Religion and its place in civil society

The Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, a couple of weeks ago, delivered the annual Theos lecture, in which he robustly confronted the creeping aggressive hostility towards religion in Europe. It is very well worth a read, and you can find it here (in pdf form). I don't go along with everything, but there is much very good stuff indeed.

I reproduce the talk below: I hope this will not infringe any restrictions—if I have done so, please let me know and I will withdraw it.

The talk addressed three questions:

1. Why has religion survived?

2. What is its place in the liberal democratic state?

3. What are the opportunities and imperatives for the future?

2009 Annual Theos Lecture

Religion in Twenty-First Century Britain

Lord Sacks of Aldgate

4 November 2009

***

1. Why has religion survived?

Let me begin, not in the twenty-first century, but quite deliberately in the nineteenth, in an encounter which I regard in retrospect as one of the most significant of modern times.

The year is 1830 and a very bright young French diplomat called Alexis de Tocqueville visits America to see for himself this new kind of society, and what he sees astonishes him. He comes from a Europe in which religion is dying, presumed dead - every self-respecting French and indeed Continental intellectual believed that in 1830. Laplace had already said when asked “What is the place of religion in your system?” he replied “Je n’ai pas besoin de cette hypothèse” (I don’t need religion to explain the universe.) and Tocqueville was going to a country which in the First Amendment had made a principled

separation of Church and state. And what he saw when he first went to America was extraordinary. America, he discovered, was a very religious country indeed.

This is what he wrote in 1832:

Eighteenth century philosophers had a very simple explanation for

the gradual weakening of beliefs. Religious zeal, they said, was

bound to die down as enlightenment and freedom spread. It is

tiresome, that the facts do not fit that theory at all.

This year, 179 years later, the editor and the Washington correspondent of The Economist, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, published a book entitled God is Back - in effect saying exactly the same thing as de Tocqueville had said

all those decades earlier. Everywhere, except in Europe, religion is growing – from the mega churches of America to China, where the weekly attendance at church services is far more than the membership of the Communist Party.

So here, despite more than a century of atheism - from Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead’ to Matthew Arnold’s ‘melancholy, long withdrawing roar of the retreating tide of faith’ all the way to today’s angry atheists, whom I call the intellectual’s equivalent

of road rage – all the way, through all of that, God is back and Europe as a whole still doesn’t get it.

It is our biggest single collective cultural and intellectual blind spot. In fact - and here is an extreme example but it is an extraordinary one - some people today who are most convinced that religion is irrational and altogether outmoded, are

nonetheless queuing up to get their children into faith schools. And they still don’t fully understand the contradiction.

The survival of religion in the twenty-first century cuts across some of our most basic intellectual assumptions. After all, how can anyone still need religion if: to explain the universe we have science; to control the universe we have technology; to negotiate power we have politics; to achieve prosperity we have economics. If you’re ill you go to a doctor, not a priest. If you feel guilty, you go to a psycho-therapist, not to confession. If you are depressed you take Prozac and not the book of Psalms. And if you seek salvation you go to our new cathedrals, namely shopping centres, where you can buy happiness at extremely competitive prices.

So why has religion survived? The answer is – to cut through several volumes of potential literature - that homo-sapiens is the meaning-seeking animal. Alone among life forms we ask the big questions. Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live? And to understand why these are religious questions, consider the four alternatives that the last two or three centuries have produced:

i. The market

ii. The state

iii. Science

iv. Philosophy

i. The market

The market of course gives us choices, but it cannot tell us which choices to make. The market fails to deal – or in principle, and I think rightly, refuses to deal - with what are called ‘second order evaluations’. We have wants, appetites, desires, but we are also capable of standing back and passing judgement on those desires; between those we feel that we may or ought to satisfy and those we feel we ought not to satisfy. Economics, in principle, does not deal with second order evaluation. The market tells us the price of things; it does not in principle think of telling us the value of things. The market is at best neutral

toward, and at worst destructive of, some of the fundamental values on which society depends: values like loyalty, and honesty, and responsibility, and social solidarity. And in the wake of the financial collapse of 2008 and the scandal of

MPs’ expenses I don’t think I need to labour the point; there are no meanings in markets.

ii. Politics and the state

What singles out liberal democratic politics from all others, what makes liberal democracy quite different from Athenian democracy (the democracy of Athens in the fourth century before the Christian era) is very simple. In Athens, the citizen

served the state; in liberal democracy the state serves the citizens. In Athens, the state embodied the good, the noble and the true; in liberal democracy the state delivers services in return for taxes. For us, politics is managerial and procedural

and it is built on the principle, again rightly I think, that morality is my business and not the business of the state.

So there are no meanings in liberal democratic politics either. And this is not, incidentally, a failing; I think this is what makes them the great institutions they are.

iii. Science

What then about science? Again, the answer is quite simply no, and that, as a simple matter of intellectual principle. Science studies causes not purposes. And they are completely different ways of thinking. Science, to explain any event, must look back because a cause always precedes its effect. So a scientist seeking to explain something is always looking at what preceded it. When it comes to purposes - meaningful behaviour - always what explains my act is not something in the past, but something in the not-yet-realised future, which I believe my act will bring about or bring nearer. So, they are different kinds of intellectual activity.

Again, to gloss over another few books, my way of putting it - the simplest I’ve come up with – is this: science takes things apart to see how they work; religion puts things together to see what they mean. And that is the fundamental difference between the two. I don’t have any argument with science at all, but they are different kinds of activity and you will not find meaning in science. Of course, some of the great scientists - Steve Weinberg in particular - have been very eloquent on this point.

iv. Philosophy

Finally, philosophy. I have to say that I didn’t begin wanting to be a Rabbi, I began wanting to be a philosopher. I got to know the late Isaiah Berlin quite well towards the end of his life, and I always remember the first conversation we had in our home, he said “Chief Rabbi, whatever you do, don’t talk to me about religion. When it comes to God I am tone deaf!” He said, “What I can’t understand about you is you studied philosophy at Cambridge and Oxford, how is it you believe?” and I said, “Sir Isaiah, if it helps, think of me as a lapsed heretic”. “Quite understand, dear boy,” he said. And that actually is the truth. I gave up philosophy because at that particular time when I was studying it, Philosophy had declared as a matter of principle that the search for meaning is in itself meaningless. And because we cannot, to remain human, give up that search for meaning, I gave up philosophy instead. I might add one particular point – although I still do teach, read and admire it - there is a footnote I would like to add, that I think people don’t fully understand.

As we know, there are some people who believe still in the twenty-first century that God is an old man, with a long white beard and his name is Charles Darwin. Now, people think that Darwin refuted religion. As a matter of fact, Darwin did nothing of the kind. What Darwin refuted was Aristotelian science, on which a great deal of Christian theology, what is called Natural Theology, was based. Aristotle believed that there were purposes in nature, and by studying nature you could discover the purpose in things. That never was a Jewish belief – it happens to be a belief of a certain kind of synthesis between Hellenism and Christianity. So, actually, the new science is more of a challenge to a certain kind of philosophy than it is to religious belief. And I don’t know anyone who has said that.

So, if we search for meaning, we will not in the twenty-first century find it in the market, in the state, in science or in philosophy. It is that principled abdication of the search for meaning by the four great institutions of modernity that has created the space which religion has returned to fill, and which indeed it always did fill. In Stephen Hawking’s words “Religion is about the thing that breathes fire into the equations.” In Karl Marx’s words “Religion is the heart of a heartless world.” It is our last best hope if we seek to find meaning, as people in the Abrahamic monotheisms have always tried to do, in concepts like freedom, justice, human dignity, compassion, love, forgiveness and hope. I think it was Philip Larkin in his very famous poem Church Going - a man who had lost belief, but nonetheless put it best - speaking of the church, as you remember, he said:

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious.

And that is why religion will never be obsolete, so long as we continue to be the meaning-seeking animals. That is why religion survived.

2. What is the place of religion in the liberal democratic state?

Again, the best answer was given by Alexis de Tocqueville. Tocqueville was absolutely fascinated by what gave religion such power in America in the 1830s. And he describes how this was a puzzle to him and he asked people including, above all, clergy. The answer they all gave him – this was 1830, don’t forget – the answer they all gave him was: “Religion has influence in America because it never gets involved in politics.” He asked them why, and they replied, “Because politics is divisive, and if religion ever got involved in partisan politics, it too would be divisive”. And that was true then, and it remains true today.

What then did he see religion doing in the United States? He saw that it sanctified the family, that it created community, that it encouraged philanthropy, that it built schools, that it taught responsibility, that it brought people together for the common good. It created what Tocqueville called “the art of association” and another beautiful phrase, “habits of the heart,” which he described as “the essential apprenticeship in liberty.” He saw religion as the essential counterbalance to what he described – again 180 years ago - as “the greatest danger facing America.” It was a new phenomenon in those days and he had to invent a word to describe it, and the word he invented was ‘individualism’.

He in other words saw that religion was the counterweight to individualism, and because of that it sustained a free and democratic society. In the terminology of today, we would say that religion sustained the third sector that is not the state, that is not the market but it is civil society. Here are two little passages from Tocqueville when he says just this (it’s an eloquent little book, and I re-read it every year), he says: “In the United States, religion exercises but little influence on the laws and upon the details of public opinion, but it directs the customs of the community, and by regulating domestic life, it regulates the state”. And again in the introduction to Democracy in America:

Liberty regards religion as its companion in all its battles, and all its

triumphs - as the cradle of its infancy and the divine course of its

claims. It considers religion as the safeguard of morality and morality

as the best security of law and the surest pledge of the duration of

freedom.

