Can Parliament tell us that Women Bishops and SSM are right?

Henry VIII: casts a long shadow.

Recently I had a little exchange on Twitter with 'Cranmer', aka Adrian Hilton, the conservative but also rather establishment Anglican blogger, who likes to refer to himself as 'His Grace'. He pointed put to me that, in response to his serious and reasoned position, I had responded with sarcasm and scorn.

It is true. Our exchange went like this. (I can't get a simple screenshot for various reasons).

Cranmer: "...since the English Reformation, the Church of England is, in law, the true Catholic church of the land..."

Me: Since when has Parliament had the power to overturn Divine Law?

Cranmer: Since Christians began to have very diverse views about the nature of the vocation that belongs to the See of Rome.

Me: oh right. So Christ wrote to say Parliament could take over. Can I see the letter?

Cranmer: His Grace gave you a reasoned, historic, theological and polite response, which you answer with sarcasm and scorn. Goodbye.

I should say, incidentally, that in Twitter terms Cranmer's response really does count as 'reasoned, historic, theological and polite', which is why it is useful to carry on the discussion on a blog.

I do confess I find it impossible to take Anglican claims to be 'the Christian Church in England' seriously. I find them, quite literally, ludicrous. It appeared after well over a thousand years of Christianity in these Islands which acknowledged the authority of the Pope, and did so, frequently, with a fervour which exceeded that of many other nations. At no point in its brief history has the Anglican Church, this 'Ecclesia Anglicana', had the support of more than about 80% of the population; in Catholic Lancashire and Puritan East Anglia Anglicanism was almost a besieged minority. Despite the shedding of oceans of blood, the attempts to impose this artificial religion on the peoples of Ireland and Scotland ended in pretty comprehensive failure. It wasn't much more successful in Wales. It is now many years since the number of worshipping Anglicans was below the number of worshipping Catholics.

Oh, but Anglicanism has been established by law - by Parliament! Take that, potato eater! 

So, Protestantism rejects the authority of the Pope. Each individual is supposed to be able to decide for himself, with the help of the Bible, what he should believe.  Anglicanism, on the other hand, claims that it is the Crown in the Parliament of England, and later in the Parliament of the United Kingdom which wields ultimate religious authority. (This is the position known as 'Erastianism'.)

Because after all that's what Christ said in the Bible, isn't it? Oh but that's sarcastic.

But to take this position seriously we have to ask what Adrian Hilton calls sarcastic questions. Is the British Crown in the UK Parliament, by some inscrutable Providence, the religious lode-star of the entire world? Ok, if that seems absurd, whence does lawful religious authority derive in countries which have not adopted Erastianism? And to what can we appeal when one Erastian state disagrees with another?

Where did religious authority come from before the English Crown decided to arrogate it to itself? And by what lawful means did it pass from one institution to another?

I'll tell you what this reminds me of: the Marxist theory that the Communist Party is the chosen instrument of History to liberate the Proletariate. Somehow the British Crown has this historic spiritual destiny... Well, codswallop.

I know there are many people of good will who have come to some kind of intellectual accommodation with the anomaly of Anglicanism. Having rejected the Pope, it might seem preferable to various alternatives. But that doesn't make Erastianism make sense. It is a position without any rational basis, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

It comes into the category of positions which are so silly that rational argument almost fails. To point out the Scriptural and historical absurdity of it doesn't do it justice. It needs ridicule. It needs to be said that this is not even a contender among views of religious authority. It is just a grubby historical expedient, left over from the age of Monarchical Absolutism. It's just Henry VIII saying: Who's going to stop me?

Catholics of all stripes, and in fact pretty well everyone, genuinely struggle to understand why we should be interested in what Parliament has to say, for example, about the ordination of female bishops. And yet it is increasingly clear that it is the secular political class, in Government and in Parliament, who are calling the shots on this and on the Anglican position on Same Sex Marriage. David Cameron memorably said:

"I think it's important for the Church of England to be a modern church in touch with society, as it is today, and this was a key step they needed to take."

