Pope Francis on ideology, and some Catholic cartoons

Yesterday Pope Francis spoke again about the danger of making the Faith an 'ideology'. Here's a passage from a typical report.

It is, he said, “the image of those Christians who have the key in their hand, but take it away, without opening the door,” and who “keep the door closed.”

Asking those present how a Christian is able to fall into this attitude, the Pope reflected that “The faith passes, so to speak, through a distiller and becomes ideology. And ideology does not beckon (people).”

Noting that it is a “lack of Christian witness does this,” he stressed that “when this Christian is a priest, a bishop or a Pope it is worse.”

“When a Christian becomes a disciple of ideology,” urged the Pope, “he has lost the faith: he is no longer a disciple of Jesus, he is a disciple of this attitude of thought,” and “the knowledge of Jesus is transformed into an ideological and also moralistic knowledge.”

“Ideology frightens, ideology chases away the people,” he stressed, stating that it is because of this that many are distanced from the Church.

I think I know what the Holy Father means. we Traditionalists have been the victims of this attitude many times. The guys at the Catholic Cartoon Blog, to whom I owe these cartoons, were not saying something incomprehensible when they drew these, we all looked at them and smiled to ourselves, oh yes we've seen that!

And then there are the priests who have, over the years, refused to allow the Traditional Requiem to the grieving relatives of a deceased Catholic who requested it. Those who have refused Holy Communion to a Catholic who kneels for it. Those who get angry with penitents in Confession who ask for a valid formula of absolution. And those who fob off people seeking to convert to Catholicism. Well, we can argue about what Cardinal Kasper really meant in this or that speech, but in pastoral practice some of the nuances can get lost.

Yes, we all know about priests and bishops who have the key to the door and take it away, those who insist on pettifogging rules and policies rather than responding with apostolic charity to our requests.

It may be that liberals will say I'm reading Pope Francis upsidedown, isn't he talking about 'moralistic' types, and isn't that code for conservatives? Seriously, look at the contrast here: between moralism on the one hand, and on the other hand prayer. Who are the people who for a century and more have been telling us that the Faith is not about the supernatural, about an encounter with God in prayer, including liturgical prayer, but is instead about ethics? Step forward every liberal biblical critic you've ever heard of, starting from Kant. How does the Holy Father's words fit into that? The attitude that 'what's important' in the Church is not what we do on our knees, but the implementation of elaborate and impersonal programmes to improve the world, has been a cancer in the Church.

This is a serious problem for the liberals who want to instrumentalise the present pontificate. Pope Francis' proposed solution to the moralism isn't to change the teaching of the Church: unlike the liberals, he knows this is impossible. It is to pray.

Well, Mr Liberal, if you want to follow the Pope, you're going to have to allow us to pray.

The Brown Scapular at Aylesford

Here are some more photographs, quite a crowd of people were clothed with the Brown Scapular by Fr Marcus Holden at the Latin Mass Society Pilgrimage to Aylesford Priory.



Aylesford is the home of the Brown Scapular, where St Simon Stock (probably) had his revelation about it from Our Lady in 1251. We were in the chapel which houses his relic. The old Catholic Encyclopedia has a wealth of information about scapulars of all kinds here, and on the Sabbatine Privilege here.



It goes without saying (though perhaps it does need saying) that like all sacramentals (medals, blessed objects and so on) the effectiveness of the Scapular is dependent on the dispositions of the person using it (ex opere operantis), unlike sacraments which are valid regardless of a lack of pious dispositions, sinfulness and so on (ex opere operato). Even valid sacraments, of course, won't convey grace to recipients who resist that grace. The Brown Scapular can help you get to heaven, but not without your cooperation. It doesn't work like a magical amulet or secret password, like those offered to initiates by ancient Gnostic sects (and the Mormons, I gather).

The Scapular is one of the Church's most important sacramentals, and was recommended, along with the Rosary, by Our Lady at Fatima: here is the classic image of her holding them both out to the children. Given the range of sacramentals she could have recommended, this is surely significant.