So, we would expect, if Tocqueville got it right, to be able to test that in practice. If Tocqueville was right, then we would expect any society in which religion declines, in that society, civil society would decline. Families would become fragile, marriages would decline, communities would atrophy, society would cease to have a shared morality. And by those tests, 100 years later, Tocqueville got it exactly right.

Now I am going to do something here which is deliberately provocative, but why should the angry atheists get all the best tunes? So let me give you two very provocative examples; let me begin with the neo-Darwinians. After all, it’s their year – the 200th anniversary of Darwin and 150th of The Origin of Species. I haven’t seen this argument ever presented before; a five step neo-Darwinian refutation of neo-Darwinism.

1. A person is, in Richard Dawkins’ beautiful phrase, “a gene’s way of making another gene”. So forget religion, forget values, forget ideals, its all about reproduction; handing on our genes to the next generation.

2. Europe today is the most secular region in the world.

3. Europe today is the only region in the world which is experiencing population decline. As you know, zero population growth – a stable population – requires an average of 2.1 children for every woman of child-bearing age in the population. Not one European country has anything like that rate today. Here are the 2004 figures: In the United Kingdom: 1.74, in the Netherlands: 1.73, Germany: 1.37, Italy: 1.33, Spain: 1.32 and Greece: 1.29.

4. Wherever you turn today anywhere in the world, and whether you look at the Jewish or Christian or Muslim communities, you will find the more religious the community, the larger, on average, are its families.

5. The major assault on religion today comes from the neo-Darwinians. From which it follows, as night doth follow day, that if you are a true neo- Darwinian believer you want there to be as few neo-Darwinians as possible. QED.

Now, actually, it sounds like a joke, but beneath it, is a very serious point indeed. Parenthood involves massive sacrifice: of money, attention, time and emotional energy. Where today, in European culture with its consumerism and its instant gratification ‘because you’re worth it’, in that culture, where will you find space for the concept of sacrifice for the sake of generations not yet born? Europe, at least the indigenous population of Europe, is dying, exactly as Polybius said about ancient Greece in the third pre-Christian century. The century that is intellectually the closest to our own – the century of the sceptics and the epicureans and the cynics. Polybius wrote this:

The fact is, that the people of Hellas had entered upon the false path

of ostentation, avarice and laziness, and were therefore becoming

unwilling to marry, or if they did marry, to bring up the children born to

them; the majority were only willing to bring up at most one or two.

That is why Greece died. That is where Europe is today.

Now, that is one of the un-sayable truths of our time. We are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it. Albert Camus once said that the only serious philosophical question is “Why should I not commit suicide?” I think he was wrong. The only serious philosophical question is “Why should I have a child?” And our culture is not giving a very easy answer to that question.

The second un-sayable proposition: At the end of his famous 1957 lecture, Two Concepts of Liberty, one of the great statement defences of liberty of our time, Isaiah Berlin famously quoted a statement of Joseph Schumpeter: “To realise the

relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.” To which Michael Sandel, this year’s Reith lecturer, Professor of Political Philosophy at Harvard University; and

I in the book I wrote called The Politics of Hope, ask the following question, “If your convictions are only relatively valid, why stand for them unflinchingly?” You cannot defend a civilisation on the basis of moral relativism. In a head-to-head contest between a moral relativist and a fundamentalist, who wins? The fundamentalist must win because he is sure he’s right and you are not sure he’s wrong. Or, as they say in America, a liberal is someone who can’t even take his own side in an argument. There’s a wonderful man I love dearly, a novelist from Israel called Amos Oz, and at one time when there was a lot of difference between secular and religious in Israel, I did a big public conversation with Amos, just to show that we can talk respectfully and I think even lovingly. He began with the following sentence: “I’m not sure I am going to agree with Rabbi Sacks on everything, but then on most things I don’t agree with myself.”

In 1989, as the Cold War ended, as the Berlin Wall fell, people thought that liberal democracy was about to conquer the world. Twenty years on - after Bosnia, after Kosovo, after Somalia, and Iraq and Iran, and Afghanistan - does anyone believe that any more? Now after 9/11 many politicians here and in the United States said that the battle against terror is as much a battle of ideas as it is of weapons. Eight years on ask yourself the following question: “Which ideas?” Freedom? Democracy? Autonomy? Rights? Will freedom persuade somebody who believes that submission to God is the highest value? Will democracy persuade somebody who believes that the will of God takes precedence over the will of the people? Will autonomy persuade somebody who believes in obeying God’s will, not my own? Will rights persuade somebody who believes that the first of all rights is the right to obey the voice of God? Not only has the battle of ideas not been won, it hasn’t even been fought.

Liberty of conscience, the peculiarly modern form of liberalism that we inherit today was born not in a secular age but in the most religious age of modern times, namely the seventeenth century. And it was built not on moral relativism but on moral absolutes. Among them, the non-negotiable dignity of the human person, the sanctity of human life, the imperative of conscience and the consent of the governed. All those things are not moral relativism they are what has come

to be called the Judeo-Christian heritage. The idea that you can lose the moral foundations of freedom without eventually losing freedom itself is simply absurd.

All credit to Isaiah Berlin who though he was a relativist, or what he calls a pluralist, actually saw this and said just before the end of the lecture I just quoted:

It may be that the kind of freedom that we enjoy today is only the late fruit of our declining capitalist civilisation; an ideal which remote ages and primitive societies have not recognised, and one which posterity

will regard with curiosity, even sympathy, but little comprehension.

Isaiah Berlin saw clearly that on his own philosophy, freedom was indefensible if it ever met a singularly determined opponent. So to repeat. Tocqueville was right: the place of religion is in civil society where it achieves many things essential to liberal democratic freedom, but two in particular: Number one, it sanctifies marriage and the family and the obligations of parenthood; and number two, it safeguards the non-relativist moral principles on which Western freedom is based. That is why Tocqueville described religion as “the surest pledge for the duration of freedom.”

It may not be religion that is dying, it may be liberal democratic Europe that is in danger, demographically and in its ability to defend its own values. That is the second point, where does religion belong in a liberal democratic society?

3. What are the opportunities and imperatives for the future?

Finally, I end with a simple question – what is the way forward? Does it mean, given all I’ve said, that we have to march back to the nineteenth century or the seventeenth century? Clearly not. Religion is going to grow in strength in the twenty-first century and a very great deal will depend on what kind of religion it is. At the moment, the fastest growing religions in the world are those who take an adversarial stance towards society, religions that challenge liberal democratic freedoms, and that is bad news. Worse than that, sadly, is that in various parts of the world, political conflicts - conflicts that were once clearly political - have now become religionized. And once that happens they become insoluble because compromise in politics is a virtue and in religion it is a vice. All peace depends on compromise and that is why peace comes to seem to some religious groups to be a form of betrayal which is why peacemakers get assassinated. And therefore I believe we have no choice but to articulate an intellectually open and humble and tolerant religiosity as the only strong enough defence for some of the religiosity that is coming our way with the force of a hurricane. I believe the way ahead lies in at least the following three directions:

Number one: I believe that we are ready for a new dialogue between religion and science. I believe almost everything about recent scientific discoveries – whether it be in cosmology or neuroscience or the mapping of the human genome - are awe-inspiring and have deeply religious implications. Not least for instance the discovery of DNA and the genome: we now know that all life on earth from the simplest bacterium to you and me comes from one single source. All life speaks the same language of A-C-G-D – that, as I argued in my book The Dignity of Difference, is what I regard as the fundamental truth about mono-theism. The unity up there creates diversity down here.

Number two, it’s very interesting that while the genome was being mapped everyone was expecting it to come up with this number of 100,000 genes; as we know it turned out – and this was one of the great surprises of the project – that there are only 20-30,000 genes, which means that genes aren’t selfish at all, they’re team players, which I think is quite nice. I always said about the genome, the great miracle is that a whole bunch of selfish genes get together and create selfless people which I think is fabulous. I believe that biology is right now giving us wonderful new insights into the origins of altruism and the universality of morality. The biggest refutation of moral relativism is today coming not from religion and not from philosophy but from science itself. I haven’t got time to talk about this, but I would recommend any of these three books which were published this year, two in America and one in Britain. The British one is a book by James Le Fanu, called Why Us? and the two American books are Dacher Keltner’s book Born to be Good and that wonderful man on primate politics, I don’t know if you’ve read Frans de Waal - you want to understand the politics of the European Union, read Frans de Waal on who’s going to be Alpha Male and all that stuff, it’s great stuff - Frans de Waal has just written a book, published a couple of weeks ago, called The Age of Empathy. Any one of those three books - all written incidentally by non-believing scientists, there’s not a word of religion in any of them - this is the kind of science with which religion can have a serious conversation because it’s enthralling and enormously hopefully about the human future.

Secondly, I believe that the big global issues - like climate change - are crying out for the unparalleled power of religion, nothing else has this kind of power to recruit energies on a global scale. To give you the obvious example, the great global programme of 2000 of international debt relief was called ‘Jubilee 2000’ because it began as a religious initiative - I believe it began in the Vatican - based on the Biblical principle of Jubilee in Leviticus 25 “Proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants.” That began as a religious movement and became a political and financial movement of international debt relief.

More recently, two very distinguished scientists, neither of whom is religious, both are atheists, EO Wilson, the inventor of socio-biology and conciliance and Lord May in this country, the former chief scientific advisor to the government and former president of the Royal Society both proposed an alliance between religion and science to combat global warming. And that is exactly what the faith leaders in Britain did last Thursday at Lambeth Palace, we came together to sign a joint declaration on climate change – our commitment to it and to working for it in our constituencies - that will be taken by the British Government to Copenhagen on 9 December.

