Neither here nor there

Allow me to come out of the closet. I am a member of Forward in Faith, an Anglican society the founding purpose of which was to ensure the continuance of the apostolic ministry of bishops, priests and deacons in the Anglican Communion. To this end, FiF has opposed the ordination of women to the priesthood and the episcopate. Now, as it happens, I am not at all sure that women can't or shouldn't be ordained priests and bishops, but I am sure that the convictions of those opposed to such an innovation must be respected and allowed for.

This means (at the very least) that it must be possible for such Anglicans to have - by absolute right - a male bishop consecrated in a direct line from the apostles by an unbroken succession of male bishops. This was solemnly promised by the General Synod of the Church of England some years ago, and thus, to my mind, the abrupt termination in that Church of the so-called Period of Reception in favour of the innovators has been both dishonest and unjust - and much, much too soon. Hence my decision to join those who are now probably just tilting at windmills - at least where Anglicanism in the western world is concerned. But lost causes often have a fine air of tragic inevitability about them.

However, as my copies of New Directions have arrived regularly from FiF headquarters in London, I have begun to suspect that the business of ensuring the apostolic succession against an unacceptable degree of uncertainty is perhaps a stalking horse for another set of aims as well. And so it has proved with the response of the leadership of FiF to Pope Benedict's generous offer of water-wings to those Anglo-Catholics who are now dipping their disaffected toes in the dangerous waters of the Tiber.

This response has been little short of ecstatic. From the Bishop of Fulham (the chairman) on down, editorialists, writers of articles and contributors to the letters column have been falling over themselves to express their gratitude to the Holy Father for his wonderful, gracious, timely, generous (etc.) invitation to bend their knees in the House of Rimmon. (I know, I know, that's just a little extreme, and on mature deliberation I may delete it. Or not.)

For some years now FiF has been straying into areas whose connections with the ordination (or otherwise) of women are not immediately apparent. This is particularly so where the little matter of homosexuality is concerned. Astonishingly enough, they claim they are not for it. Indeed, like the Holy Father himself they are determinedly, almost hysterically opposed to it. On the face of it, their vehemence is somewhat surprising. FiF is almost entirely Anglo-Catholic rather than evangelical. And Anglo-Catholicism - particularly Anglo-Papalism - is somewhat gay. In fact it is very gay indeed. I was trained at St Stephen's House in the mid 1970's and a curate at All Saints' Margaret Street in the early 1980's and I know whereof I speak. And I doubt if things have changed very much since then.

In order to displease almost everyone I have wilfully adopted views on this subject with which few others agree. I have thought that same-sex relationships can be pleasing to God if the intention is that they be lifelong and faithful. Like heterosexual unions, I believe they should be publicly formalised, and hope that one day this will be possible in Church. But although for gay people such a relationship would be the equivalent of marriage, I wouldn't rush to institutionalise such a conclusion just yet. And I would certainly not try to compel the consciences of the faithful by imposing on them priests (let alone bishops) who are in such relationships. And finally, I would not agree that even those in a totally committed relationship have the right to adopt children - but then I don't think anybody has such a right, gay or straight, although its one they can obviously be given.

(At a later date, I will give you a little tour of adelphopoiia, which I believe has a considerable bearing on these matters. It will be something for you to look forward to in an increasingly bleak and desperate time.)

In my years in England I had a good many discussions with gay Anglo-Papalists about homosexuality and found (all too often) that they would not attempt anything like a truly personal same-sex union simply because the Holy Father forbade it. As a consequence they were often quite remarkably (and very impersonally) promiscuous instead. I found it a bewildering combination, but I have learnt since that such is often the case in these matters. Perhaps the present moral crisis of Roman Catholic clergy and religious is of the same order. Be that as it may, I believe Anglo-Papalism to be essentially untruthful, and I'm sorry to say that the members of this faction seem to be calling the shots in the Catholic movement at the present time - at least in the Church of England. But if you accept the papal claims as they were set out in the Apostolic Constitution Pastor Aeternus, and if you consider the pages of The Catechism of the Catholic Church to contain the very truth of the Faith, then - in my opinion - it's time to recite the Creed of Pius IV (as amended) and put on those water-wings.

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.

Stepping Out

Further to my last post, you can see the Seises for yourself on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYEaeGjMp3A&feature=related. The music isn't up to much (there seems to be dearth of theorbos and an excess of little girls) but the feathered hats and the footwork make a quite remarkable sight before the High Altar of Seville Cathedral during High Mass. To get the full flavour you will have to go on to Part Two for the sound of the castanets (with long coloured ribbons) which the choirboys cum pirouettists hold in their hands. Perhaps we Anglicans could follow the example of the Spanish and introduce Morris Dancing into the Sacred Mysteries. It would probably be a lot more appropriate than the somewhat unliturgical St Vitus Dance which seems popular in a number of our Churches at the present time.

