spend my declining years writing damage limitation posts such as I attempted for a while.

I want to look after my parishioners, the ones whom God has entrusted to my poor care. Please pray for them, and pray for me. I genuinely think that this is the only way forward right now.

I will probably continue to post occasionally. But I, in common with others, will not publicly set myself against the the one who occupies and exercises the office of Vicar of Christ. I will simply pray that God's will be done. God will be his judge, and mine.

The Battle for the Shire

A devout and good young man is keen to join the Society of St Pius X. I can understand that. I have always wanted to be simply a priest as Catholic priests are supposed to be. If he is ordained (and he seems to me to be a strong candidate), then he will be able to minister to a largely sympathetic (to the things he stands for, I mean) congregation who will appreciate who he is and what he does. That's the way things are supposed to be between priest and people.

In Lord of the Rings, in a preface Tolkien sharply dismisses the idea that he was writing an allegory. In an allegory one thing directly stands for another; when one has the key, one understands a concrete situation. A myth, however, is something far deeper. It addresses themes which crop up again and again in human history, and tells this in the form of a story whose truth is self-apparent in its root. You can change the story, the characters, but the myth remains essentially the same.

Consider Harry Potter. JK Rowling said that the entire story had sprang into her mind at once. How clever! She conceived of a misunderstood hero who lived away from his natural parents, had extraordinary abilities, had a small group of friends who believed in him, who had a deadly enemy (whom he was the only one able to resist effectively) whom he combatted and by whom he was eventually killed, and who was then raised to life thereby saving everyone else in the story…… Of course it sprang to her mind. It is the greatest story of all, or myth if you will. No wonder a writer without remarkable literary skills managed to write such a bestseller. We all know that story, and it never fails to move us.

I'm conceiving Lord of the Rings in the same way. Right now it seems to me as if the SSPX is Lothlorien. It is necessary that Lothlorien exist, so that we never forget how things should be. Perhaps the FSSP is Rivendell, living to some extent with a foot in two worlds. But we should never forget that the real battle is for the Shire; the parishes and dioceses. If all the soldiers go to live in Lothlorien or even in Rivendell, then the Shire will fall. And if the Shire should fall, then next Rivendell will fall, and eventually Lothlorien too will go. Is Saruman the White now entrenched in Orthanc and holding Gandalf?

You see what I mean about myths?

On Preserving the Faith

For Thomas More, the thing that makes the difference is what is called by others Lex orandi, lex credendi. I mentioned how he had, with Erasmus, mocked what he regarded then as the superstitious practices of the pilgrims at Canterbury. By the time he came to write the Dialogue Concerning Heresies, he had modified his opinion substantially.

These things (pilgrimages, veneration of relics) he considered in some sense to incarnate the faith and hold it together, like a tin can holds soup. They are not the soup, but the soup will spill out without the can. If you damage people's way of expressing the faith, then the faith itself will be endangered. He saw what that had done in Germany and he feared that if the English people clamouring for the same 'reforms' were to get their way there would be a lot more damage done not just to the external expressions of the faith, but to the faith itself.

A long time ago I wrote about how the faith in Ireland was damaged in exactly this way. When the expressions of the faith (Rosaries, pilgrimages to holy wells) were derided as being unliturgical, the soup began to spill out. Yes they were unliturgical, but they were not the soup, merely the necessary can.

If these things have been used for centuries to nourish and support faith, then one needs to be very sure what one is doing before getting rid of them. They may be mere externals, but then so are flying buttresses, and without flying buttresses, cathedrals fall down.

And yes, that does apply to the liturgy too. I'm just not sure what good can be served by scooping up the soup and trying put it back into a wrecked tin. What takes centuries to build can be destroyed in an afternoon.

St Thomas More and the Church

It is well known that St Thomas More vigorously resisted the Reformation in England and ultimately paid for that resistance with his life. It is less well known, but still known that he had formerly attached himself enthusiastically to many of the things for which the reformers stood–a vernacular Bible, for instance, and with Erasmus he had derided the superstitious behaviour of pilgrims at St Thomas’ shrine in Canterbury.

By the time he came to write his Dialogue Concerning Heresies in 1529, his perspective had altered somewhat. He still thought a vernacular Bible would be a good thing, but a properly translated vernacular Bible, as opposed to Tyndale’s tendentious renderings of certain terms: ‘community’ rather than ‘Church’; ‘elder’ rather than ‘priest’. As part of his thought process, he had to consider just what made Tyndale’s versions ‘wrong’ and the traditional understandings ‘right’.

