Spiritual bouquet for LMS Chaplain, Fr Andrew Southwell

Fr Andrew Southwell has recently celebrated 30 years of the religious life, and is soon to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his ordination. The St Bede's community is organising a spiritual bouquet in thanksgiving and for his good estate, with which the Latin Mass Society and the St Catherine's Trust would like to associate themselves. Please let us know what Masses you have had said, rosaries, communions etc. so they can be included in the bouquet to be presented at the beginning of September.

Fr Southwell has worked tirelessly for the cause of Tradition for many years, for scarcely any material reward beyond a roof over his head. He was the Chaplain of the Traditional Catholic Family Alliance, an apostolate for families, and later of the St Catherine's Trust, which runs a Summer School for children and a Family Retreat. He has for many years been attached to the parish of St Bede's in Southwark diocese, where he has built up one of the largest and most active congregations attending the Traditional Mass. This congregation is the mainstay of both the Sodality of the Five Wounds (of which he is Chaplain) and the London branch of the Guild of St Clare. He is now also the National Chaplain of the Latin Mass Society and has been closely involved with recent priest-training conferences.

You can email your contribution to the LMS office: info@lms.org.uk


Fr Andrew Southwell, National Chaplain of the Latin Mass Society, centre, celebrating the LMS Annual General Meeting Mass in the St George's Cathedral, Southwark.

Mass at the Holy Name, Manchester

I have just returned from a trip to Manchester, where I attended the regular Sunday Low Mass (EF) in one of the great Catholic churches of England, the Holy Name.

Twenty years ago, after the Jesuits left it, the Holy Name was saved from secular uses, if not destruction, by Fr Ray Matus. Since then he has systematically restored the fabric of the building and built up a valuable apostolate. One of the things he has long had is a regular Sunday Traditional Mass, at 4pm.

The building is stunning. The site is almost square and the church is immensly wide. The vast roof is upheld by impossibly slender columns: Hanson, the architect, performed this feat by making the ceiling out of hollow ceramic tubes. There are a large number of side chapels and a long row of confessionals. At its peak there were a dozen priests serving the church.

Fr Matus has developed the church in a number of ways. He has created a chapel dedicated to Bl J.H. Newman.

The church has one of the extremely rare first-class relics of Newman, a lock of hair, which is now housed in a reliquary bust made for the purpose.

He was given the almost complete skeleton of an early Roman martyr, and has into a space intended for such a purpose: it is St Benignus. A bust of the saint has been created scientifically on the basis of the dimensions of his skull: a fascinating glimpose of what a saint who died under Diocletian actually looked like.

Fr Matus himself said the Mass I attended.







There are more photographs of the church and of Mass here.

Smashing the TV

Since William Oddie's post on 'Catholics Unplug Your Televisions' (CUT) I've noticed a couple of other interesting articles on the subject of why so much programming is socially liberal, and so inimical to the Faith.

Tim Stanley, an English academic specialising in American history, is actually in Hollywood to research a book about the film industry. He has a fascinating post about the culture of the place, which, he thinks, explains the liberal tenor of its output better than any conspiracy. He writes:

No, the problem that the conservative faces isn’t intellectual, it’s social. Conservatism tends to be raw and unfiltered. In conversation, it punctures the Zen equilibrium that sustains everyone in Los Angeles. The industry works by networks and anyone who can’t sustain a long conversation about the importance of raw carrots and natural fibers to the functioning of Yin and the flowing of Yang won’t fit in. One Right-wing writer told me that following 9/11, he found work dried up. There was plenty of interest in his output (he’s deservedly famous) but when it came to small talk before pitches, or the gossip at the writers’ in LA Farm, he was immediately frozen out. “People would open with, ‘Isn’t George Bush a moron?’ And I would say, ‘No, I voted for him.’ And I could feel I was losing their respect.”

True, this suggests that Hollywood has a leftward prejudice. But the real problem with what the writer said wasn’t the content but the act of disagreement itself. Hollywood conversations deal in hyperbolic affirmations covering for lies: “You’re amazing. That pitch was the best ever. You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met. Adam Sandler is the funniest man alive!” Disagreement and contradiction are acts of verbal rape.

I find this all too credible. It explains how typical Hollywood output is not just liberal, but self-affirming pap. Something pretty similar, I would wager, is going on at the BBC.

The seriousness of the problem should not be underestimated. The characterisation and plots of TV shows and films can consistently affirm liberal attitudes without the viewer even noticing. This is discussed in the other article which has come up recently, via CFNews, a book review in The Washington Times (see it here). The book is 'Prime Time Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV' by Ben Shapiro; it is reviewed by Jeffrey Kuhner. Kuhner writes, of this historical development of the problem:

One of the watershed programmes was All in the Family. The character of Archie Bunker symbolised the progressive caricature of Conservatives -- ignorant, racist and xenophobic. The show frequently denounced the Vietnam War and even celebrated draft dodgers as heroes. It also broke new ground in portraying the father figure, Archie, as a working-class bigot who was less enlightened than his anti-war, socially permissive son-in-law, Meathead (played by the odious leftist Rob Reiner).