In general, religions are much more suited to the world of the twenty-first century, than our nation states. The future of nation sates, as I wrote in a book of mine, The Home we Build Together, is extremely doubtful. In the current situation Philip Bobbitt the American thinker believes we have already passed beyond the nation state into what he calls the market state. But one way or another, religions think global and act local. The twenty-first century imperative and they do so better than any other organisations, except the great NGOs. So my second point is not just a dialogue between religion and science, but a major engagement of religion with scientists and with economists on issues such as global poverty, climate change and so on. And that will lead religion in the most constructive direction I can think of.

Finally, religious groups in the liberal democratic state must be prepared to enter into serious respectful conversations with secular humanists, with charities, with other groups in civil society about the nature of the common good and the kind of society we wish to create for our grandchildren not yet born. At the moment we don’t fully have this. At the moment in Britain I would say that religious groups tend more to act as pressure groups or lobbying groups than as conversation partners. But, that conversation is there to be had and I hope Theos will play a part in facilitating it. It is doable.

Just think of this. Every time I do Thought for the Day – I have to say Thought for the Day really appeals to the sadist within me. All these people just about to bound out of bed and enjoy the day and then somebody gives you a sermon and you want to go straight back to bed! - every time I do Thought for the Day, I am speaking to an audience 99.5% of which isn’t Jewish which is a challenge. I tried to find a precedent in the whole of Jewish history – I had to go back to Jonah for the last time! Incidentally, what Jonah discovered is still true; it is much easier preaching to non-Jews than to Jews. If you read the book of Jonah, you’ll find that Jonah said five words to the inhabitants of Nineveh, in Hebrew, ‘In forty days Nineveh will be destroyed’ – five words and the whole population repented! All the other prophets - Isaiah, Jeremiah - they spent their whole lives preaching to Jews and nobody listened for a moment! Who is this guy? So there we are. The third thing is we have to be part of the public conversation. Little things like Thought for the Day show how easy it is to do without being a pressure group, without seeking to impose our will on others, just seeking not a vote. Not a veto, but a voice in the conversation.

So, let me be blunt. Either we win, or the fundamentalists win, and that is the challenge. If the fundamentalists win I wouldn’t hang around too long. So, let me summarise my argument.

1. Religion is our greatest legacy of meanings.

2. Religion belongs to civil society and not to partisan politics.

3. All of us, believers, atheists, agnostics, are in this together and we must learn to speak to one another and listen to one another.

I end with this, a very simple story. When I became Chief Rabbi in 1992, I decided everyone was looking out of shape and I decided to organise a Chief Rabbi’s marathon. Being the Jewish community, the run turned into a walk, 26 miles turned into three and in the end we had an extremely slow walk around Kensington Gardens. It was very nice, we had 5,000 people raising money for 110 different charities. The Sunday before, the organiser said “Wouldn’t it be sensible if we did a rehearsal to check for any flaws?” So, six of us got together a week before to do the walk, and within five minutes we had gone in six different directions – this is a Jewish trait which has stayed with us through the ages! They said to me “If six of us can’t walk in the same direction what’s going to happen next Sunday when we’ve got 5,000 people?!” I said “Very simple,” I said, “You see that bridge over the Serpentine at the end of the horizon? Get somebody to stand there with a big megaphone and say ‘Food this way’.”

Friends if we can look hard enough towards the future we may be just be able to overcome the injuries of the past.

Thank you very much indeed.

The Anglican Response

It seems that the Church of England is to decide that any provision to be made to comfort the opponents of lady (& women) bishops will be up to the same bishops themselves. There will be no statutory protection.

See here.

Enough

I think that more than enough has now been said on the subject of the splendid Requiem celebration at St Mary Magdalen's, so I won't be posting any more comments.

Don't mess with me!

Now that's an Abbess! Abbess Benedicta von Spiegel zu Peckelsheim (1874-1950) of Eichstätt Abbey.

On Liturgy and Communion

I have been away for a couple of days, unable to post my own comments but only those of readers (from my iPhone). Consequently, please excuse the bittiness of what follows, written during my absence.

An occasional commentator on this blog, a bishop who calls himself The Cardinal, made some critical observations of the Requiem Mass at St Mary Magdalen’s which I posted about a few days ago. This, as might have been expected, elicited some sharp replies (some sharper, perhaps, than he deserved). He won’t, however, get a sharp reply from me (though I do disagree with him): there have been, after all, plenty of comments on this and other blogs equally (or more) critical of ceremonies that (I imagine) His Eminence might prefer to that Requiem Mass. This is all fair enough; if we mete out criticism, we must also be prepared to take it from The Cardinal and others courteous enough to engage with us—sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander— and, frankly, I’m delighted that now we are able to debate these things in the open. When I was in the seminary, any sympathy for solemn liturgy had to be dissembled; had it been known that I had attended an old rite Mass (even a legal one), there would have been serious trouble. Plus, I think that The Cardinal has been very gracious in some of his later comments, and I am grateful for that.

Unless we are able, as brethren of the Catholic Church, to speak frankly among ourselves about these things, have the proverbial free and frank exchange of views, then things are not going to move forward or even settle down. The near-complete repression of the traditional liturgy was not a good thing: Even were I of the opposite persuasion, I hope that I should have learnt enough from history and psychology that if you try to repress something, you only succeed in making it interesting to a new generation.

Since the Council of Trent, the Western Church has preferred to be pretty monolithic in her liturgy. At times, she has even tried unwisely to impose Roman customs on Eastern liturgies not just from a desire for uniformity and tidiness, but also because the Western customs were believed to be better (and in my opinion at least sometimes are—unleavened bread, for instance). We know that before Trent, even in the West, this uniformity was not the case; rites varied, often considerably, from diocese to diocese, though they mostly belonged to the Roman ritual family. The Tridentine desire for uniformity has persisted right up to our own day (one sad case: I remember reading that Pope Paul VI, when Archbishop of Milan, was responsible for a certain amount of Romanization of the Ambrosian Rite). The cry has been ‘there should be only one form of the Roman rite’. And since the introduction of the Novus Ordo, the cry has been just the same. I want to ask why?

Yes, yes, I know; one can go from Tokyo to Stavanger to Rio de Janeiro and experience the same thing. But can one? Perhaps the basic framework might be the same, but I suspect that a worshipper going from, say, Milwaukee, via the London Oratory, to Linz would wonder whether he were on the same planet, let alone celebrating the same rite. So, diversity exists, like it or not. But up until now, authority has decreed that the one form of diversity not to be permitted (or to be highly disapproved of) was the older form of the Missal, what we now call the Extraordinary Form. It was as if there had been a revolution, and all evidence that anything had ever been different should be destroyed, any sign of regret suppressed.

This was not healthy, and I do not wish to return to this state of affairs. Frankly, I welcome The Cardinal’s comments (though, as I said, I don’t agree with them) because we are having the debate we should have been having in the 1960s and 1970s (and maybe the 1950s), and this time it is not about repression (on either side), but about dialogue. I hope this dialogue will go on for a long time. Then we might get it right.

If it is to be fruitful, though, the dialogue must be conducted with charity and fairness. I can accept that others don’t like to worship in the forms that the Church has used for generations. I can even accept that people may express these views forthrightly. What I don’t like is when such people express unkindly the argument that would seem to amount to ‘I don’t find this style of liturgy helpful, so you hateful people should be forbidden access to it’. Not that The Cardinal was saying this, but others do, and perhaps he pressed buttons inadvertently.

Am I suggesting, then, that liturgy should simply be a free-for-all? Absolutely not, and I am prepared to admit here that where the lines should be drawn is not entirely clear.

The Sacred Liturgy is one of our most important expressions of communion, and this communion is diminished when the liturgy does not reflect it through space (making use of the rites which are being celebrated elsewhere in the world) and through time (making use of the rites that the Church has used through the ages). This tells us, among other things, who we are. A community that seeks to emphasise liturgical rupture, by departing substantially from the rites of the Church, is bringing about ecclesial rupture. The liturgy expresses primarily not how St Disibod’s Melonsquashville sees itself, but how we the Church see God together. Communion, again. The famous monstrance of Linz, the Pitta on a Pole, says ‘we are not like you others; we are not like our forbears; this is how we do it’.

I can see an argument for the Linz thing: there might be a connection of thought to the serpent on the pole in the desert, the Type of Christ crucified, that the wounded people might look on the Saviour and be healed—all very good and theological, but it does not connect. People need archetypes, as Jung taught us, symbols that speak to our deepest levels, and to rupture something so instinctive to the Catholic spirit as devotion to the Blessed Sacrament expressed in a particular way is to, well, rupture, in order to make a point.

The Linz idea is, of course, is a different, intellectual, process to another type of liturgical rupture that has little thought behind it, being being simply a shallow interpretation of the word ‘celebration’.

‘Celebration’ should refer to the liturgy’s ability to reflect and articulate the deepest yearnings and feelings of the individuals who participate. When we talk of ‘celebration’ in the context of a Requiem Mass, this should not be (though often is) a shallow jollity, articulating a joy and happiness that the mourners cannot possibly be feeling. Inane grins on the faces of priests and jokes cracked are no comfort to a widow burying her husband of forty years, making her pretend to be happy about it. Instead, the Church mourns with her, as our Lord wept for Lazarus, but the black is shot through with gold; we can begin to articulate the teaching on the resurrection to somebody whose grief we do not dismiss but honestly share.