Backward, Christian Soldiers

In the last week or so I have been rereading one of my favourite books, A Stranger in Spain by H.V. Morton - he of the In Search of England/Scotland/Ireland/Wales et cetera books. I first came across the account of his Spanish travels (published in 1955) in the school library when I was about thirteen or fourteen. I was quite enchanted by it (and what normal teen-aged boy wouldn't be?) since it was full of wonderful descriptions of black-faced images of Our Blessed Lady wearing bejewelled crowns, and fascinating accounts of things such as the Mozarabic Mass or the dancing of the Seises (complete with castanets) before the altar of Seville Cathedral during high mass on the feast of Corpus Christi. As I say, what normal kiwi boy could resist such delights?

My enthusiasm knew no bounds. Quite soon I was sneaking copies of the Roman Missal and the Book of Common Prayer into the classroom to look at furtively while the masters droned on about such unimportant matters as geography and mathematics. Then one day a certain Mr Skelly (if I remember rightly) wanted to know what I was peering at under my desk. This invasion of my privacy was bad enough, but what followed was as unfortunate as it was extraordinary. When the other boys discovered what I had been looking at, they laughed, not at the teacher, as you might expect, but at me. From that moment on I was a stranger on this earth.

Truthfully however, my enthusiasm was as much to do with history as with religion. I have always been fascinated by the European past, largely because it has been so beautiful. I do not include (of course) the Black Death or the Holy Inquisition as examples of historical loveliness, indeed I am not talking about disasters, man-made or otherwise, at all. I am talking about (to use the most obvious examples I can think of) Chartres Cathedral, Dante's Divina Commedia, Handel's Messiah, Rembrandt's Return of the Prodigal Son, and so on ad infinitum. And note, please, that all of these have overtly (indeed essentially) Christian significance.

I loved it all. I remember the day when the music master (one Johannes Giesen) no doubt despairing of knocking an appreciation of sonata form into the heads of a class of resolute philistines, decided to show us a film about Florence under the Medici instead. Almost half a century later I can vividly remember my amazement as I saw the cathedral's belltower and Brunelleschi's dome for the first time. And when school was over for the day I rushed off to the public library to get hold of books on the subject. Illustrated books of course, nothing too taxing. And anyway, who cares what various learned aesthetes have to say about it all? Just look at the pictures, for heaven's sake, look at the pictures.

All this has great importance, not just for me, but for many others as well. We live in a society largely disenchanted with its past. Thus "old" music, "old" prayers, "old" buildings and so on, are often seen as obstacles to faith, rather than (as they have been for so many) the very opposite. Furthermore, our society likes to think of itself as egalitarian. No elitism for us. No organs when we could have guitars, no antiquated vestments when we could have smart and fashionable contemporary dress. And worst of all perhaps, no beautiful liturgical texts drenched in the sanctity of centuries when we could have mere committeespeak instead.

Perhaps in a democratic and egalitarian society we should be content with our much vaunted modernity, but I certainly hope not. Why does our inclusiveness and respect for the rights of the individual leave so many individuals feeling very excluded? Why do I get the impression that we have the liturgical equivalent of two legs good, four legs bad? In the Roman Church at the present time there is a movement sometimes called the Reform of the Reform. Perhaps we Anglicans could do with something similar.

Satan's Cuckoo

A few weeks ago we celebrated John Calvin's five hundredth birthday in Dunedin. When I say we, I really mean the participants at a conference held in his honour at Knox College. I wouldn't be seen dead celebrating him myself. On the occasions when I have visited my good friend the Master of Knox I have had to walk past a large picture of the birthday boy, and have always felt the same sort of outrage which I imagine I would feel if I visited the German Embassy and found a nice photograph of the late Fuehrer in a place of honour on its walls.

This is not quite as mad as it seems, when you consider that Calvin played Dr Goebbels to Our Hitler in Heaven, a deity of well-nigh infinite sadism, content to create billions of human beings whom he knew would require "irresistable grace" in order to be saved from an eternal Auschwitz - and then quite cheerfully denied it to them. And all for no better reason than his personal pleasure in exercising his sovereign will, utterly uninhibited by any such notions as compassion and mercy.

We are told that the Sage of Geneva has been traditionally misrepresented and that modern historiography has at last started to redress the balance, but still, as Alec Ryrie, the Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University says, "Calvin was an intensely arrogant and argumentative man, who could not abide to be crossed. He could be vicious, especially to his friends. Opponents, including those who rejected or disliked his vertiginous moral standards, were lambasted, driven into exile, or, on one notorious occasion, put to death."