'All in the Family' was first broadcast in 1971, and set the tone for the decades which followed. How often have you seen socially conservative or religious characters portrayed in a favourable light? Let me rephrase that: have you EVER seen such a character portrayed in a favourable light in a mainstream film or series? How often have you seen such characters ridiculed and outwitted? How often have such characters turned out to be hypocrites? If there is anything attractive about them, or a streak of honesty, how often have they been converted to a more relaxed, progressive, liberal approach to life? (Has the opposite ever happened?)

This is insidious and poisonous. There are intrinsic problems with TV as entertainment: the tendency of people simply to switch it on and watch whatever pops up, even if rather bored by it, for hours on end. What Shapiro is talking about, however, is a problem not intrinsic to the medium, but accidental: the fact that the people making so much of the programming are peddling a relentless liberal agenda. It makes it even more boring than it would be otherwise.

There are lots of good films, and from time to time there are good series on TV. All of them can be seen on DVD, for hire or for sale. Vast quantities of stuff is becoming available on YouTube and Gloria TV. It is becoming possible to access films and programmes by downloading them (legally, and temporarily) from the internet for a small fee. All in all, the telly is losing its indispensibility as a window onto popular culture. Popular culture is itself increasingly fragmented: it is no longer the case that 'everyone' is watching anything in particular as it is broadcast.

All of this opens up the possibility that instead of making provision for the entire sewer to be delivered to your sitting room every day, you can be selective and choose some decent things to watch from time to time, and stop paying the TV License at the same time. Kuhner concludes his review:

Conservatives have one powerful weapon: They can flip their TV sets off. I have not watched television in years, sparing my senses - and soul - from the ubiquitous onslaught. Hollywood has declared war on Middle America. It's time we declared war on it.

So go on: Catholics: Unplug Your Televisions!

See the CUT website here.

Norway's tragedy: don't blame Christianity

Update: I just love this photo of Breivik in his Masonic garb. H-t Bones!

While we are all in shock from the appalling events in Norway, the Norwegian police, the BBC and the international media have taken the opportunity to label the mass murderer, Breivik, a 'fundamentalist Christian'. What mix of laziness and Christianophobia has led to this is anyone's guess. What is clear is that the killer had no developed theological ideas and no discernible links to any Christian groups. See here.

There have been mindlessly violent Christians over the centuries: think of the Donatists in Africa, the somewhat Christianised gnostic Cathars in France, the Anabaptists in Germany, or Cromwell in Ireland. But Breivik was not one of them.

The initial basis of the claim was the fact that on Facebook he called himself a Christian. This is a minimally meaningful gesture but it fits in with his wider views, which have since emerged, to the extent that his motivating idea is opposition to multi-culturalism. You don't have to be a Christian to hate immigrants - on the contrary, being a Christian is an impediment - but if you want to oppose multiculturalism with some notion of native European culture, then you may want to lay claim to Christianity. And that is what is happening here.

Breivik also seems to be keen on Odinism. Are we going to hear that he is a pagan fundamentalist?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Understanding what goes on at Mass, Opera, and Shakespeare

I recently re-tweeted a link to a nice blog post comparing the liturgy to Italian opera, quoting the narrator of the film The Shawshank Redemption, talking about the few minutes the film's hero gets control of a prison PA system to play a Mozart duet.

I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don't want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I'd like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can't be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.

The blogger at 'Shameless Popery' says this tells us how important music is at Mass. Actually, it tells us much more than that. It tells us about the value of non-verbal participation.

'Red', the film narrator, doesn't even want to know what the words meant. The music and the sound of the Italian were expressive in a way that a translation could not be; one might add that offering the listener the meaning of the words at the time would have distracted him from listening. I am a big opera fan, and I'm not against 'surtitles' at the opera on balance, but one must acknowledge their disadvantages: one can easily end up staring at the words instead of looking at the singers, attending to the English and not listening to the song. It is the same with using a hand missal at Mass: Missals are good things, but sometimes one wants to put the thing down and engage with the Mass wordlessly.

Because you can engage with things in many different ways. This point has been driven home to me recently because I've started taking my eldest daughter to Shakespeare plays. She's seven years old, so it seemed the obvious thing to do. Every Summer there are many cheap productions in quirky venues in Oxford. We've been to Twelth Night in Blenheim Pleasure Gardens, Midsummer Night's Dream in Oxford Castle and As You Like it in the Bodleian. She has enjoyed them hugely, but she's clearly not understanding every word.

Now I'm in favour of people understanding what's happening at Mass. We have wonderful catechetical materials for this purpose. I'm in favour of understanding Shakespeare: we have a book explaining the plots and I have the BBC complete Shakespeare on DVD so we can watch them at home first. But having done a reasonable amount of preparation, you need to go along and let the experience reach you where you are.

The fact is, no-one at a Shakespeare play understands every word. No one at Mass understands every word. That is true of a liturgical expert attending a Mass in the vernacular where the translation has used baby-talk to get the message across, as much as a small child at the Traditional Mass. Great works of art and the liturgy are not sponges, to be sucked dry, but wells, from which one may draw water every time one experiences them. To experience them fully, it is necessary at a certain point to stop analysing, take one's nose of the book one is holding, and just let it sink in.