The liturgy at its best seeks to engage people appropriately, articulating and transforming their present needs and feelings and turning them into prayer. And the ultimate need that the liturgy lays hold of and divinizes is the human need for union with God. Turning everything into a party is shallow and self-defeating. That is not what ‘celebration’ is about.

The late Christiane Brusselmans’ course for preparing children to receive first Holy Communion is a case in point. In many dioceses in this country (including this one) her course was the only one approved for parish preparation courses. Very few use it now, D.G.. This course made no attempt to even mention the Real Presence, let alone the Sacrifice of the Mass. All that mattered was being nice to one another (important, of course—well, it is) summed up in Holy Communion which is, basically, a party with Jesus. As long ago as 1982, a priest (my university chaplain now become an Episcopalian but at the time a great inspiration to me) said, thinking of a child receiving Communion, and looking at the Wafer in his hand: ‘A party? Some party!’

At a recent Solemn Mass here in the Extraordinary Form, for the sake of those unused to it, I described what they were going to experience as something that was not so much ‘celebration’, but ‘worship’. This was misreported somewhere else as a distinction between ‘liturgy’ and ‘worship’, which is not a distinction I would be happy to make. The former distinction, though, I am happy to stand by. I mean that the Ordinary Rites, which I celebrate daily, engage more with the congregation; the Extraordinary engage more with God.

Let the Church decide, in the decades to come, which will be preferred. Or make the best of both. There’s more here, but I need to think more first.

Let me finally thank The Cardinal for his perseverance in posting on this blog. His contributions have always been interesting, even when I don't agree! These are the ways we grow together.

Anglicanorum Cœtibus

Well, it's here, and I suppose (having held forth at length on this subject up until now) that I ought to write something on it, through really there is a lot of stuff already written around the web.

The thing that immediately struck me was that this time, the Vatican Information Service seemed to have got it right; the concerns voiced around the world, manifested in the speeches at Forward in Faith and on the blogosphere, seem to have been addressed. Maybe there is a model here for future similar initiatives: after careful initial research, announce a forthcoming document together with general outlines, and wait and see what ideas surface. Then one can address these in the final document. It might prevent a lot of pain.

The item likely to produce most dissatisfaction (in a document that has so much to please, however) concerns the celibacy requirement. Some wanted to maintain a priesthood that automatically had the right to marry—possibly even while in the clerical state. This last was probably never going to be a runner: the Church, East and West, has never permitted its clergy to marry (which is to say after having received Sacred Orders). But the Vatican might have permitted all future Ordinariate clergy to be married, as a matter of course.

I suspect that here it might be trying to avoid the rather unseemly situation that obtains in the East where a seminarian who has determined that celibacy is not for him is required, before ordination, to find a wife as quickly as possible. Were this transferred to the West, with its higher expectations of marriage, there might be a lot of unhappy relationships, not to say anullments due to lack of due discretion. Secondly, as many people have noted, the Vatican desires to safeguard the tradition of clerical celibacy in the Latin Church, of which the Ordinariate will be a part.

However, the Vatican has not closed the door on the ordination of married men. It says simply that it will be treated on a case-by-case basis. My guess is that the answer will be yes in almost every instance; the Holy See just wants to make it a little more difficult, in order to encourage what one might call a culture of celibacy among ordinands. I do not believe that the idea is to phase out a married priesthood altogether: as many have pointed out, this is one of the things considered to be 'patrimony' by many Anglo-Cathlolics.

A concession that many will have been pleased to see is the clear permission to celebrate using the Roman rites. This may be less important in the US, where there is a puzzling attachment to the Book of Common Prayer, but here in the UK, the Roman Rite is used by almost all Anglo-Catholics, and if not the Roman Rite, then the official liturgical book, Common Worship, with all the adaptions most resembling the Roman Rite selected. I do hope that they will think long and hard before adopting the existing US Anglican-Catholic liturgy—it's a strange beast, shuttling uncannily between archaic and modern vernacular.

I was interested to see that the Ordinariate has been conceded its own tribunal(s). How they will make this work we will see. I cannot imagine that this can be set up overnight; they are going to need Roman-trained canon lawyers, for a start, and that can't be done overnight, unless they can borrow some. They are also going to need their own supplement to the Code of Canon Law, which, also, cannot be done quickly.

Another interesting point is the identity of the Ordinariate's line manager: the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. One might have expected the Congregation for Clergy, or for Eastern Churches (with a change of name, perhaps; the Congregation for Non-Roman Churches or something like that), or Propaganda Fide (who oversee dioceses in missionary territories), or even the Secretariat of State or Christian Unity. Why the CDF? Are they going to be keeping an eagle eye on priests' sermons, watching for any hint of neo-Nestorianism or semi-Pelagianism? This after all, was the demon congregation that attracted such opprobrium in the 1980s for its rejection of ARCIC.

One must remember, of course, that in recent years the CDF has attracted several odd jobs to itself; Ecclesia Dei, for one—and the situation of this body is not unlike that of the possible ordinariate. Consider the S. John Vianney administration in Brazil; it has its own clergy, its own rite, and its own bishop existing in parallel to the 'normal' diocese. Now Ecclesia Dei has been subsumed entirely into the CDF (perhaps because it used to occupy rooms there and everyone simply got to know each other), it is maybe felt that the experience might be useful with the new Anglican Ordinariate.

The new Ordinaries are not going to be mere Confirmation dispensers, either. Selected from among the Anglican clergy themselves, (is this initially wise? I don't dispute the terna selection by the clergy themselves, though) their authority will be very like that of a territorial bishop, and though they will have a seat on Episcopal Conference, they will not be subject to individual bishops.

I noted that former Catholic priests will not be allowed to exercise ministry in the Ordinariate. That will be sad for Archbishop John Hepworth, who, no doubt expecting this, has acted with considerable self-abnegation in conducting these negotiations. He can be comforted by the provision that former bishops, even if not consecrated Catholic bishops, may continue to wear the gear. So, may we expect him to sit in the pews with his Mrs, in mitre, cope &c?

I don't think that the seminaries business has quite been worked out. It seems to be saying that the Ordinariate seminarians should be trained alongside 'Roman' seminarians, but also have their own house of studies for the rest of the stuff. Sounds complicated.

I think in the end that it will take a long time to settle down, and a certain amount of chaos is going to have to be tolerated in the meantime. Possibly it will be only in another generation that the situation will be easy for all concerned. But God is very patient.

Requiem at St Mary Magdalen's

This is a clip from the very beautiful Mass of Requiem on All Souls' Day at St Mary Magdalen's Church, Brighton. Do congratulate Fr Ray. I think Bishop Hilarion would understand this liturgy.

Liturgy and Ecumenism

On September 18th, the 43-year-old Archbishop Hilarion Alfeyev, of the Russian Orthodox Church, met with Pope Benedict at Castel Gandolfo. He is the delegate of Patriarch Kirill of Moscow in his relations with the Catholic Church: as it were, his 'foreign minister'. This is what he had to say about the liturgy:

As a boy of 15, I first entered the sanctuary of the Lord, the Holy of Holies of the Orthodox Church, but it was only after my entrance into the altar that the theourgia, the mystery and 'feast of faith' began, which continues to this very day. After my ordination, I saw my destiny and main calling in serving the Divine Liturgy. Indeed, everything else, such as sermons, pastoral care and theological scholarship, were centred around the main focal point of my life — the liturgy. 

Orthodox divine services are a priceless treasure that we must carefully guard. I have had the opportunity to be present at both Protestant and Catholic services, which were, with rare exceptions, quite disappointing. Since the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council, services have become little different from Protestant ones.

Quoted in Lead Story, Inside the Vatican Oct.09

My guess that Archbishop Hilarion and Pope Benedict understood each other very well.

The 'Traditional Reservoir' and the French bishops

This is an article from the French Paix Liturgique, today's issue (my rough-and-ready translation).

The French bishops met in Lourdes last week under considerable psychological pressure. Even though it was not explicitly on the agenda, they were thinking of only one thing—and which the media constantly kept in the forefront of their minds—that the life of French dioceses is mortally sick from the lack of priests.

In La Croix of 5th November, the President of the Episcopal Conference, Archbishop Vingt-Trois, lost his legendary self-mastery and attacked (not by name, but the inference was obvious) his colleague, Bishop Dominique Rey of Fréjus-Toulon. ‘One might have a bishop who believes in the New Communities: he rings the bell and calls six new communities into his diocese, and thinks that everything will now be fine! Well, it might be fine so long as he is there, but what about afterwards?’ He is quite obviously talking about the pastoral strategy of Bishop Rey; in particular the welcome accorded to these communities. But he passes over in silence his principal reproach that he bears to his colleague; his generous welcome to those priests who celebrate according to the Extraordinary Form, or according to both forms: in short, his application of the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum. Because, to the Episcopal Conference, the subject remains strictly taboo.

Asphyxia on its way

1. The number of French diocesan priests working in France is fewer than 9000. For a number of dioceses, (Digne, 25 priests, Nevers, 38, Auch, Saint-Claude, Gap, Digne, Viviers, Verdun, Pamiers, Langres, etc) in ten years time the number of priests in active ministry will be ten at the most. In Bishop Gueneley’s diocese of Langres, the most liberal of French dioceses, one frequently finds one sole priest for 60 churches.

2. The number of seminarians has now fallen below the mark of 750 (740 in 2008, and this number includes a good hundred seminarians from non-diocesan communities). Pamiers, Belfort, Agen, Perpignan, &c, have no seminarians.