The Church of England Synod had just rejected them. Cameron was menacing them: we'll give you time to sort this out, he said, but you know the result you need to get, so don't take too long over it. Oh, and they have.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has now taken Parliament's hint on Same Sex Marriage. 'there is also a great fear that our decisions will lead us to the rejection of LGBT people, to irrelevance in a changing society, to behaviour that many see akin to racism.' Setting aside this 'fear', he looks forward with hope and confidence to the Anglican Church of the future:

'It has incoherence, inconsistency between dioceses and between different places. It’s not a church that says we do this and we don’t do that. It’s a church that says we do this and we do that and actually quite a lot of us don’t like that but we are still going to do it because of love.'

We all know what this means. He's going to allow Same Sex Marriage in churches, provide some incoherent let-out clause for those Anglican clergy who don't want to do them, and then watch this let-out clause collapse under pressure from homosexual activists and the law.

Would anyone who disagrees like to give me odds on that? I'd be prepared to lay a substantial wager on it.

Refugees from Anglicanism as this unfolds will be very welcome in the Catholic Church, as many have been before them.

2014 Summer School and FSSP Boys' Camp

The St Catherine's Trust Family Retreat, which usually takes place either over the weekend of Passion Sunday (the Sunday before Palm Sunday in the EF) or Low Sunday (the Sunday after Easter Sunday), at the Oratory School, will not take place this year because of building words at the venue.

The Summer School will take place as usual: the dates are Sunday 27th July to Sunday 3rd August; it takes place at the Fransiscan Retreat Centre at Pantasaph in North Wales.

This year there is also taking place a Summer Camp for boys organised by the FSSP, from 27-31st, at Douai Abbey in Berkshire. So according to your time available and other preferences, there will be for the first time a choice of traditional activities for children in the Summer. More details here.

The SCT Summer School application forms can be downloaded here. Enquiries and email applications (just give us the info the form asks for) can go to
info@stcatherinestrust.org

The Summer School is supported by the Latin Mass Society and there is NO FEE. Donations gratefully received!

Guild of St Clare Goldwork Course: and Pro-life Witness

The Guild of St Clare, which promotes liturgical and domestic needlecraft, and is affiliated to the Latin Mass Society, has organised a


Goldwork Training Day in Oxford, on Saturday, 22nd February, 

The tutor is Sarah Rakestraw from Golden Hinde.

The location is the church hall at St Anthony of Padua, 115 Headley Way, Oxford OX3 7SS.

The cost is £40 per person plus materials. 

There are places still free, please email lucyashaw@gmail.com

On the same day, and outside the same church, the next Oxford Pro-Life Witness: this takes place from 3 to 4pm. This is the monthly event which has attracted a counter-demonstration, whose antics I noted on this blog; they are likely to be more subdued this time, with a little help from the forces of law and order. I almost think this is a pity, they made such a fool of themselves last time, however what they did was illegal as well as ineffective.



The Goldwork course starts at 10am and ends at 4pm; some participants will be joining the witness at the end, and we can all have tea in the hall after the witness concludes. So whether you'd like to learn Goldwork or just pray for the end of abortion, this is the place to be on 22nd.

The Guild of St Clare is holding another training day: on Saturday, 12th April, we are having a bobbin lace making day for beginners, also in Oxford, at The Fibreworks in the Cowley Road. The price for this is also £40. Again, contact Lucy Shaw to book.

Can the Church change Marriage? 3: Discipline

Over the years liberals like Mgr Basil Loftus have thrown out all kinds of half-baked ideas about what, in practice, the Church could do to be more 'Merciful' in relation to marriage and divorce. Loftus has suggested, for example, that somehow it be possible for a baptised Christian couple to contract a valid natural marriage, since under certain circumstances natural marriages can be dissolved by the Church allowing for remarriage. This raises incredibly complicated theological and canonical questions, and I really don't see how it would solve anything even if it were possible. If a couple's marriage is declared non-sacramental, that is a decree of nullity. If they want to divorce and remarry, they can. If they want to make their marriage sacramentally valid, they can. How does saying that they have a natural marriage help anyone?