Children receiving 'first blessings' from Fr Matthew McCarthy FSSP in St William of York, Reading.

Fame at last: LIFE and non-directive counselling

The pro-life charity LIFE has clearly been stung by my blog post on non-directive counselling and has issued a statement, which has been reported in the Catholic Herald, about it.

Hanging a story on someone without even asking them for a quote looks like shoddy journalism, but there you are. However I've never been described as a 'leading Catholic figure' before so I can't complain.

In my post (on my deeply obscure 'Casuistry Central' philosophy blog) I summarise objections to non-directive counselling under four headings. I don't say that their policy is wrong; I just seek to identify what the fuss is about. I end the post by saying that LIFE needs to address the arguments, particularly the last, key argument about cooperation with evil, and I explain what form the justification of such cooperation with evil can take, in Catholic ethics.

So do they provide such an argument? Or any argument? No.

Instead we get a quotation from Dr David Albert Jones, the Director of the Anscombe Centre (of which I am a Governor). He chooses his words carefully, and I wouldn't disagree with any of them. Indeed, they are little more than a paraphrase of what I wrote to qualify the 'moral' argument at the end of my original post. This is not as surprising as it looks, since Dr Jones was not responding to my views when he wrote these words: when asked by the Catholic Herald for a quote, he just sent them something he'd written earlier on the general topic.

“There is a certainly a role for directive parents, teachers, preachers, and judges. Nevertheless, from a Catholic perspective, there could also be a role for a non-directive counsellor, if this means someone who aims to help people to come to see these things for themselves. Catholic counselling should always be value-driven but may express these values also by giving someone space to reflect on what their heart tells them.”

Yes, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with not jumping down a client's throat to say things which will make the client more inclined to have an abortion. There is a time to speak and a time to remain silent (Eccl 3.7). The question, which Dr Jones does not address here, is whether faithful obedience of the rules of NDC would prevent a counsellor from avoiding an illicit cooperation with evil under certain concrete circumstances.

Remember, NDC requires counsellors to be non-directive not only when that would aid a pro-life outcome, but also when it would aid an anti-life outcome. It is neutral between outcomes: that's the whole idea.

Here are a couple of examples.

1. If the counsellor knew that information about the nature of abortion, the developmental stage of the baby, or the consequences of abortion for the mother, would influence the client in a positive way, would the counsellor be able to offer this information without being asked?

2. If the client asked the counsellor whether she, the counsellor, thought that abortion was morally licit, and the counsellor knew (having established a rapport with the client) that an tactful but honest answer would influence the client in a positive way, would the counsellor be able to answer?

Neither I nor Dr Jones knows the answers to these questions. They depend on the detailed nature of the NDC guidelines which LIFE uses. What I suspect, however, is that whatever the real answer is, LIFE would prefer its government partners to think that the answer to each question is 'no', and would simultaneously prefer its Catholic supporters to think that the answer to each question is 'yes'.

The hermeneutic of rupture

I blogged recently about finding Medieval wall paintings in an Anglican church. What can they think, I said? I managed to offend some-one leaving a comment, though he or she didn't pause long enough to explain how it is supposed to work. Anglicans are proud of these medieval vestiges (after a few centuries of trying to expunge them); these churches often play down the Reformation, saying things like 'we have worshiped here for 900 years' or whatever. And yet they can't claim that the theology and spirituality of a Medieval Doom painting is in continuity with modern Anglicanism (the calvary to the right was near the Doom; it formed the reredos to a nave altar). Ironically, it would be more in continuity with the theology of the people who first white-washed it over in the 16th Century, but that's another story.

But some people in the Catholic Church have a similar problem. Catholics who openly reject the first 19 Centuries of Catholic practice, spirituality and theology exist, but they are no more common than the fire-eating Protestant Anglicans who would still prefer to erase the Medieval paintings in the parish church. A much larger number of Catholics talk confidently about the Church's great history, and even point proudly at our artistic heritage, while wanting to hear as little as possible about the praxis, theology and spirituality which went with it. Indeed, when talking about the past, they would like to pretend that certain awkward facts did not obtain. Those facts are embarassing.

This is part of what the Holy Father condemns as the 'hermaneutic of rupture'. For a nice example, see this illustration from the Catholic Truth Society's children's book, 'Saint John Mary Vianney, the Cure D'Ars.' Don't get me wrong, I like these books; I own the full set and have read each of them many times to my children. And then again I am very aware that they are translations from the Italian - presumably the illustrations were not commissioned by the CTS, but come from Italy too. (The illustrator is a certain Giusy Capizzi.) However, it illustrates the point all too well.
Looking in the St Paul's Bookshop in Westminster the other day, I saw a very similar illustration in the children's Life of St John Vianney published by St Pauls. Is it too embarassing to allow children to see that priests used to say Mass facing East, with the altar against the wall? (Let's not say anything about them wearing proper vestments, having a corpus on the cross, using altar cloths, candles, a Missal, etc. etc.)

If we can't be truthful with our children about the past - and this is the recent past, remember, and indeed the present too in many places - then we clearly have a problem.