Odi et amo

I must have been all of thirteen when I discovered the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church. Quite without any inkling of what it would lead to, I clambered up a steep flight of steps and into St Joseph's Cathedral and began what I can only describe as a kind of love-hate relationship which has lasted for the best part of half a century. My parents were horrified. "What is it that attracts you to those people?" my mother asked in some distress. When I enquired of my father why she should have reacted as she did, he pointed out that Roman Catholics were disloyal, clannish, bred like rabbits, and (worst of all) Irish.

But I didn't care. I appreciated St Joseph's very much. It was so much more alive and interesting than the Anglican cathedral in the Octagon where I sang in the choir. However, according to the prejudices of the time, it was essentially off-limits to a well-bred protestant boy like myself. I went to Otago Boys' High School after all, not to Christian Brothers, so in subsequent visits I had to turn the tops of my school socks down in the hope that my origins would remain undetected, and my treason unreported to family and friends.

Soon I was sneaking off on Saturday evenings to St Patrick's Basilica in South Dunedin for the Novena of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, followed by Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament celebrated in God's own native Latin, just the way it should be. It was there that I first sang such classics of the hymn-writer's art as Mary from thy Sacred Image with those eyes so sadly sweet, Mother of Perpetual Succour see us kneeling at thy feet. Who wouldn't warm to that?

I was determined to join up. The Roman Catholic Church seemed to be truly religious. People were always in St Joseph's praying, morn, noon and night. All sorts of people: male and female, old and young, rich and poor, black and brown, yellow and pink - you name it, they were there - and they loved it. They were proud to belong to The One True Church. Everything about it, the saints, the rosary, the Redemptorists, the Mater Hospital, the ancient and beautiful liturgy and much more, all testified to the fact that this was something very special which had come down from a glorious and sacred past, and in which many of the ordinary citizens of twentieth century New Zealand could feel right at home.

Then came little Paul VI, a nice, well-meaning little man who was unfortunate enough to succeed John XXIII. The latter was a man both great and good, who valued the sacred past while being able to relate to the present. Little Paul VI could do neither - at least not with any great comprehension of what was involved. He was a would-be egghead [see the Satan's Cuckoo post] who allowed himself to be led astray by liturgical eggheads such as Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, the Robespierre of modern Roman Catholicism, who (with his mates) gutted the Roman Rite and consequently decimated the Latin Church from Cork to Christchurch.

I was not pleased. Like millions of others, I liked the old Roman Rite very much. I greatly valued its timeless quality, its serenity, its transcendence, and its remarkable beauty. Let us not forget that it was for the celebration of this liturgy that Westminster Abbey and the great cathedrals of Europe were built. For this liturgy Rubens, Titian, Raphael and Michelangelo (among many others) painted great masterpieces. For this Liturgy Palestrina, Byrd, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Stravinsky wrote some of their finest music. In its essentials, the Mass of the Tridentine Rite is the service which was known and loved by Benedict, Bede, Patrick, Hilda, Alfred the Great, Francis of Assisi, Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart, Thomas More, Teresa of Avila, Francis de Sales, Simone Weil, Maximilian Kolbe, Edith Stein and Thomas Merton. Not bad is it? But not good enough, it seems, for little Paul VI, who to all intents and purposes simply threw it away without so much as a by your leave, while at the same time maintaining (against all expectation and advice) the ban on birth control just because his predecessors had.

Of course, little Paul VI didn't leave his devoted (if diminishing) flock without a form of worship. No indeed: he thrust the Rite of the Ruined Remains down the unwilling throats of the faithful, whether they liked it or not. And by and large they most certainly didn't. Hence the increasingly empty pews from that day to this.

Little Paul VI's liturgical bolshevism gave me something of a shock. I was confirmed in my view that Christianity was not at all the same thing as mere ideology - even fashionable theological ideology. I saw the point of Archbishop William Temple's dictum Mankind can be saved by only one thing - worship. Likewise Oscar Wilde's remark We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars, seemed to be remarkably relevant. It appeared, however, that at the new Roman Supper of the Lord Stars are off, Luv.

A few years previously I had received a different kind of shock in St Joseph's Cathedral when I was idly thumbing through a missal which someone else had left behind. In its pages I found a little pamphlet about the Sabbatine Privilege, according to which, Our Blessed Lady will descend to purgatory on the Saturday following the death of a member of the Carmelite Order (or its Confraternity) and will personally liberate him from the flames and conduct him to heaven. I found some difficulty in believing this. Clearly it meant that if you were drowning in your bath, you would be well advised to do so on Friday night, and as you went down for the third and final time, you should make sure that the two little strings joining the front and back of your scapular were to found lying neatly on either side of your neck - just in case. An off-the-shoulder number might not do the trick.

Now of course, we don't believe that sort of thing anymore, do we? O but we did. Despite strenuous scholarly protests, various popes endorsed this splendid heresy, until finally even they started to back off, and reinterpret the matter in a rather more Sea of Faith sort of way. But I was still somewhat shaken to find that they had ever entertained such an idea at all, even just a little. So by the time I entered St Stephen's House in Oxford to train for the priesthood, I had already developed that peculiar kind of semi-detached and highly ambiguous relationship with the Holy Roman Church which has been such a feature of English Anglo-Catholicism ever since the late John Henry Newman and his deplorable friend Richard Hurrell Froude muddied the waters in the nineteenth century.

But more of that in the next post.