The obvious way forward might seem to be simply to expand the grounds, or the interpretation of the grounds, for declarations of nullity. But this is more difficult than it looks. Marriages are null, essentially, if either party did not make a free and sincere marriage vow to marry the person he or she thought they were marrying. This can mean that undisclosed mental health issues can invalidate a marriage, undue pressure to marry, or a prior determination not to be faithful or fruitful within marriage.

What the liberals would like to see (and this is why they like the Orthodox practice) is a ground for annulment along the lines of grounds for secular divorce: something like 'irretrievable breakdown of the relationship'. But this cannot be a basis for determining the nullity of a marriage, which is why the Orthodox talk not about nullity but 'death'. For it to be null it has to have been null from the first moment, at the Altar rails. That is what nullity - sacramental invalidity - means: it was never valid.

I've already written about the possibility of adopting the Orthodox practice. This illustrates the problem of trying to create a hybrid position.

And here's another thought. It is not usually regarded as 'pastoral' to make it harder to perform a sacrament. And yet that is what the liberals are trying to do with their development of the theology of marriage. They want, in fact, to make getting validly married as difficult as possible. Pope Benedict remarked laconically:

We run the risk of falling into an anthropological pessimism which, in the light of today's cultural situation, considers it almost impossible to marry.

This is perhaps the ultimate fairness: not 'marriage for everyone', but 'marriage for no-one.'

Perhaps you can, instead, interpret the existing grounds of nullity in an elastic way, and it is often said that this happens to the point of abuse in some jurisdictions. Certainly, successive Popes have demanded that tribunals take their task seriously and strictly. Ultimately, tribunals are trying to establish a fact: was a sacrament validly accomplished, or not. They cannot make a marriage null. Their role is to reassure the couple and everyone that it is reasonable to proceed with a subsequent marriage. If they declare a marriage null which was not null, subsequent marriages will be objectively invalid.

Let us take a moment to consider that. Suppose tribunals became lax and just rubber-stamped applications. Catholics in good conscience would re-marry in church without being really free to do so. They would be in an objective state of grievous sin, and the second marriage would not be sacramentally valid. They would not be in mortal sin - they would not go to hell for this - because mortal sin requires both gravity and consciousness on the part of the agent. But they would lack the graces which flow from the sacrament, which help to develop the marital relationship and assist them in raising their children. Furthermore, the exercise of their marital duties, however heroic, would lack merit, and they could not, through them, grow in virtue. They would be a lot worse off than those in valid natural marriages. It is a bad situation to be in.

The idea that this situation should be encouraged for the sake of 'Mercy' is simply appalling. Essentially the proposal is to rob Catholics of their confidence that tribunals can establish the facts to a reasonable degree of certainty, and therefore of their confidence that they are free to remarry. If this is Mercy, give me Justice...



Here's the final option. Leave the tribunals alone and just focus on what happens to Catholics who have remarried outside the Church. They have ignored the fact that their first marriages were (or might be) valid; they have defied the Church, their former spouse, and Our Lord's words, to establish an adulterous relationship, and have furthermore raised this adulterous relationship to the status of a legally recognised and binding contract. Their adultery is no longer something private, which we might ignore, or simply not know about. They force it on the attention of the state and of society: they want to be known and Mr & Mrs Smith. They come into church and queue up for communion. What should the priest do?

Well, he can give them Holy Communion: that's what the liberals want to hear. Why not? Canon Law says otherwise, but Canon Law - say the liberals - can be changed or ignored. (They've certainly put in a lot of practice doing the latter.) Isn't this a Merciful solution?

Now these couples are not 'in good conscience'. Their sin is, as I have noted, a self-conscious and deliberate public violation of the Natural Law. They may, of course, have convinced themselves that the Church is wrong about marriage, but the point of the example is that they are painfully aware of the incompatibility between their state of life and the Church's discipline.

