LMS Pilgrimage to Aylesford, Sat 3rd October

This is the first time, certainly in recently years, that we've been able to arrange a High Mass, rather than a Missa Cantata. The celebrant will be Fr Marcus Holden. The music, provided by Matthew Schellhorn and his group Cantus Magnus, promises to be a treat as well.

Aylesford is an important shrine, a great example of the reconstruction of Catholic England, that was going on right into the 1950s.

Dietrich von Hildebrand on beauty, 4: Raising hearts to God

A.W. Pugin's stunning chapel at St Edmund's College, Ware, draws the eye,
and thus the attention and the heart, to the centre of the Sacrifice of the Mass.

Concluding this series of quotations from Dietrich von Hildebrand's Trojan Horse in the City of God, mostly from chapter 26, a final section addresses the question of the role of beauty lifting our hearts to God: perhaps a hackneyed phrase, but for something which, surely, we all feel. It is a theme taken up in recent times by Pope St John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, who talk of the via pulchritudinis, the Way of Beauty, as a form of evangelisation.

Beauty helps form us in the Faith and helps us to become holy. If we take this idea seriously, we will concur with the attitude of the Liturgical Movement which wanted to rid the liturgy and devotions of aesthetic elements which struck the wrong note, in the first half of the 20th century: most obviously, sentimental hymns and art. Far, far worse, however, is the invasion of our churches by various forms of pop music in more recent decades. It is not just a matter of giving the audience aesthetic pleasure, but of engaging with them in the right way and to the right end: this brings us back to the earlier arguments in this series, against aestheticism and on the question of beauty as an adequate expression of worship, serving worship and not distracting us from it to its own, alien, theme.

A new liturgical gesture - the camera?

Seeing these images floating around the internet in connection with Papal liturgies in the USA is pretty depressing. It is not as if these priests would not be able to access far better photographs and videos after the event, taken by professionals from specially selected locations. The photos or videos they are taking don't even feature themselves in these cases - the ones that do, of course, are even more depressing. (Fr Stephen Paolino: a name to live forever on Istagram, in infamy.)

What is it we are seeing? I suppose these men live in a society where the social media is ubiquitous, where family events go up instantly onto Facebook and so on. (Where I live, the mobile signal isn't good enough.) Can't they see the difference between a barbecue with cousin Bob and a Mass with the Holy Father?

Clearly, they can't. Their sense of the seriousness of the liturgy has disappeared, if it ever existed. Even when the solemnity of the occasion is increased to the highest possible pitch, with the Pope himself celebrating Mass in a vast cathedral with bishops and all the bells and whistles, it makes no difference. They have, to be fair to them, been trained to treat the liturgy as much as possible as something where the rules of ordinary life still obtain, rather than something special and different.

To meet the ordinary man and woman the liturgy must be ordinary. To transform ordinary life, the liturgy must be as like as possible to ordinary life. This is an ideology which would have dominated many of the seminaries these men attended in the 1970s and 1980s, and since. It is one of those counter-intuitive things which are completely wrong.

The Holy Father's liturgies in the USA, as elsewhere, are undeniably special occasions. Lots of people turn out for them; they get lots of coverage. Are they going to be special in a religious way, in a prayerful way, in a way connected with the worship of God, or are they going to be special in a Holywood way, a 'celebrity' way, a way like events are special because you get to see Clint Eastwood in the flesh?

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Special Mass at St Walburge's, Preston, Sunday 27th Sept

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'Call Mission Journey': Looking into the Abyss

For an astounding example of self-flagellation, the results of the survey commissioned by the Bishops of England and Wales on the family, The Call, the Mission and the Journey, takes some beating.

From a statistical point of view the survey is completely meaningless. Responses to a series of questions have been provided by a self-selecting group of people, partly online and partly offline. These have then been cherry-picked and collated by some functionary of the Bishops' Conference, and the result, with a little commentary, weighing in at 17,500 words, has been plonked on the web like an undigested potato.

Nevertheless, reading through it one hears the authentic voice of... middle class liberal Catholics aged between 50 and 70. We can be fairly specific about the age because almost all the references to children are to grown-up children and grandchildren. These are, in any case, almost the only people who would bother filling in a questionnaire of this sort, though many of them seem pretty annoyed about it.

'A number are critical of the way the questionnaire as a whole and this question [6] in particular were framed'

(Note the illiteracy, or at least the haste, of the functionary collating the responses.)

This splinter of the Church's demographic appears to be held in awe by the Bishops' Conference. Their opinions are apparently regarded as some sort of oracle, and the 'Bishops' response' (what bishops, I wonder?) is not exactly robust. It consists of a couple of pages of quotations from Pope Francis, a prayer, and a list of credal statements about marriage and the family which manages not to mention either indissolubly or sanctifying grace. Their approach appears to be inspired by Oscar Wilde:

'Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.

Dietrich von Hildebrand on beauty, 3: Irrelevance

The vast baldachino of Westminster Cathedral, built to frame and
emphasise the central rites of the Mass.

The final argument against the importance of beauty considered by Dietrich von Hildebrand in Trojan Horse in the City of God is that beauty is simply irrelevant to the proclamation of the Gospel and the salvation of souls.

He argues that while it may not be necessary, it does not follow that it is not significant.

First, the adequate expression of our worship requires beauty.

Second, beauty in the liturgy lifts our souls to God. 

This post is concerned with the first of these ideas; the second will be expounded in the next post. The first is the less familiar idea of the two, but it is an important one. Public worship is by definition a public act; it must involve words and rites of some kind: it must find some kind of expression, or it is not happening at all. What kind of expression should it have? Something ugly, plain, utilitarian or functionalist? No: Catholic liturgy, like the liturgies of all traditional religions, seeks its expression in the most beautiful fashion possible.

In this way, beauty is appropriate to the liturgy because it is called for by the greatness of the liturgy itself, and the God the liturgy serves. This is sufficient justification. Nothing we can do will be too good, too beautiful, to give expression to our worship.

Is singing in Latin wrong?

Panis angelicus, for singing in Latin,
with a Japanese translation.

This weekend's Catholic Universe draws my attention to a story which appears in The Times of Malta, about a priest who did not allow allow a Latin hymn - Panis angelicus, to be exact - to be sung at a funeral, because it was not in Maltese.

According to the Universe, the priest, Fr Carmelo Tanti, said that is wasn't right for something to be sung which the people wouldn't understand.

The Times of Malta is incredulous, and it appears that Archbishop Scicluna of Malta agrees with them.

A while ago I wrote a post on this blog about a Pastoral Letter from Archbishop Scicluna's predecessor, Archbishop Cremona, which appeared to be a veiled attack on the Traditional Mass. Let us hope that things look up under Archbishop Scicluna.

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