3. The number of ordinations remains fewer than 100 (90 in 2009—Paris, which is one of the best situated, had 10, 2 for the Emmanuel Community; 7 are predicted for 2010, and 4 for 2011)

4. 120 vocations have been declared for the class beginning in 2009.

The conclusion is dramatic: a third of French dioceses will cease to exist but will have to regroup within the coming 15 years.

Yet the majority of bishops, above all Archbishop Vingt-Trois, do not despair. Despite everything, the Church remains visible; she remains alive despite appearences. Archbishop Vingt-Trois has given a marvellous example of ‘visibility’ which was heard on Radio Notre-Dame (interview of 5th November): in a parish without a priest, the laity got themselves together to say the Rosary in a village hall: there they also had the idea of cleaning the church to recite the rosary in; so, nothing is lost; this church will live again…

A useful ‘reservoir’

The use of the ‘traditionalist reservoir’ won’t sort out every problem of the French dioceses like magic, but it might breathe some life into them, and above all, it will change the ideological tone. However it is just because of that, that for the Episcopal Conference, the subject remains rigorously taboo. For now.

Because the traditionalist world (not including the Religious) is becoming more and more difficult to ignore.

1. 3% of working priests are traditionalists (officially traditionalists, that is, not even mentioning the diocesan priests who observe the same liturgical practice). There are 260 priests equivalent to diocesan priests (140 in the SSPX and allied communities, around 120 priests in the communities under Ecclesia Dei).

2. More than 14% of ordinations are for the Extraordinary Form. (Paix Liturgique, 183, 22.06.2009): in 2009, 15 French priests were ordained for the Extraordinary Form (of whom 6 were for the SSPX).

3. Almost 20% of seminarians are destined for the Extraordinary Form (there are 160 of them, of whom about 40 were for the SSPX in 2008-9): op cit. 5.04.09. If this crossover continues as in past years, then in two years or more, a quarter of seminarians will be destined for the Extraordinary Form. Everybody knows that if the traditional priests had the assurance of a ‘normal’ apostolate in the dioceses, the number of these seminarians would be even greater.

4, Finally, 25% of vocations are inclined towards the traditional form (op cit 12.10.09). At the beginning of the academic year, September 2009, there were 41 entries (of whom 17 for the SSPX) into a traditionalist seminary.

However, the ‘Extraordinary’ clergy serve 400 Mass Centres in France, of which 184 are served by the SSPX and their allies. One should not forget in this regard that according to an important CSA poll, September 2008, that a third of practising Catholics would willingly attend a traditional Mass if it were available in their parish. It is no exaggeration to say that if we add to the fully traditionalist vocations those vocations of traditional sensibility that are found in diocesan seminaries, that a third of priestly vocations, were it permitted to them, would regard themselves as directed to the Extraordinary Form, or to Bi-Formalism.

A third of the laity, and, eventually, a third of the priests. It would only seem reasonable, then, officially to give these priests a proper freedom—no longer in ghettos, but now in the hearts of the parishes—to celebrate Mass according to their preferences (which is how they speak of the sense of the faith). Is this not the spirit (and the letter) of the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum? And by this act, these priests would be able to give help by administering many other sacramental services, conduct missions, catechize…

But for the majority of the French bishops, this group of their flock, priests and faithful—who are willing, who demand nothing, but to be allowed to live and let live—simply do not exist, except as a thorn in their flesh. The dioceses are dying, but their ideology remains alive and kicking.

1. One remembers that the little diocese of Fréjus-Toulon has about 80 seminarians, destined for the Ordinary form, or the Extraordinary Form, or for both forms. The next biggest seminary (Paris, Issy-les-Moulinaux, for the Paris region) has at most 50.

2. These should have been the last to have flung mud against their confreres: there remains the scandalous fact that ‘Bishop Centène; we made him buckle. Bishop Aillet; we give him three years. Afterwards, we will see. Bishop Dominique Rey; his diocese will end up sinking.’. (Op cit. 02.11.09)

Many thanks to an anonymous translator who made a couple of corrections (see comments).

'Ten thousand difficulties do not make a doubt'

The Society of the Holy Cross, I understand, has long had at its heart the notion of union with Rome as being an essential part of Catholic Unity, and hence it is not surprising that we saw many signs of euphoria from its members when Pope Benedict heard the appeal of the TAC.

Now, however, it might be that the Holy Father has called the bluff of some. Now that the time is fast approaching when the fleshpots of Neasden (or wherever) must be abandoned for the partially unknown, then somehow, to some, lady bishops don't seem so bad after all. 'At least I can stay here till I retire, and then it doesn't matter' said one ABC resolution vicar not far from here to an (Anglican) acquaintance of mine. An attitude I find shockingly selfish.

A real issue, articulated by some, refers to the part of Anglo-Catholicism that treasures parts of its Protestant heritage also. Bishop Martyn Minns, an American flying bishop, supplied by conservative Africans, commented to the New York Times: 'I don't want to be a Roman Catholic—there was a Reformation, you remember.' The bishop of Fort Worth has said similar things, and I thought I detected a similar tone (though much more cautiously expressed) in the speech of Bishop Nazir-Ali at the Forward in Faith conference. Just how Catholic is Anglo-Catholicism?

To that there is no one answer. There are probably as many Anglo-Catholicisms as there are Anglo-Catholics. But a very real issue, as expressed by some, is the requirement (for those contemplating the new arrangement) to subscribe to Catholic doctrine as the TAC have done. This was immediately picked up by the press and pushed home.

Most Anglo-Catholics subscribe to most of Catholic doctrine, though to some it may be a little nuanced. What I mean is that there may be an enjoyment of the liturgical expression of, say, the Immaculate Conception of our Lady, or her Assumption, but if an actual profession of faith in these things as fact is required, then that may be another matter.

Am I alone in sensing an ancient Reformation issue here? I suspect that it is not Justification, or Scriptura Sola that is the most fundamental issue that divides Catholic and Protestant, but rather the method by which doctrine is made known to us.

Is it the Church that teaches, or must I make up my own mind, doctrine by doctrine, trusting the Holy Spirit to enlighten my reading of Scripture, even if I do add a healthy dose of tradition and reason too.

To a Catholic mind, doctrine comes from the Apostles; 'he who listens to you, listens to me…&c' and is not something that a priori derives from my intelligence or conscience (enlightened or otherwise). Thus a Catholic may question a doctrine in his or her mind without doubting for a minute the divine constitution of the Church that was founded to bring the teaching of Christ safely to the twenty-first century, and every century. 

The Italians grasp this very well: as I read amusingly the other day (I've forgotten where), an Italian man describes himself as 'Cattolicissimo' because his wife never misses Mass on Christmas Day. Italians have a lordly disregard for the moral law, but never question either it, or the Church's right, even duty, to teach it. Now I am not suggesting that this is a good state of affairs, simply that it is Catholic. The principle is always there, to be dusted off by the devout: the pilot light is more than lit; the stove is alight, simply turned down low at the moment.

The devout Protestant agonizes over every doctrine; the non-devout Protestant doesn't bother at all and either descends into liberal Christianity or ceases to believe and becomes, in Evangelical terms, a non-Christian.

So, if the Reverend Septimus Harding comes to me and asks anxiously 'do I really have to subscribe to Papal Infallibility, the Immaculate Conception, the Assumption, the evils of artificial contraception and all that stuff?', I might want to say that this is probably the wrong place to start. If you can accept that our Lord did not come to write more books of the Bible but to found a Church that would bring his presence to every age, and which could genuinely speak, teach, bless and heal in his name (and that would, in the event, write more books of the Bible), in fact, be his Mystical Body, then that makes you a Catholic. The rest follows in due course. We may fail for now to understand the details, but we acknowledge the Church's divine right to teach, and that is the essential sine qua non.

Perhaps, as a postscript, one ought to observe that liturgical observations of some of these dogmas is the only form of catechesis on the subject that many Anglo-Catholics have received, even clergy. No doubt some theological colleges teach the Marian dogmas (St Stephen's House, Mirfield), and a little Catholic moral theology, but there must be many clergy (such as those trained by correspondence course) who have never been given the grounding to understand the basis of these dogmas, and suspect that they are supposed to believe in our Lady being assumed into heaven like a sky-rocket with hordes of angels holding her up and steering her past the Ryan Air planes. Many will, of course, have continued to read and study, but many others will never have found the time, their grasp of the doctrine remaining sketchy. On what basis, then, can they be expected to make a doctrine-by-doctrine examination of the faith? This would, in any event, I think, be the wrong way to approach the Catholic faith. As I have suggested.

Confiteor or not-Confiteor?

In the past, I have been involved in some disagreements over the traditional rites, largely for my careful adherence to the 1962 Use, to which some take exception. My adherence is often misunderstood as a principled upholding of the particular changes that had taken place to the rite by that date—people have said that they cannot understand my interest in the Sarum Use, while I insist on the 1962 Use in Roman Masses.

The blogger who appears in many places as 'Rubricarius' has a very good site raising awareness of the modifications of the rite prior to the Council, and he might be surprised to read that broadly I agree with him. I don't happen to think that the Holy Week services as reformed in the 1950s are better than the services that were celebrated before. I'm not sure, really, that Pius X did us a service in his reorganization of the Breviary (though I'm grateful not to have to say 18 psalms at Sunday Matins).

The point is that every age has tinkered to some extent: I remember seeing a Roman Missal of 1478, and there were quite substantial differences to that of 1570—not of the Ordinary, but things like Prefaces and Sequences. 