He pondered whether it could be the authority of the Pope, or the authority of a Council. But in the end, for More it all came down to ‘the common consent of Christendom’.

Eamon Duffy writes in his Reformation Divided:

It is notable that in the Dialogue this appeal to the common life of the church as the ultimate criterion of Christian authenticity never becomes merely or mainly an appeal to hierarchy, or to the teaching authority of the clergy. Though he insisted that Peter was Christ’s Vicar and head of the Church, ‘and alway synce the sucessours of hym continually.’ More never once appeals to the teaching of a pope or a council to clinch his argument. Though the authority of ‘the olde holy fathers’ is repeatedly invoked in defence of current practice, it is always as a witness to the shared faith of the Church as a body. ‘I take not one doctour or twayne but of the consent and comen agreement of the olde holy fathers’ expressing the ‘comen consent of the chyrche’. Even when More’s argument might seem to be leading him inexorably towards an appeal to clerical authority, he steers instead towards this insistence on the shared belief of the whole Church.  p59

This isn’t unlike St Vincent of Lérins’ ‘quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus’, but I think it’s better than that. St Vincent is quite easily answered by saying that there are lots of people who don’t agree, so it can never really be semper, ubique or omnibus. Common consent says something subtly different; it implies that there can be disagreement, but that the body of consent will carry the truth forwards. 

Chesterton’s ‘Democracy of the Dead’ comes closer. Truth cannot be arrived at by simply taking a vote among those currently living, or, worse, a powerful selection of those currently living or worse, a powerful self-selection of those currently living. The whole Church, militant on earth, suffering in Purgatory, triumphant in heaven, has to be consulted. It’s what we call Sacred Tradition.

In recent centuries we have come to see things a bit differently. The Pope, the Vicar of Christ, has come to be seen as the all-powerful discerner of the truth for the entire Church. There are various degrees of solemnity attached to his various teachings, and the higher the degree of solemnity, the more powerfully it binds the consciences of the faithful. A remark to a journalist on a plane might be distressing, but can be respectfully disagreed with. A note published in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis is an official act, and can’t be dismissed but is to some degree binding in conscience.

Well, that theory has now been tested hard—some might say to destruction. A publication in AAS has now been set in apparent opposition to the ‘common consent of Christendom’. There are those who argue that it doesn’t contradict established teaching, those who argue that it does and dislike that, and those who argue that it does and think it’s wonderful.

This is to some extent distressing, sure, but it hasn’t disturbed my faith one bit. It has just reassured me that St Thomas More was right, that the locus of the truth of the faith is not the teaching of one individual, even if he be the current Pope, but is the faith of the entire common corps of Christendom. People, even popes, teach truly when they teach according to that faith, and untruly when they don’t. Popes have a special role to strengthen the brethren, to define infallibly should it ever be necessary to expound with ultimate authority the faith of the common corps of Christendom, but they are not the fons et origo of the Church’s faith, still less its master, and not God’s direct mouthpiece on every possible subject. As someone clever once said—as it happens, a Pope teaching according to the faith of the common corps of Christianity—the Pope should be a gardener, not a technician.

St Thomas More has more to say on the subject of how the Church stays true to her teaching, the mechanism by which it holds to the faith. That I'll address in another post.

On whose authority?

Like some of you, I don't find this particular pontificate easy, and I have really tried (see earlier posts). I have been rebuked on Facebook by some (and one in particular) who say that since the Holy Father is chosen by the Holy Spirit, reluctance to embrace all the teaching of the present Pope suggests direct resistance to the Holy Spirit.

There is a lot one can say about that: for a start, if the Holy Father is always the candidate of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit must have been somewhat distracted, let us say, in the tenth century. Cardinal Hume famously said in 1978 that Pope John Paul I was plainly the candidate of the Holy Spirit—that same Holy Spirit who presumably changed his mind 33 days later.

On other people's part, there is also a temptation to identify authority's embrace of their own opinions as 'the work of the Holy Spirit.' We have seen plenty of that at work in the General Synod of the Church of England when one or other item of traditional doctrine has been shelved 'by the Holy Spirit'. All that means is simply that someone thinks the right decision has been made and wants to claim Divine approval.

For some people the unfamiliar path marked out by Pope Francis is a strong test of faith, as, no doubt, were the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI for those of a more liberal persuasion. Does God continue to guide his Church or not? And if so, how?