The public nature of their marital status means that ordinary considerations of scandal, in dealing with sinners asking for Communion, are reversed. Ordinarily, if a priest knows privately, or under the Seal of Confession, that a person asking (publicly) for Communion is in a state of mortal sin, to refuse would be to publish this fact (detraction), and cause scandal to others. In this case, the priest knows publicly, and other people present know, of the sin, and the scandal would be caused by giving the Communion, not withholding it. So although the Communion of a private sinner is a sacrilege, the priest must go along with it. The opposite is the case with the public sinner.

And in this, of course, the public sinner is at a huge advantage. Yes, advantage. By what twisted logic, in what alternative, liberal, universe, is it not an advantage to be prevented from committing an sacrilegious act? It is true that the remarried divorcee may have committed it already in intention. But it is another matter actually to have received Our Lord sacrilegiously. As the Corpus Christi Sequence expresses it:

Both the wicked and the good 

Eat of this celestial Food; 

But with ends how opposite! 

Here 'tis life; and there 'tis death; 

The same, yet issuing to each 

In a difference infinite.

How, pray, is it a work of Mercy to administer the means of spiritual death to a sinner? This is something which we need to keep in the forefront of our minds. The objective gravity of the sacrilegious Communion is one thing, certainly. I've been reading about the Medieval theologian William of Auxerre, who described this situation as 'throwing Christ into the latrine of the Devil' - the priest 'proicit corpus Christi in latrinam diaboli'. (He still thinks a private sinner should be given Communion, incidentally.) Liberals often say: oh Christ can take it. Well, consider then the subjective side, the effect on the sinner. If he is a public sinner, the priest is in a position to save him from at least this degree of involvement with sacrilege.

If you don't care about Christ, at least refrain from throwing the sinner into latrinam diaboli.

Can the Church change marriage? 2: the 'Orthodox option'

In my last post I made the point that being merciful to divorced Catholics seeking to remarry can be a failure to be merciful to those whose marriages or families would be destroyed, if the sanctity of marriage is yet further undermined. There is also the question, which I address here, of how exactly the Church's rules could be changed.

It has become common for liberals to appeal to the practice of the Orthodox churches as a precedent which could be followed by the Roman church in dealing with divorce. The Orthodox allow a second marriage, and sometimes a third, after divorce.

What is interesting is the way the Council of Trent defined the issue:

Can. vii. If any one shall say that the Church errs when she has taught, and now teaches, that according to the doctrine of the Gospels and of the Apostles the bond of Matrimony cannot be dissolved owing to the adultery of one of the partners, and that neither party, not even the innocent party who has not by committing adultery given any ground (for separation), is free to contract another marriage during the lifetime of the other partner, and that he who after putting away his adulterous wife marries another, commits adultery, or the wife who after putting away an adulterous husband marries another, let him be anathema.

This teaching, expressed as a formal anathema by a General Council, is infallible.

The argument is made - I am tentative because I'm not in a position to judge this on historical grounds - that this condemns the proposition:

P1: The Church is in error when she teaches that re-marriage after divorce is illicit.

and not the proposition

P2: Remarriage after divorce is licit.

in order to avoid condemning the Orthodox practice. This practice was in use among Greek subjects of Venice at that time of the Council of Trent, who were in communion with Rome. They could carry on saying that remarriage was possible (P2), as long as they didn't condemn the Roman view as wrong (P1).

As far as making possible the adoption of the Orthodox practice in the West goes,  this is a pretty small mouse-hole to creep through. The first thing Catholic would-be reformers do when they propose a change is almost invariably to say that the Church has been in error to say that marriage is indissoluble. So they immediately incur Trent's anathema, and the argument ends there. It is terribly hard, in fact, to see how any articulation of the Orthodox view would escape the anathema, but the Orthodox do in fact affirm that marriage indissoluble, but somehow can 'die' as a result of sin.

I'm not going to try to explain what exactly this distinction means. It is open to Western theologians today simply to say that the Orthodox position is wrong, and that seems to be what Archbishop Muller was saying recently:

This practice cannot be reconciled with God’s will, as expressed unambiguously in Jesus’ sayings about the indissolubility of marriage. But it represents an ecumenical problem that is not to be underestimated.