Where is the golden age that we can return to? Professor Laszlo Dobszay asserts persuasively that the real Roman rite is not to be found in the Tridentine Missal, which is actually a cut-down Curial version of it, but in an analysis of all the other Roman family Uses (Sarum, Paris, Freising, Premonstratensian, Dominican &c &c) which preserve the authentic Roman tradition far better.

The difficulty is that everyone would have their favourite Use and period once they come to rummage around in liturgical history. There is no one obvious Use that people can agree on. 

Except, hang on, didn't somebody say that the Church likes us to use 1962? Well, my personal wish-list would include things like the older forms of Holy Week, but for now, until things stabilize and, the traditional rites are happily bedded in once more as part of the normal worship of the Church, when we (the Church, I mean) can look at this again and see what needs amending or improving, well I will use 1962 for the sake of Unity, and wish that others would do likewise. I make no criticism of those who disagree with me; I just wish we were more united.

One law for all?

You might care to look at this post on Fr Tim's blog. It concerns the unequal treatment given to people who abuse children. 

I find it particularly obnoxious that the New York Jewish community have been given legal leave to sort child abuse cases out quietly themselves without involving the legal system at all. Why the hell should they? These were the people who first screamed loudest accusations against Catholics involved in this vile practice and in the New York Times demanded public disgrace again and again, and ensured it by their publicity.

Clarification:

I'm grateful to a reader for drawing my attention to the original article, which does not quite articulate what I had understood from Fr Tim's reference. No doubt I had misunderstood Fr Tim. It seems that rabbinical courts had been routinely settling abuse cases themselves, and often in an unsatisfactory way, this being winked at by some judiciaries, but that now some appellants have approached civil courts for the justice that they could not obtain from the rabbinical courts. The original article is here, and it is from the New York Times itself (this, too, is encouraging). This is a lesson to me to follow up all links carefully! Apologies to all concerned: it seems more honest not to remove my original post, but to post this correction.

More here

and here. 

Bean Dubh an Ghleanna

I discovered this last night. I think that Bean Dubh an Ghleanna (Dark Woman of the Valley) is quite my favourite melody. I am familiar with it played on the Uillean pipes, but have never before heard it sung. This little video touches me deeply on so many levels: the only item missing is a picture of the Sacred Heart with a flickering electric lamp in front of it. No doubt there was one behind the camera. It is so deeply familiar—this says 'home' to me (and produced tears) when first I heard it last night.

I know that this will simply puzzle some of you. But, dear God, it is so beautiful. And beauty, I suppose, is in the eye of the beholder.

Baptism, baptizers and Baptists

I have been thinking recently upon Baptism. I love baptizing; it is one of the most unalloyedly joyful sacraments (except when the catechumen is in the terrible twos; too young to know that he or she doesn't want to be baptized, but plenty old enough to know that he doesn't want his hair wet).

I saw a baptism on Shoreham Beach the other day; a group of black people in nighties were in the sea. When I noticed what they were about, I stopped my walk and remained on the beach out of respect for the Sacrament until it was over and the figures emerged from the waves, shivering in the sharp wind. I gave a surreptitious blessing and went on my way.

Here in Shoreham there is a sort of blow-up pool that circulates among the free churches; I think it belongs to the Baptists. The Baptists hold that for validity, baptism has to be by full immersion, being let down backwards, the formula uttered being either that of the Trinitarian invocation or some other symbol of the faith of the candidate. Here's one account:

Baptists insist upon baptism by full immersion, the mode Baptists believe Jesus received when he was baptized by John the Baptist. The candidate is lowered in water backwards while the baptizer (a pastor or any baptized believer under the authority of the local Baptist church) invokes the Trinitarian phrase found in Matthew 28:19 or other words concerning a profession of faith. Baptism by immersion is a representation of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus.

For purposes of accepting transfer of membership from other churches, Baptist churches only recognize baptism by full immersion as being valid.^[3] Some Baptist churches will recognize "age of accountability" baptisms by immersion performed in other Christian churches of "like faith and order," while others only recognize baptisms performed in Baptist churches. Baptists are known for re-baptizing converts to their faith who were previously baptized as infants or small children. Because of this, the first Baptist congregations were dubbed "Anabaptists" which means re-baptizers.

from here.

There are several curious points here. What does validity mean in this context? If the ceremony cannot convey grace, or change the state of the person, then what means validity? Secondly, I'm not sure that I go along entirely with this total immersion theory. I know it's fashionable right now, and that the East does so, and presumably has done so for a long time. More in a minute. Third, the alternative invocation clearly would invalidate a baptism from our point of view. I had always thought that Baptist baptism was pretty watertight. As it were.

Back to total immersion. Is is really the ancient practice? Consider those ancient baptisteries that have been dug up in the East. They really aren't large enough for a person to lie fully prone, and especially not without bumping his head. The sole argument that total immersion is the only Biblical method comes from the baptism of our Lord, that he went into and came out of the water. (Mt 3:16).

Okay, I'm prepared to accept that certainly people went into and came out of the water, as out from a tomb. Ancient fonts have steps. But think of those ancient representations of our Lord's baptism, such as at Ravenna. In all cases he stands up to the waist in water, while John pours water over his head. In other words, the baptism is by affusion, not immersion. Just as we do, in fact, except that we don't make people stand up to the undies in water. My suspicion is that this is the ancient universal practice, given the small size of floor-fonts and the iconographic evidence. Is there any ancient evidence for full-immersion baptism, other than in presumption?

This Easter, God willing, we should have no fewer than nine baptisms, seven of them adult or teenaged. Do say a prayer for our wonderful catechumens.

By the way, should you wish to attempt a full-immersion baptism of a baby boy, be very aware that the shock of the cold baptism very often causes the child to urinate forcibly. I have known a couple of cases of this, causing embarrassment to some and amusement to others. I have never risked this.

Mr Angry of Purley

Yup, as I predicted, the air is blue on the letters page of The Tablet this week. There isn't a single letter in support of Pope Benedict's hand of friendship to Anglo-Catholics. The editorial is pretty unpleasant, too.

On the other hand, there is a very good letter by Fr Dermot Power concerning the debate between the African Archbishop and Anne Widdecombe on the one hand and Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens on the other. Fr Power (whose father came from the same town in Ireland as mine) draws pertinent attention to the Catholic Media Office. Why were Miss Widdecombe and his Excellency left as the only champions of the Church in such a high-profile debate? Apparently, no English bishop was willing to take up the gauntlet. Actually, I don't blame them; I'm no good in such a forum either, but surely the Media Office should have been on the ball, and could have found some able apologist, of ability and stature, to meet Hitchens and Fry on their own ground and match their own undoubted eloquence. Is that not their job?

Money in the Bank? 2

As somebody known for his traditional leanings, I have always been also ecumenically-minded. This has disconcerted people who like to put others into neat pigeon-holes, and who would like to find that I voted BNP (I don't) and had a whole raft of rebarbative opinions so that they could dislike me properly.

Having dinner with an Anglican clerical friend the other night—in fact one who is considering whether or not to accept Pope Benedict's Ordinariate proposal—our conversation ranged broadly over the recent happenings. 

It is clear that, for many, The Holy Father's idea represents the ending of all the ecumenical hopes: Rome ceases to dialogue with Anglicans, and simply reverts to You-come-in-ism, delighting in poaching converts at whatever price. The word 'poaching' has been used even in so-called 'quality' journalism.

The trouble is that, as far as mainstream Anglicanism is concerned, ARCIC is dead in the water. The achievement of ARCIC, while not perfect, did actually go a long way towards representing Anglicanism and Catholicism to each other, finding common ground and common expression. Anglo-Catholics in particular were encouraged to hope that this might be the beginnings of a model whereby they might find Anglicanism 'united with but not absorbed by' the larger Roman Catholic body.

What was not remembered (or perhaps it was convenient to forget) is that the Church of England regards itself as being both Catholic and Reformed, and that it has a substantial number of adherents who would describe themselves as Protestant and a larger body who would, in their own probable words, put people before dogmas, and whom we call Liberals—liberal-protestants, and liberal-catholics, depending on the flavour of the worship. To these, there was nothing sacred about ARCIC. Interesting, perhaps, (indeed there were Liberal and Protestant representatives on ARCIC), but not in any sense binding for the Church. Just a statement of where we were then. Now we've moved on. Time to dialogue again.

The trouble is that the Catholic Church is not a moving-on sort of institution. It has never regarded itself as floating around, blown by the spirit of the age, as have both Protestantism (except in its most traditional forms) and certainly Liberalism. So, the Anglo-Catholics, with one foot in the floating-off Anglican Communion, and the other on the Catholic bank, became increasingly distressed by the painful splits that began to result, and have been on the point of collapse into the water.

Now, in the nick of time, Pope Benedict has offered them an arm to grasp, with relatively few conditions attached. He has, in other words, again taken up the ARCIC idea, and though the mainstream Anglican Communion is no longer interested, he offers it to those who were hoping for so much from it, and who approached him in this spirit.

So, money in the bank, or dead in the water? Well, both; it depends on your perspective. There is a television programme (they tell me), in which someone called Anne Robinson is nasty to a group of people who, when they have saved up enough points, shout out 'Bank', which saves what has been achieved such that it can no longer be jeopardized by future speculation. A lot of good stuff has been achieved ecumenically. It would be a great shame if it were to be lost just because most of the Anglican Communion no longer thinks that way.

The idea that Pope Benedict's offer damages ecumenical relations only holds water if you presume that, in order to pursue dialogue with the Anglicans now, you must despise the group that they despise, which is to say, the dogmatic Anglo-Catholics. If that new sort of 'dialogue' is pursued, then the loss would be major. Not only would we have cast off a group with whom we have been in discussions for some forty years, and who share the overwhelming majority (if not the totality) of our beliefs (and what would that say about our own faith?) for the sake of some external observances and different traditions, but we would also have to begin again on the new pitch with the substantially moved goalposts; something we would have had to do anyway.