A parishioner in her very early twenties texted me, distraught, when that letter clarifying what claimed to be the correct interpretation of that footnote in Amoris Lætitia made it to the Acta Apostolicæ Sedis. To her and others it seemed to shake their faith in the Church. I had to reply with a kind of 'calm down, dear'. Frankly, the publication in AAS didn't shake me so much as annoy me. It was irresponsible, not a catastrophe.

What is unthinkable is that Divine Providence would simply have abandoned the Church and left her to her own devices. Perhaps what we need to do is to look at our own presuppositions and ask whether we have got it right. What really is the Holy Spirit trying to teach us in (and perhaps by) this pontificate?

Put simply, I think what is happening is that Ultramontanism is now finally being put into its coffin. It's been a long time a-coming, and its demise was delayed far beyond its normal sell-by date due to the abnormally high quality of most of the various incumbents who have filled the shoes of the fisherman since the mid-nineteenth century. They have led us to expect high-quality teaching that did indeed seem to come straight from the mouth of God.

Truly it seemed as if the Pope's job was to tell us what to believe. He was the earthly shepherd of Christ's flock, striding out while we followed along behind. Or, to change the metaphor, he taught the faith to the bishops, who taught it to the priests, who taught it to the laity who took it to their friends and colleagues. It is as if the Pope was the locus wherein lay the fulness of God's active Word, the fons et origo (on earth, anyway) of Divine truth.

Back in the 1970s, despite a decade of Papal indecision and inaction, Ultramontanism was still alive and well. I stopped believing in it in the mid-eighties. Pope John Paul seems to have believed strongly in it—a cardinal is supposed to have gently suggested abdication once he (JP) was no longer able to walk. The Pope replied firmly 'I don't need two functioning legs to rule the Church!' That made me very uncomfortable, that he saw his role as 'ruling' the Church in that very positive way. I can see why the system might appeal to some from the United States, where strong personal rule is valued in a president (an American friend of mine didn't take to the gentler Benedict: 'John Paul, now, he really kicked ass!') and now we have become accustomed to it.

But is it right? Is that what Christ intended for his Church? I rather suspect that the answer is no, and that we can be grateful to Pope Francis for helping us to see that. I wish I could think of a kinder way of putting this, but it seems as if we have now the reductio ad absurdum of Ultramontanism. You have to believe X because this particular pope teaches X.

It begs the question, though, about what is the locus, the earthly fons et origo of the truth into which our Lord promised that we should be guided by the Holy Spirit?

I'll discuss that in another post.

Augustine and Beards

There seems to be quite a row blazing about whether St Augustine was black or not. Does it actually matter? The proposition was first made to me some thirty years ago, and even then I thought it odd, but not in any way objectionable. Some (including Brown, Augustine's most prestigious biographer) have thought that Monica was a Berber name (for those who don't know, that was St Augustine's persistent Mum), but Patricius (his Dad) has a Latin name—though perhaps a rather noveau-riche Latin name (effectively meaning Posh Guy). One thinks of people who call their sons Duke or Lord. This might suggest a lower-middle-class aspiring to poshness. But it says nothing about skin-colour.

I don't personally think Augustine would have very likely been black, any more than most Tunisians and Algerians today are black, if what you mean by black is sub-Saharan black. But of course it isn't impossible, because the Roman Empire mixed all sorts of people up. It placed soldiers all over the Empire in different places from where they were born precisely to provide a genetic or rather ethnic mix in which people would identify as 'Roman' rather than as Palmyran, or Egyptian, or British. The Roman Empire didn't spread into sub-Saharan territory, but it certainly captured slaves and employed mercenaries from there, who would have spread throughout the territories. Unlike slaves in the Southern States of the US, Roman slaves could be, and frequently were, freed, and were then able to set themselves up as businessmen, their descendants becoming citizens, often wealthy and influential ones. The issue was your willingness to buy into the Roman thing, not the colour of your skin. So Patricius could well have been the son of a freed slave, sub-saharan or not. But the probability is against it, I think. Yet why on earth would it worry anybody at all if it were to be found so? A Roman would have had far more problems with me, a descendent of the extra-terratorial, therefore barbarian, Irish, than with a black Augustine.

Here I want to stand up on my hind legs and come to the defence of Professor Mary Beard. In my view she is one of the most illuminating and intelligent teachers of Roman History around these days. As some of you may know, I teach early Church History in a seminary, to trainee priests, and I start the course by asking my students to watch her BBC series on Roman History; the fact that the BBC Store no longer will allow us access to the items we have purchased is deeply distressing, because her course on Rome without Limits was the most wonderful introduction to a Church History course. There are other people around (I won't name names!) who start with their conclusions and then go in search of the evidence, ignoring anything contrary. Television abounds with them. Mary Beard is not one of them. She is not only amazingly erudite, she has the ability to teach, too, without patronising her audience. She doesn't try to bolster a weak argument by provocative dress (or lack thereof), or hop on right-on bandwagons. She is an honest and amazing historian, who deserves our profound respect even if we don't agree with everything she says. Nuff said.