While sacramentals are sadly neglected in the Church today (it is disappointing to see the very limited treatment of them in the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the 2001 Directory on Popular Piety), but they are needed more than ever to feed our faith and remind of it through the day. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the Brown Scapular is almost a uniform for Traditional Catholics in some circles. There cannot be a better place to receive it than before the relic of St Simon Stock at Aylesford.

The Altar of Our Lady of Fatima in SS Gregory and Augustine in Oxford decorated for the Maternity of Our Lady (11th Oct). The statue has recently acquired a large Scapular.

Pilgrimage to Aylesford: photos

I've been behind with processing these photographs; it was as always a wonderful event, led this year by Fr Marcus Holden, and accompanied by some excellent polyphony led by the Southwark North Rep, Matthew Schellhorn, who organises the pilgrimage each year.



As well and Mass, the Rosary and Benediction, a good number of people came forward to be clothed with the Brown Scapular. I bought ten scapulars and gave eight of them away to people who wanted to be clothed, others had their own.



Aylesford Priory is a remarkable place; St Simon Stock (probably) had his vision of Our Lady giving her blessings to his scapular here, and our Mass is in the chapel which houses his relic, his cranium. It was bought back by the Carmelites after the Second World War.

Oxford Pilgrimage, this Saturday

This Saturday, 19th October, is the Latin Mass Society's Oxford Pilgrimage in honour of Oxford's Catholic Martyrs.

Mass is at 11am in Blackfriars, Oxford (in St Giles: map).
This will be a Solemn Mass in the Dominican Rite, accompanied by Chant provided by the Schola Abelis, and Polyphony from the Newman Consort. It happens to be the Feast of St Frideswide, Patron of Oxford, and the Mass will be hers.

After a break for lunch:

Procession at 2pm, starting from outside St Michael's at the North Gate, Cornmarket (map). This will go down Broad Street and Holywell Street to 'Hangman's Corner', the end of Holywell Street where the Town Gallows once stood. This is where four beatified martyrs died in 1589: the priests George Nichols and Richard Yaxley, and the laymen Thomas Belson and Humphrey Prichard.

The procession will return to Blackfriars:

Benediction, 3pm.

Everyone is welcome to any part of the proceedings. 2-hour Pay-and-Display parking is available outside Blackfriars; longer parking can be found in a number of central Oxford car parks, the nearest being Gloucester Green and Worcester Street.

Photos from last year, when we visited the other site of martyrdom, the Castle Gallows where Bl George Napier died in 1610. We alternate between these two sites, both of which are marked by plaques blessed by bishops.

Rosary Crusade of Reparation:photos

I was at the Rosary Crusade of Reparation today, it was well attended - about 2,000 people. It is the biggest event of its kind in London, rivaled only by an Italian procession.



For those who don't know about it, it started outside Westminster Cathedral (Ambrosden Avenue) at 2.15pm, and at about 3.45 it arrives at the Brompton Oratory, where it goes into the church for Benediction, a sermon, and other devotions.



We stop the traffic: or rather, it is stopped for us. It is important that the Catholic Church manifests itself in this way occasionally, a lot of other groups do. We too must give witness: since we have the Faith to give witness to. Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel! says St Paul. The sound of our praying the Rosary and singing hymns to Our Lady is a puzzle to most Londoners; it brings to them something which wouldn't otherwise cross their minds.

Sloane Avenue. The faces of the security goons outside the designer shops are worth the trip on their own.

If you don't already support this, and could, please do. It is always in mid October on a Saturday, it has a blog here. Next year it will be on 11th October.

Knightsbridge

There are more photos here.

Letter of the week

This letter in the Catholic Times (13 Oct 2013) really deserves a wider audience. Well, it made me laugh!

Can it be possible that the Catholic Church in this country has pre-empted Pope Francis' blueprint for Church reform?

If discourse on sexual morality is to be abandoned in favour of pastoral care, we in these parts abandoned it years ago. The last recorded sermons on sexual morals given locally were from our church pulpits in the early 1960s, and ever since pulpits were dismantled there has been little said on the subject.