What Pope Benedict and the Anglo-Catholics have done is shout 'Bank!' Before further damage is done, the achievements of ARCIC have been banked. Now dialogue with the more unified Anglican Communion can proceed (or start again from the beginning)—and one may presume that this dialogue will be in time more fruitful, as we will be talking to a group whose views will be more homogenous than heretofore—though, being liberal-Protestant, the dialogue is less likely to be fruitful in our lifetimes. Who knows, in a hundred years or so? But the dialogue must be pursued.

In the meantime, just look where we have got to! The Bulgarian, Russian and Romanian Orthodox are all now actually interested in ecumenical dialogue, not just being grumpily reactive. That's progress. In the West, there is a genuine realignment, with the Protestant Communions dissolving and resolving into a broad liberal consensus. The Catholic end is coalescing, too, with Anglo-Catholics and Lefebvrists in sensible talks to pursue full visible oneness.

This is ecumenical progress. And it is largely thanks to the Pope of Christian Unity who has pursued this goal, as Benedict and as Cardinal Ratzinger, for at least thirty years. Seen in this light, his much-resented rejection of parts of ARCIC, too, can be seen as money in the bank; a real commitment to making sure that the faith expressed in those documents really did provide a solid foundation for unity. 

Such, no doubt, are the workings of Divine Providence.

Money in the Bank? 1

I was present last night in Worth Abbey at Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor's lecture, ARCIC: Money in the Bank or Dead in the Water? The Cardinal, his voice a little weaker than of yore, was in good form; as always, the talk, in classic Cormac mode, was enlivened by little stories—H.E. is a marvellous raconteur—and touched by the man's genuine warmth and charm which not even his enemies can deny. I have always been immensely fond of the Cardinal—he ordained me, and supported me at a time when not many others did.

Many had speculated that the talk would have had to have been entirely rewritten in light of the Holy Father's new initiative with regard to Anglo-Catholics, but, wisely, the Cardinal avoided this red herring (because that is what it would have been), and spoke simply about his own experience of the hopes of Christian Unity from the fifties to the nineties, of the view of Vatican II and the theological underpinning, and finally of what he called Spiritual Unity.

This is what he had to say about the Ordinariate:

 But for the Catholic Church, the Petrine Ministry is a gift which serves to preserve both unity and the freedom of the Church from one-sided ties to certain nations, cultures or ethnic groups.   This is why Pope John Paul II seized the initiative and issued an invitation to a patient fraternal dialogue with other Christians on this very issue in his document, Ut Unum Sint.

 It is in this context that we perhaps should understand the response of Pope Benedict XVI to a number of requests over the past few years to the Holy See from groups of Anglicans who wish to enter into full visible communion with the Roman Catholic Church and are willing to declare that they share a common Catholic faith and accept the Petrine ministry as willed by Christ for his Church.   As everybody knows, there are certain groups of Anglicans who for years have nurtured hopes of new ways of embracing unity with the Catholic Church.   The generous response of the Holy See has been to establish a canonical structure for what is called ‘Personal Ordinariates’ which will allow former Anglicans to enter full communion with the Catholic Church while preserving elements of distinctive Anglican spiritual patrimony.   There is much that has been written and spoken about this matter over the past week but I would just want to emphasise that this response of Pope Benedict is no reflection or comment on the Anglican Communion as a whole or of our ongoing ecumenical relationship with them.   Indeed, I think it true to say that this was one of the reasons why this particular provision for Anglicans who wished to enter into full communion in 1993-94 was not implemented.  At that time, Cardinal Hume, Bishop Alan Clark of East Anglia, the then Auxiliary Bishop of Westminster – now Archbishop Vincent Nichols – and myself were responsible for the on-going discussions with the leadership of a movement called, Forward in Faith, as also with the then Cardinal Ratzinger and his advisers in Rome.  It is true to say that some special provision for the Anglicans who wished to come into full communion with the Church, a provision such as the Personal Ordinariates, might have been very helpful at that time.  But after much discussion, it was finally decided that it would not be appropriate to take this initiative.  The reasons for this were two-fold.   The first is that in 1993-94 the we bishops were dealing solely with clergy of the Church of England, and any such response as is now given by the Holy See would naturally have had to be offered to the whole of the Provinces of the Anglican Communion.   It did not seem within our remit to engage in such a response.   The other reason, however, was even more important.   If the Holy See had offered such Personal Ordinariates then, and in particular here in England, it might well have been seen as an un-ecumenical approach by the Holy See, as if wanting to put out the net as far as one could.  Both Pope John Paul and the then Cardinal Ratzinger would have been against such a move as, indeed, were the four of us.  Matters have moved on since then and the repeated requests by many Anglicans, not only from England but from other Provinces of the Anglican Communion, have necessitated a new approach, which is why I think that the Personal Ordinariates offered by the Holy Father can be seen not in any way un-ecumenical but rather as a generous response to people who have been knocking at the door for a long time.

Like me, His Eminence doesn't (in my opinion) think well on his feet, and his response to the questions afterwards was less satisfactory. A young monk (presumably from Worth) pulled him up on a theological imprecision and in trying to explain, the Cardinal simply dug himself in deeper. Likewise, the first questioner, a non-Stipendiary Anglican priest, had expressed disquiet regarding the Church's questioning of the validity of his orders. That, too, could have been handled better—this question should have been anticipated. His Eminence did better when tacked on Pope Benedict's recent Ordinariate proposal. He refused to do anything but support the Holy Father, and resolutely rebutted the suggestion that this was intended to have a negative effect on Ecumenism. One questioner drew scattered applause from the audience when he opined that the Catholic Church should be learning from the Anglican on the subject of married clergy and women clergy. Again, Cormac supported the Church's line, saying that married clergy were a possibility; they were already in the Church, but that celibacy was going to remain the norm, and that the possibility of women priests was simply not to be thought of.

As for money in the bank, I have some thoughts of my own which I will deal with in the next post.

Calm down, dear!

That well-known theologian Richard Dawkins has weighed in with his opinions on the new Ordinariate. They are couched in his usual sweet and reasonable style. Here's a taster:

 No wonder that disgusting institution, the Roman Catholic Church, is dragging its flowing skirts in the dirt and touting for business like a common pimp: "Give me your homophobes, misogynists and pederasts. Send me your bigots yearning to be free of the shackles of humanity."

There's nothing like calm reasonable debate, is there? And this is nothing like calm, reasonable debate. 

Read the rest here, if you like.

A rant like that really would make me interested in quite what he is spitting and spluttering about. I remember somebody (a Protestant) in the 1980s suggesting that Ian Paisley was really an under-cover Jesuit and agent provocateur; he certainly did a lot of good for the cause of Catholicism by the sheer intemperance of his outbursts. It's nice that he, at least, seems to have taken Michael Winner's advice to 'calm down, dear!' But for the meantime, the more loony Dr Dawkins appears, the more reasonable our case appears.

I hesitate to draw the parallel with the riots accompanying Question Time last weekend, but I would not be surprised if the sheer intemperance of the protesters contributed to an increase of sympathy for the BNP speaker.

What I fear more is the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry. I used to like Stephen Fry; he is witty, erudite, fearsomely intelligent, personable and a marvellous professional communicator. But somehow when you press the religion button, he simply loses it, and turns all his considerable talents to the very thing he professes to hate; hatred. The debate that took place in London last week, with Hitchens and Fry, experienced and articulate speakers, against Ann Widdecombe and Archbishop Oneiyekan of Abuja in Nigeria (who he?) is a case in point. The motion was 'The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world'. Fry and Hitchens turned all their rhetoric against the motion and simply reduced the Archbishop and Miss Widdecombe to a quivering mess. The audience, composed, I gather, of the chattering classes, overwhelmingly voted out Catholicism 1876 votes to a mere 268. 

There is a lot one might say: all Fry and Hitchens had to say was 'condoms, misogyny, raping little boys', with all that legendary authority and articulacy, and the other side would be quite unable to reply with lists of the good works that the Church does throughout the world; it isn't sexy, it can't be listed in a handful of minutes. And when the audience is quite plainly hostile (the archbishop was even booed), you can hardly expect even articulate and confident controversialists to do well. Ann Widdecombe did her best, but it simply isn't her field. All Hitchens and Fry had to do was to play to the gallery. I think it was unworthy of them.

I hesitate to say this, but I also suspect the thing was something of a set-up.

I don't fear the Dawkins' of this world. But I do fear the Frys; somebody who can be all cuddly one minute, all sweet reason, with fans in the hundreds of thousands, suddenly spitting hate. As he said on one edition of his quiz programme, QI, when the subject of religion came up, 'shit it, shit it, shit it!' And this is the man who says of himself 'I think of myself as filled with love'.

Love for everyone, that is, except us.

Calm down, dear!

Good stuff here on Christopher Hitchens Watch.

Pius X in Lourdes

The Fraternity of St Pius X have been on pilgrimage this week in Lourdes.

On the money

It would seem that for the TAC the decision is simple: there is nothing to lose, and an awful lot to gain, by accepting the Holy Father's offer. I imagine, then, that most, if not all, provinces will do so, and even when provinces don't, individual congregations will do so. This is because there will be very little sacrifice involved except, I suppose, a certain autonomy. They already own their churches, halls and rectories, so for those who do accept the Pope's offer, it will pretty well be business as usual once the modus operandi for reception/ordination has been worked out.