Convergence

Cardinal Sarah's comments on the convergence of the two forms of the Roman Rite have drawn much comment around the Interweb, not least on the subject of the Lectionary. It goes without saying that I believe the OF can be much improved by the EF; how about the other way around?

I am not one of those who is an 'immobilist', in Fr Mark Drew's memorable word, meaning those who think that there can be no improvement whatever to the traditional rites. But I have a deep reluctance to start tinkering under the bonnet: that has been tried and found to be not particularly successful, not least in my own lifetime. Our Church is a 'we' Church, and that 'we' embraces not only those alive today, but those in Purgatory and in Heaven. Our liturgy has to embrace that 'we-ness', and a liturgy designed only for those of one particular age risks cutting adrift from its moorings. Our liturgy expresses the unity of the Church across space and across time. It is the cry of the whole people of God to its maker, the nuptial song of the Bride to her Groom. It is fundamentally transcendent, going beyond itself, focussing not on pleasing itself, but on pleasing its Spouse.

So making things more entertaining, if I can put it like that, needn't, perhaps shouldn't, be part of the recipe.

Let's consider the Lectionary. A lot of erudite stuff has been floating around recently: Cardinal Sarah's proposal hasn't been received very favourably. At root is the fact that we see the purpose of the Lectionary differently these days. Now we consider it didactic, an opportunity for people to learn from the Word of God Itself. The homily is intended to reinforce that lesson. Yet the more ancient liturgies don't use the Scriptures like that in the Liturgy; many of them have very restricted Lectionaries indeed. The Ethiopian, for instance, confines itself to a handful of Gospel passages and a few bits of St Paul, among which the priest selects whatever he likes. This is because the purpose of the readings is not didactic, but is instead considered an Epiphany of God the Word, a precursor to the coming of God the Bread of Life later in the celebration. Teaching about what the Scriptures contain takes place outside the Eucharist. It's a different mindset.
Certainly other rites had a much richer Lectionary than the Ethiopic, not least the Roman. But teaching was not considered part of the function of the Lectionary really until the Reformation. The Mediæval lectionary was richer simply because the Mediæval liturgy was richer; they thought that richness was a good thing in itself.
When Cyril and Methodius sought a Slavonic liturgy, Rome granted permission as long as the Scriptures continued to be read only in Hebrew, Latin or Greek—precisely the inverse of what we might have thought today. Then, it was considered that the Scriptures should be read only in the three languages which appeared on the titulus of the Cross. A vernacular liturgy was thought less inappropriate than vernacular scriptures.
It is generally acknowledged that parts of the Roman Lectionary are very ancient indeed. Catacomb ancient, in fact. Even the new Lectionary acknowledges this in part, preserving carefully the early Lenten cycle of readings.
Arguments can be made about content: the new Lectionary appears to skirt around difficult passages, for instance, but to my mind this is less important than the change to a didactic purpose to the readings. It goes hand in hand with an insistence on preaching on every possible occasion. Priests really shouldn't be forced to preach; very few of us can do it at all well! I try to avoid preaching whenever I can, because I think that actually bad preaching does more harm than no preaching. I suspect that we are loading far too much onto the Mass right now, which should be simply the worship of God; our small space where we can allow Him to Be in our lives, without being distracted (or possibly bored) by lesser matters such as Fr X's latest twenty-minute variation on 'God is Love' and How Awful Everything Used To Be Before the Nineteen-Sixties (something utterly foreign to anyone born before 1970).
I would resent a full rewrite of the EF Missal lectionary, still less would I welcome an uncritical adoption of the current OF lectionary. But I would not resent an optional widening of the traditional lectionary: what I mean is a provision of a weekday selection of readings, so that one would not be obliged to read the same readings several times on successive days. In fact, such an arrangement was made in the 1960s for a few years; I even have a copy of the lectionary. It isn't perfect, but it's pretty good.
I might come back to this, but I wanted to jam down some preliminary thoughts.

We are Church

I've been turning over in my mind the proposition that Pope Francis may have some providential role to play in the Church's life. I have to come clean and say that I cannot warm to the man. But in the Scriptures, and in the Church's history, many times have uncongenial people performed unpleasant but necessary tasks which in the long run have benefitted the People of God.