How very Christlike. And this is the man who even today has an enthusiastic following of people who claim to be Christians, and even worse, claim that Calvin has provided the best account of the Christian religion since St Paul - or possibly his great mentor Augustine of Hippo, from who he derived much of his appalling doctrine of grace. Augustine, remember, said that the fact that God saves some people shows his mercy, while the fact that most people are lost shows his justice. And I seem to remember that a seventeeth-century Roman Archbishop of Tuam called Florence Conry wrote a whole book in defence of Augustine's belief that "the very unbaptised babes crawl about the floor of hell." (And just in case you are wondering, Florence was a boy baby himself and not a member of the Movement for the Ordination of Women.)

Eggheads all, and by eggheads I mean people for whom ideas are often more real than reality itself - to the exclusion of irrationalities like empathy and compassion. Witness the more unbending Pharisees' devotion to the Law, not to mention the works of such enthusiastic ideologues as Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot nearer our own time - all driven to murder millions for the sake of their pet theories. How Satan must have loved them (if love is quite the right term to use where the devil is concerned!). And how very pleased he must have been with John Calvin, who so cleverly turned the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ into the Heavenly Hitler, the Celestial Stalin, with eternal Bergen Belsens, Dachaus and Gulags all ready and waiting to torment the majority of his children beyond endurance just as soon as they throw off this mortal coil.

Clearly Calvin's God is actually Satan's Cuckoo.

Assumption assumptions

When I posted the last entry, I was not entirely sure that I was saying what I wanted to say as clearly as I wanted to say it. Then I received a comment which asked why I felt the assumption was stretching my capacity for belief too far when I was happy to affirm such things as the resurrection and the transfiguration, particularly as the assumption would be "one of the easier wonders" to perform. This resembles the defence of the Immaculate Conception made by Duns Scotus, the great mediaeval Franciscan philosopher and theologian, when he said: potuit, decuit, ergo fecit (God could do it, it was fitting that he did it, and therefore he did it). But did God agree with Duns Scotus, or was the latter assuming too much? (Pun intended, I fear.)

I believe that the Mother of God reigns in glory, that she appeared to such saints as Seraphim of Sarov, and that by the Holy Spirit (as St Silouan of tne Holy Mountain says) she sees us and hears our prayers. However, I also believe (with Lossky - humbly, I might say!) that the glories of Our Lady are part of the inner mystery of the Church, and not necessarily to be proclaimed from the rooftops. But I should also wish to affirm my belief (gratefully!) in the continuing experience of the Blessed Virgin as the Mother of the Church which has been integral to Catholic Christianity up to the present day.

In Caelum

Well did she? Did the Mother of God fly into the heavens, body and soul, like the shuttle from Cape Canaveral? Pope Pius the Twelfth said she did and proved it by saying so infallibly in 1950. The Eastern Orthodox on the other hand combine a certain mystical fuzziness about it with a liking for an apocryphal sixth-century farrago on the subject which begins as follows: 'As the all-holy glorious Mother of God and ever-virgin Mary, as was her wont, was going to the holy tomb of our Lord to burn incense, and bending her holy knees, she was importunate that Christ our God who had been born of her should return to her...and while she was praying, it came to pass that the heavens were opened, and the archangel Gabriel came down to her and said: "Hail, thou that didst bring forth Christ our God! Thy prayer having come through to the heavens to Him who was born of thee, has been accepted; and from this time, according to thy request, thou having left the world, shall go to the heavenly places to thy Son, into the true and everlasting life."' A little later in this account we learn that Our Lady asked for the presence of the holy apostles at her passing, and so they were borne on clouds by a whirlwind to witness her departure. Hence the ikons which show them getting a good view of the proceedings from somewhere in mid-air.

Well, scripture says something almost as fantastic about Elijah and perhaps Enoch as well, and I can't help feeling that if it's good enough for them, it's good enough for the Mother of God. But it does, I think, push my capacity for belief just a bit too far. And it makes me fairly indignant as well. Why does every detail have to be rewritten by the (fairly dim) light of human piety? And why does the lily have to be so thoroughly and comprehensively gilded? As the Russian Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky observed, 'The authors of the apocryphal writings often alluded imprudently to mysteries about which the Church had maintained a prudent silence...The Mother of God was never a theme of the public preaching of the apostles...While Christ was preached on the housetops in a catechesis addressed to the whole universe, the mystery of the Mother of God was revealed only to those within the Church.'

Even King James the First said that the Blessed Virgin was far above all God's creatures, and the assumption, whether literally true or not, is surely a celebration of that fact. To whatever glory human beings are destined (and that is surely to do with their sharing in the divine nature, as in 2 Peter) Our Lady is already there. St Gregory Palamas described her as the Boundary between the Created and the Uncreated, which seems all right to me. But to quote Lossky again, 'Let us therefore keep silence, and let us not try to dogmatize about the supreme glory of the Mother of God.'