With the Church of England, it is the other way round. They are accustomed to having others make decisions for them (Synod &c), and in a direction they don't like. Autonomy has had to be wrested from those who would not willingly grant it. But for the most part they don't own their property and, as I have remarked before, the Church Commissioners are unlikely to feel in a generous mood. But perhaps I am being unduly cynical. Having listened to the Sunday Programme yesterday, I was struck how the three interviewed parties; an Evangelical bishop, a woman priest and academic and a bishop likely to accept the offer, all substantially agreed. The Evangelical and the lady were surprisingly warm about the scheme. And why wouldn't they be? Their jobs have just become a lot easier; there will now be only negligible opposition to their projects. This might dispose them to be in a generous mood and allow the secession of church buildings in places where there is a superabundance of them (as in Brighton, for instance). And, as I mentioned before, maybe a redundant church or two may be pressed into service.

The trouble is that, as I read on another blog (perhaps it was OneTimothyFour), lay Anglicans are disposed to love their bricks more than their bishops. I can envisage a situation whereby, if property transfer is not agreed, a large number of clergy may swim the Tiber, bringing their English Hymnals, their volumes of Pusey and the odd buckled shoe, but leaving their congregations behind, distressed at the choice they have had to make, but in the end prepared to put up with Bishop Susan and Father Margaret rather than leave St Disibod-by-the-Gasometer.

For some churches, I imagine this will not apply. I don't think all churches are owned by the Church Commissioners, or the Crown, or whoever. The shrine at Walsingham springs to mind (wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to worship there!) and maybe St Bartholomew's, Brighton (which made some very tentative enquiries Romeward in the early nineties). No doubt there are others. But if there really are going to be over a thousand clergy taking up the Pope's offer, then these churches are going to be like olden days, with a dozen curates each, or possibly a hundred. That won't do.

I don't imagine, either, that existing RC dioceses, many already strapped for cash, are going to be able to take on the burden of priests and families without there being some benefit to the diocese. It is possible that in England there may need to be some compromise worked out whereby priests are loaned by the Ordinariate to the dioceses to work in Roman Rite Catholic parishes, which then become liable for their support. These priests can offer Mass according to the Anglican form as and when needed or wished, maybe initially even in their Roman Rite parishes. Over time, congregations will gather, no doubt, and it should eventually become possible to find premises and become self-supporting, then being entirely under the supervision of the Ordinariate.

This loaning of priests from one jurisdiction to another (called fidei donum) is quite common in the Catholic Church, though I have not encountered it much in this country under that name. For some years this diocese sent priests to Chulucanas in Peru, and Portsmouth sent priests to Bamenda in Africa. Priests loaned to English dioceses would remain canonically part of the Ordinariate, and would return to work for it as soon as an opening became available.

More thoughts on the new Ordinariate for Anglicans

Well, we're a few days into the new situation now, and there have been a number of positive receptions, such as that expressed this morning in the last section of the Sunday Programme (surprisingly, I might add) and some negative ones, such as this rather unpleasant one. 'Backwards in Faith' from the Guardian.

For myself, I've taken the opportunity to say a few words at all Masses this weekend to reassure people (whose views have been formed by some of the more irresponsible and ignorant media) that Pope Benedict has not actually poached the most unpleasant people from the CofE simply to reinforce his campaign to repress women, gays and decent human beings. Having listened to several of the speeches at the Forward in Faith conference yesterday, I was impressed that the overriding issue seemed to be the feeling that the ARCIC discussions should be allowed to be brought to fulfillment, at least with a section of the CofE, and that the Anglicans should be 'united but not absorbed' (or some similar phrase). That seems very reasonable. Since the Church has long lived with a multiplicity of customs, liturgies and histories in the East, it seems not unreasonable to allow the same to happen in the West when there is a good case for it. If the faith is the same, then there is no reason not to admit to Communion, allowing a generous difference when it comes to externals.

Looking around the blogs, I see that an abiding concern is whether the term 'Anglican' can be retained. It seems to have a serious resonance for many. I have a friend who is a Rumanian Catholic priest, which is to say, he follows the Eastern Rite. He has clearly described himself as an Orthodox Christian who is in communion with Peter. I think what he means is that all that is proper to the tradition of Rumanian Christianity he takes to himself, but also expresses it as a member of the Universal Church. In this sense, I can see no reason why a member of a future Ordinariate should not describe themselves as 'An Anglican who is in communion with Peter', as long as the description of 'Anglican' should not be taken as suggesting subscription to the 'historic formulas of the Church of England' including, of course, the 39 articles, nor communion with Canterbury, but rather, bringing with them, and indeed being prepared to share with co-religionists, the riches of that tradition that enlighten and deepen the faith we have in common. In fact, bringing with them the riches of the Ecclesia Anglicana that have existed for hundreds of years before the Reformation, and having gathered some more interesting stuff (Hooker, Lawes, and all that) along the way. I personally prefer the term 'Anglo Catholic', now properly understood as being parallel to Greek Catholic, Ruthenian Catholic, Armenian Catholic and the rest.

In the speeches at the Forward in Faith conference, there seemed to be a little uncertainty as to the nature of an Ordinariate. My understanding is that an ordinary is an ordinary; which is to say, the true ecclesiastical superior of a group of priests and their associated laity. The suggestion from the Vatican that the ordinary might be a priest rather than a bishop seemed to me not a restriction on the possible new Church, but rather the reverse. It meant that the Vatican was perfectly prepared to countenance that the chosen leader might be a married priest, if this was deemed desirable by the new Anglo-Catholics, though it was certainly prepared to provide a bishop, as long as the candidate were celibate. A parallel, though not an exact one, has been drawn with military ordinariates. In the Catholic Church, these function almost exactly as non-territorial dioceses; in some cases (Italy, for example) they train their own candidates for ordination who work and live exactly as in a diocese; in other military ordinariates, (such as the British), priests are supplied from dioceses, though while in the Ordinariate, they work with the Bishop of the Forces as their Ordinary. It would seem that Rome intends that Anglicans in Union with Peter should remain as a permanent body with their own ordinary, which is to say an ordinariate on the Italian model. The only difference from a 'normal' diocese is that this authority will be non-territorial; in other words, the bishop or prelate would have full authority over his priests and parishes under the Pope, and certainly much greater authority than the present flying bishops have over resolution A, B & C parishes. Bishop John Hind's worries, (as expressed yesterday) then, I think are groundless, that the new body would lack proper ecclesiality; there will be a bishop (or another prelate) working together with his priests for the salvation of the people entrusted to them. That is just what the Holy Father intends. That's Bishop Hind in the picture.

The speech by Bishop Nazir-Ali (though far from hostile) was more cautious than some of the others, and he expressed a concern that candidates for priesthood in the new arrangement would have to be trained in regular Roman Catholic seminaries with some optional extra classes in Anglican Catholicism. This is not what I understood to be being offered; providing numbers warrant it, there should be no reason why particular seminaries to train clergy for the Anglo-Catholic Ordinariate should not be set up. However, it would be my earnest wish that the training offered would be considerably better (and longer!) than that currently offered by the CofE. It ought in no way to be possible for a man to be ordained after two years' correspondence course in Openness, Wholeness, Counselling, and Aromatherapy. I exaggerate, of course, but only a little.

Another (quite understandable) anxiety concerns Apostolicæ Curæ and the decreed invalidity of orders. I have recently wondered whether there might not be another solution to this which does not yet seem to have been considered. In the case of marriage (like Orders, a sacrament for which the Lord has not himself prescribed matter and form), validity can be provided (and usually is) by repeating the ceremony, observing due form ('Convalidation'), but, when needs require it, it can be put right, in certain cases, by the process known as 'sanatio in radice'; a decree that the Church now supplies her consent to the original ceremony, thus rendering it valid. 

The letter of Archbishop Benson, then of Canterbury, Sæpius Officio, (quoted yesterday by the Bishop of Chichester) began the Anglican response to Apostolicæ Curæ, and since then there have also been many other efforts to correct the deficits noted by that document (reinjection of Apostolic Succession from the Old Catholics &c). I have long argued (following the eminent Doctor Freddy Broomfield, RIP) that what made Anglican Orders invalid was not the individual specific lacks, which may or may not have been remedied, but the refusal of acknowledgement of validity by the Universal Church. Now, if the Church can retrospectively grant validity to a marriage (all other elements for validity being present), can she not do so for ordination? I am not asserting the possibility for this, merely asking the question. It might prove a great comfort to many who felt that they would have to deny their past ministry. It's a fudge, of course, but Anglicans like fudge.

Good stuff here on Fr Ray's blog

and here, on One Timothy Four.

Consoling Thoughts

On reading this morning's Martyrology, I read that today is the feast day of one St Severinus Boethius, described as a martyr.

Papia in Liguria, commemoratio sancti Severini Boetii, martyris, qui, scientia et ac scriptis præclarus, in carcere detentus tractatum scripsit de consolatione philosophiæ et Deo usque ad mortem a Theodorico rege inflictam cum integritate servivit.

So this is the author of The Consolation of Philosophy. I knew he had been imprisoned, and wrote the book in his cell, but I did not know that he was a saint, let alone a martyr!

Read more here.

The title of martyr seems to have been given him because Theodoric was an Arian: well, there are plenty of other saints in the calendar whose death was only dubiously martyrdom (Edith Stein, for instance: few doubt her virtue and erudition, but she died for her Jewishness, not her Christianity): in Boethius' case, no doubt, the title of saint followed naturally; if a martyr, therefore a saint.