Contraception, adultery, sodomy, abortion, masturbation, although very prevalent and openly accepted in today's society, appear to be not for mention within the precincts of our churches. But for the persistent complaints of one of your columnists and your regular correspondents objecting to the Church's teaching, sexual immorality would be out of the public eye and a thing of the past.

If the Catholic Church is identified solely by its sexual moral precepts, it is largely due to those within the Church who persistently raise objections and maintain the the Church has got it wrong. It is a paradox that the ones who object are the ones who are doing the preaching, and perhaps we should be thankful to them for keeping the matter before our attention.

Jeff Thompson,

Chorley, Lancashire.

Mystical not ascetic: a response to Pope Francis, Part 5

This post (really) concludes my series about Pope Francis' long interview with the Jesuit journals.

Part 1: what his disctinction 'Mystical' vs. 'Asectic' means
Part 2: why traditional Catholics can better accomodate this perspective than 'Neo-Conservatives'
Part 3: why liberal Catholics shouldn't feel too comfortable with it
Part 4: what is going on with the reference to the life and family issues.

You can also find them all with the label 'Pope Francis: Mystical not ascetic'

I have tried in all these to find a way for Traditional Catholics to understand Pope Francis and to make use of his perspective to make a case for the things they want to defend. In this post I examine the one, short, reference to the 'Vetus Ordo' (as Pope Francis calls it). It comes at the end of a paragraph about the Second Vatican Council.

Asked about the Council, the interviewer is taken by surprise at how little Pope Francis wants to say about it. It is just this.

“Vatican II was a re-reading of the Gospel in light of contemporary culture,” says the pope. “Vatican II produced a renewal movement that simply comes from the same Gospel. Its fruits are enormous. Just recall the liturgy. The work of liturgical reform has been a service to the people as a re-reading of the Gospel from a concrete historical situation. Yes, there are hermeneutics of continuity and discontinuity, but one thing is clear: the dynamic of reading the Gospel, actualizing its message for today—which was typical of Vatican II—is absolutely irreversible. Then there are particular issues, like the liturgy according to the Vetus Ordo. I think the decision of Pope Benedict [his decision of July 7, 2007, to allow a wider use of the Tridentine Mass] was prudent and motivated by the desire to help people who have this sensitivity. What is worrying, though, is the risk of the ideologization of the Vetus Ordo, its exploitation.”

I have already noted how, on another occasion, Pope Francis has made clear that he regards the traditional liturgies of East and West as God-centred, and that this is a good thing, which 'we have lost a little' in the West with the reform. That doesn't mean he thinks what is gained does not compensate for what is lost, from this paragraph it is clear he thinks it does. But he does not take the view, which many progressive liturgists have taken over the years, that the traditional liturgy is either theologically problematic or pastorally a dead-end. Which is good, obviously, since those views are absurd.

What he is expressing here is another familiar concern, expressed in Bugnini's book 'The Reform of the Liturgy'. Bugnini writes about the early Traditional movement, and how there were calls for permission for the Old Mass both from rather fanatical groups and perfectly orthodox ones (pp295-7). He appears to conclude that permission was withheld because of the former: a nice example of kicking the cat to punish the dog. Indeed, in practice it forced the orthodox traddies to choose between hearing the Traditional Mass in the context of the more extreme groups or not hearing it at all.

Anyway, this self-defeating policy is over, thank heavens, and Pope Francis approves of this change, but he is still worried about 'the risk of ideoligization' of the Vetus Ordo. Let's think about what that means.