For the sake of argument, however, let us consider the possibility of the Roman church adopting the Orthodox practice. Would this solve the problem we currently have?

The difficulty here is that the Orthodox practice operates on different principles to the Western one. In the West we have procedures to determine nullity (to speak only of sacramental marriages): that the marriage never took place. If this is so, both parties are free to marry. It may, or may not, have been the result of one or both parties' sin, but in any case subsequent marriages are in no way impugned. There is no limit to how often this can happen. In societies with easy divorce and poor formation of Catholics, this practice can keep up with social conditions. More marriages are likely to be null.

For the Orthodox, there is no procedure of annulment. The first marriage is on the conscience of both parties. Remarriage is permitted as a dispensation, and the petitioner is given a penance. The subsequent marriage service is penitential in character. A third marriage might be allowed, but that is made even more low-key. Fourth marriages are forbidden - even when the spouses have died. The catch-phrase is that the Church "blesses the first marriage, performs the second, tolerates the third, and forbids the fourth."

No doubt cases which a Western tribunal would declare null will often be cases where among the Orthodox a bishop will allow a second marriage, and vice versa. It is actually not at all clear that the Orthodox practice is more lenient. It will in fact depend on what Orthodox bishop is being compared to what Western tribunal. There will certainly be cases in which a couple who could have got a decree of nullity in the West will not qualify for remarriage in the East.

What is clear is that one cannot make the Western practice more lax simply by adopting all or part of the Orthodox practice. The two systems work upon completely different principles, even if the results overlap. You couldn't keep the concept of nullity and add to it the idea that marriages can 'die' allowing a bishop to give you a dispensation to remarry along with a penance. That would create a Frankenstein theory of marriage with no support from the traditions either of East or West.

Another problem, for liberals, is this penitential business. Is this something which Western divorcees are really going to swallow? Such a thing seems, at least to me, quite inconceivable.

References to the Orthodox practice, in the debate about divorce and remarriage, are essentially a fraud. Liberals like the idea of remarriage without the first marriage being null, but they would never accept the corollaries which have maintained a practical respect of the sanctity of marriage in the East over the centuries.

It is, in fact, a familiar trick. Liberals see some aspect of practice of some former era, or some distant and unfamiliar rite, and seize on it as being attractive, but on closer examination they only find it attractive because they have ignored the context in which it actually makes sense.

Didn't people exchange the kiss of peace in the congregation once upon a time? Yes: but never between the sexes! Didn't people receive Communion in the hand in old times? Yes, but they never picked it up, and their hands had to be ritually washed afterwards, and sometimes before too. Didn't people stand for Communion in former ages? Yes - after kissing the priest's foot first, or something similar.

In fact, the idea that the Orthodox churches are some kind or paradise for liberals is so utterly absurd that the liberals using this argument should be ashamed. Since they think we have so much to learn from the Orthodox on the subject of marriage, let's hear what Metropolitan Hilarion (leader of the Russian Orthodox Church) has to say about Same Sex Marriage.

We have to state clearly that those countries that have recognized in law homosexual unions as one of the forms of marriage are taking a serious step towards the destruction of the very concept of marriage and the family. ...

The notion of parents, i.e. of the father and the mother, of what is male and what is female, is radically altered. The female mother is losing her time-honoured role as guardian of the domestic hearth, while the male father is losing his role as educator of his children in being socially responsible. The family in its Christian understanding is falling apart to be replaced by such impersonal terms as 'parent number one' and parent number two'.

Can the Church reform its marriage laws?

This weekend the untiring Mgr Basil Loftus (The Catholic Times, 9th Feb 2014) is making some perfectly innocuous remarks of Pope Francis in his address to the Roman Rota into a call for some kind of revolution. I don't think the judges of the Roman Rota will be too shocked to hear that justice has to be 'adapted to the needs of the concrete reality', and I certainly don't think the needs of the concrete reality are for annulments on dubious grounds. Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI made it abundantly clear, in fact, that the opposite is the case. The culture of easy divorce and poor marriage preparation is a concrete reality calling for great vigilance in protecting the sanctity of marriage, when the matter comes before Catholic Marriage Tribunals.