This morning I saw on Facebook a page alleging that Pope Francis had decried the idea that a Christian might have a personal relationship with Jesus. To underline the point, the poster had included a short video clip from a public audience where indeed Pope Francis did say just that…but went on immediately to add 'in private, without also being a member of the Church, the people of God'. In other words, he was exactly right, and the person who had created that post had done a wicked thing, twisting the Pope's words to make him appear to say something very different.

For a long time (maybe mid-nineteenth century on) we have had a very top-down style of leadership. The Pope gives instructions to the bishops, who give instructions to the priests, who give instructions to the laity. I think it was Wilfrid Ward who longed to have a papal encyclical on his breakfast table every morning. Popes became charismatic figures who taught authoritatively on every subject (one thinks of those thousands [well it seems that way] of allocutions to midwives that Pope Pius XII was so fond of making).

The sixties changed all that; 'I've gotta be me, I've gotta do my thing!' People ceased to listen to the distressed bleats of Pope Paul VI and worked things out, each man (or woman) for him (or her) self. As St Paul warned, they wandered about with itching ears, finding teachers to suit their fancy.

Pope John Paul II changed this to some degree, largely by his own overwhelming personality. Once more, the Pope led the Church personally and in his case forcefully. It is said that when he lost the use of his legs the question was asked whether he was now capable of leading the Church. 'I don't need two functioning legs to rule the Church', he is supposed to have growled. At the time this comment struck me as worrying, but it has taken until now for things to gel in my mind.

Are Popes supposed to be absolute monarchs who rule by force of will and personality? I think that maybe American presidents do, for the years of their office, and that is why so many Americans warmed to John Paul II.

The other day I had a pub lunch with one of my Anglican opposite numbers. He is married to a Catholic, and has a woman assistant priest. I like him. He gently sounded me out about intercommunion and about women's orders, as I guessed he would. Fortunately, I had prepared my answer. I knew it couldn't be a hard answer, for that would close the issue off in his mind. So I simply said 'what I personally think about the subject doesn't matter, because in the Catholic Church theology isn't something *I* do, but something *we* do." And that *I* excludes every *I*, from the Pope down to the latest neophyte, whereas the *we* encompasses *every* Catholic Christian; not just those alive now, but those in Purgatory and those in Heaven. Chesterton called this the 'democracy of the dead'.

That gives nobody the right to innovate in his *own* name, except, perhaps, the theoretical right possessed by the Pope to teach infallibly in certain very circumscribed circumstances. Even the famous proclamations of our Lady's Immaculate Conception and Assumption were acts of the *whole* Church: the belief of the living Church was assessed, and the discussions of the past were investigated.

I think this is why Pope Benedict tried to change the character of the papacy. He was never a man for outward show, and I rather suspect that the red shoes and mozzettas were more of a penance to him than anything else. But he saw that he could never dominate the Church like his predecessor: a young American friend of mine didn't really think much of that: he once commented approvingly 'Pope John Paul really kicked ass!' That wasn't Benedict's way; he reminded us that a pope is supposed to be a gardener, rather than an engineer. He has a hieratic function at the centre of the family; he has a particular role, outwardly expressed by liturgical rite and particular dress. But he is not an absolute monarch, even an enlightened one.

Pope Francis sees it differently; he has something personally authoritative to say on practically every subject. Is that really his job? Is that really any Pope's job? This is why I get so uncomfortable when I hear people say things like 'you've got to get with the Pope's programme: he's the Pope, after all, and if you don't do what he says, you're disobeying Christ!' Maybe this is why we have Pope Francis: I hesitate to write this, but maybe he is a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the notion of a monarchical papacy.†

Not even the Pope can do theology alone. After all, *WE are Church*.

† just as there are those who consider that Donald Trump is the reductio ad absurdum of a monarchical presidency.

Fish

Today I went to Tesco—it was on my way, and has usually parking spaces—to buy some fish for lunch. Over the display cabinet was a big sign: "Fish: not only for Friday's". Yes, I reproduced that accurately, apostrophe included.

But it does say two interesting things;

First, that fish once more has come to be associated with Friday.

Second, that supermarkets have noticed that more people than in recent years are buying fish for eating on a Friday (and want to extend that).

I think that, still, England and Wales are the only English (and Welsh!)-speaking conference which has restored Friday abstinence. But notice how it has already impacted one of the largest supermarket stores in the country.

Again, I congratulate my former bishop, Kieran Conry, for having given us back Friday abstinence. Little things sometimes have great impact.