There are, of course, groups totally at odds with the Church which celebrate the Traditional Mass, or some approximation of it; if anyone is ideologizing the Mass presumably they are, so they can be our paradigm. Old Catholic groups didn't adopt the 1970 Missal and have done their own thing since 1870, Jansenists since even earlier, though these groups have in many cases made their own changes. Feeneyits also went into schism before the Council (many in fact have been reconciled since). Then there are Sede Vacantists, the main body of whom split away from the SSPX in the 1980s, and the even loopier 'conclavists' who elect their own Popes. These are all a pretty rum lot and mainstream Traditional Catholics wouldn't touch them with a bargepole. I'm not even going to bother explaining who they are or what they think; anyone can satisfy a morbid interest with the help of Google, but they are numerically insignificant, and really shouldn't become the focus of an obsession. They are, however, a really clear case of people using the Traditional Mass who have lost the plot doctrinally. My question is: in what sense can we say there is an 'ideologization' or 'exploitation' of the Mass going on here?

In two senses, perhaps. First, apart from the Old Catholics / Jansenists (who can be very liberal) they like to claim that theirs is the only valid Mass. In this way they make an ideological issue out of the Mass. Secondly, they exploit it, in the situations in which they alone offer the Traditional Mass in an area, by attracting people who are (at least at first) simply interested in experiencing the Church's authentic liturgical traditions. They make the Mass a bait for drawing people in to quite distinct theological issues, where their views are heterodox.

Oh Nobadaddy! As William Blake wrote,
Why darkness & obscurity
In all thy words & laws
That none dare eat the fruit but from
The wily serpents jaws?

Clearly, the way to  combat both aspects is to make the Vetus Ordo more and more widely available in the Church, with the permission of the hierarchy. This undercuts the argument that the authentic Catholic theology implicit in the EF is denied by a heretical hierarchy, and it undercuts efforts to attract Catholics to schismatic celebrations by offering something which can't be found in the Church. In short, the danger of 'ideologization'/ 'exploitation' is a danger in not having enough Traditional Masses celebrated, NOT a danger which arises from having too many celebrated.

There is, however, another kind of ideologization/ exploitation of the Mass in the Church today, that of liturgical abuses in the Novus Ordo. In most, if not all, cases, common abuses have a theological rationale which is at odds with the theology of the Church. For example, cramming the aisles with Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion has a theological motivation (in the minds of the ideological initiators of these things), namely an attempt to downplay the role of the priest; this is also achieved by many other abuses, such as that of having lay people receive communion in the sanctuary, or having the priest go into the nave all the time. Many abuses, similarly, downplay the Real Presence: I'm sure we can all think of examples. It seems to me that these are even better examples of 'ideologization' / 'exploitation' of the liturgy than those noted above, since they can be used to impose false theological ideas on the Faithful through the very ceremonies of the Mass, and not just over a cup of tea afterwards. It is not surprising that such abuses have been condemned so strongly by Bl Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict.

If we are concerned, as we certainly should be, about the liturgy being utilised to convey an ideology at odds with the Faith, then we have to look very seriously at these abuses and, if we can, do something about them. As far as the Traditional Mass is concerned, the answer is again to have more and more of it, since its ceremonies tend to made clear precisely those things which the abusers want to obscure, and to teach precisely what the abusers want to deny, notably about the special role of the priest and the Real Presence, but also about the reality of sin, grace, transcendence, the role of art and beauty, and so on.

In short, the widespread celebration of the Traditional Mass is an effective defence against the ideologization of both the Old and the New liturgy. Such ideologization can only flourish where the Vetus Ordo is little celebrated in a diocese and where it is regarded, consequently, as something peculiar and either wrong-headed or at least to be steadfastly ignored. For in fact, as the FIUV Position Papers have shown on many topics, it has much to teach the Catholics of today.

On a final point, I'd like to say that I rather like the Holy Father's revival of the term 'Vetus Ordo', if only because I believe in a terminological free market against those who fanatically insist on the term 'Extraordinary Form', and have even suggested that to use any other terms is disloyal to the Holy See. If we can say 'Vetus Ordo', obviously we can also say 'Novus Ordo', which contrary to popular belief has never been a term of abuse, but just what Pope Paul promulgated (the 'New Order of Mass', Novus Ordo Missae). Let's stop arguing about words, and address the realities to which they refer.