Watch out: Mercy at work.

Is Loftus engaging in a scholarly joke, when he quotes St Bernard talking about God's Mercy? (No.) This is the same St Bernard who preached the First Crusade with such vigour, and introduced the burning of heretics at the stake. Now that's a kind of Mercy I can understand.

Joking aside, there is a problem here which often arises in ethics: the contrast between identifiable (potential) victims and non-identifiable ones. We can all think of people who would, personally, welcome a relaxation of the Church's laws. People who are divorced and remarried, who might like to be told that they can receive Communion. People who are divorced, who might like to be told they can marry again in church. These people suffer for the Church's discipline: there is no denying it. The people who would suffer from a relaxation are not so easy to identify. They are the spouses who would be abandoned, because not even a Catholic husband or wife any longer really regards marriage as inviolable. It is the children whose parents would separate, for the same reason. Lives shattered, children abandoned: we have seen these consequences with the Divorce Reform Act in the UK; do we really want to take the Church further down this road? The people who might be victims should the last vestiges of respect for marriage be loosened, because the last institution (beside the Mormons) on the planet which takes marriage seriously, has decided to throw in the towel, these victims of course will never write in to the papers on appear in a TV interview, because we don't know who they are going to be. Does this mean we can ignore them? Does that mean that protecting them doesn't count as a work of Mercy?

To sacrifice people we don't know, people we can't readily identify, for the sake of people we do know, people we've met and who have campaigns in the papers and get wheeled out to talk on the radio, without bothering even to consider how many there might be of each: this is not Mercy, it is self-indulgence. It is an indulgence of our sentimental feelings towards our chums, or to those who have made a favourable impression on us, which is merciless to those we don't know, people who are voiceless, not just, like the unborn, because they are too young, but because we won't know who they are going to be until it is too late. It is because they are unidentifiable, and therefore can't defend themselves as a group in advance, that they need our special protection.

But here is another question. What exactly do people like Basil Loftus want to see happen? What does he imagine can be changed, to make things 'easier', more 'Merciful'?

I am going to explore this in a couple of posts: first, the 'Orthodox option', and secondly, the 'relaxation of discipline' option.

Just for the record, Loftus once again displays his contempt for his superiors by attacking Archbishop Müller.

"The Mercy of the Lord is, then, my merit." Try telling that to Archbishop Müller. For him it does not seem to be true that because of God's Mercy, "where sin abounds, grace abounded all the more", certainly not within the confines of an invalid marriage... Is it not Müller who misses the mark?

This is the same Archbishop Müller whose appointment filled Loftus with such joy. Oh yes: back on the 8 July 2012, he gave his assessment of where the Archbishop's critics were going wrong. ‘Quite simply, he [Archbishop Müller] is profoundly scholarly and spiritual, and they [his critics] are not.’

This kind of misapprehension of a person's character might even be grounds for an annulment. But if Loftus can be wrong about this, what can we rely on?

New Mass of Ages: with Laurence England!

The new edition of Mass of Ages has arrived with members and is available to buy in bookshops, parish repositories and online here.

Laurence England's article on Pope Francis and the Media is a 'taster' article available online for free here.

Updating you on our progress...In the SPRING 2014 edition, we have guest pieces and special features, news from around the country, and a double-page year planner highlighting some of the major events we are organising this year. We have a feature on Pope Francis and the media, a report on setting up a new traditional Catholic youth group in Nottingham, and a fascinating article about the Vatican Archives (much more interesting than it might sound!). We have a report of a retreat organised by the Institute of Christ the King in north Wales. Plus our popular family notebook column, our regular column on Catholic art, comment and opinion pieces, our quarterly look back into the LMS archives from past decades, your letters, and a prize crossword, plus full listings of Traditional Masses across England and Wales, and much more besides.