Category Archives: Religious

Chaput=Kaput for the Church

06 Sunday Nov 2016

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The US ‘National Catholic Reporter’ is very interesting this week on bishops.
One writer points out that ‘Some of our bishops are determined to hunker down behind the battlements and dream of past illusory glories, praying for a holier church, even if that means we have to cast off a few members.’ He adds ‘I seem to remember a parable about a shepherd who leaves his flock of 99 to search for one lost sheep. How does that parable fit with the plans of those church leaders who want to bar the doors and draw the curtains ?’
Interestingly enough, his question is answered in the same edition by an Archbishop Chaput of Philadelphia on October 19th.
Now our readers know our views on the concept of the Tridentine priest as an ‘alter Christus’ , and whether we should laugh or just cry. But here, articulated beautifully, is its logical enough conclusion, the Tridentine bishop as ‘supra Christus’
Archbishop Chaput , naturally, enough, is a St Pope John Paul bishop, although the point of view he expresses has also been an Emeritus Pope Benedict one.
He says ‘But we should never be afraid of a smaller lighter church if her members are also more faithful, more zealous, more missionary and more committed to holiness ’. He objects to a secularising culture and a political agenda that’ ‘leaches out strong religious convictions in the name of liberal tolerance’….True enough, but he then accuses them of transferring ‘our real loyalties and convictions from the old church of our baptism to the new “church” of our ambitions and appetites’.
Notice the skilful use of ‘real loyalties and convictions’ , ‘the old church of our baptisms’ the inverted commas round ‘church’ Loaded terminology is a useful weapon, but the last three or four words are in the shoot to kill class :‘Our ambitions and appetites’. Extensive teaching of emotive language and connotation in our English classes nowadays means that this kind of kidology no longer really works and worse still for its proponents, is easily seen as kidology.
We compliment him on not mentioning Canon Law directly. But what does he mean by ‘appetites’, if anything other than just being offensive? Could it be that ‘they’ have ‘appetites’; he has spiritual aspirations and is therefore not ‘as others?
There is so much to comment on in his remarks, but all we’ll say is that it strikes us as being a classic example of institution vs. The Christian message.
The first writer in that edition quotes a sister in religion: ‘Leadership fixated on preservation may actually be losing the future.’
On the other hand, Bishop Robert Lynch of St Petersburg ,Florida was quoted in the ‘Tablet’ of November 5th, that he was appalled by Archbishop Chaput’s proposal for a ‘smaller, purer’ church.
Archbishop Chaput is a member of the Prairie Band Potawatomi tribe, and the first Native American archbishop. His Potawatomi name is ; ‘the wind that rustles the leaves of the trees’
We will leave it at that

We Will Follow ‘Follow, Follow’ !

16 Sunday Oct 2016

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This blog is based in Glasgow and Central Scotland. So far it has reflected the views of a very large section of the world-wide community of Catholics, and joined with them in deploring the apparent inability of the Tridentine priesthood to realise that it no longer functions as it did.

We have had a wide variety of readers from all points of the compass. It occurs to us, given the extent of world-wide media information, that spiritual life in Glasgow and Central Scotland can demonstrate a more complex texture than we have hitherto explored on this blog. It is perhaps enough –and many of our US readers will understand this perhaps better than our loyal South American readers- that this not unconnected with the Irish background of Catholic life in Glasgow and Central Scotland.
We halt to add that this is not a pro-Irish blog, nor an anti-Irish blog, Irish by background though we are. But, when discussing Catholicism, we do share some of the irritation felt by Churchill after World War I, when he saw ‘the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone ‘ emerging once again. Again, we have to agree with Sir Walter Scott : “I never saw a richer country, or to speak my mind, a finer people; the worst of them is the bitter and envenomed dislike which they have to each other. Their factions have been so long envenomed, and they have such narrow ground to do their battle in, that they are like people fighting with daggers in a hogshead.”. Both obviously deal with Ulster.
The problems of Ulster need not concern us, since they appear to concern property disputes from the seventeenth century. We are aware that hundreds of people are killed by suicide bombers daily as to whether Mohammed should have been succeeded by relatives or not in the eighth century. Neither is a credit to organised religion, as we are so often told by liberal opinion, although we feel that this is just an excuse for any kind of stigma with which to thrash a dogma. As a matter of interest, neither money nor sex , with their chequered histories of impact on daily life, shall we say, ever seem to be held up for similar criticism.
Anyway, we are not interested in Ulster culture, and we want to get it out of the way in this blog as quickly as possible. . But it does impinge upon Catholic life in Scotland . We would like to look at one aspect of it- and we suspect that not merely our US readers and our South American readers, but indeed those on other planets- if any- will find it intriguing. It is the tendency of some of our fellow citizens to take up a different theological position by demonstrating their alternative viewpoint by marching through our towns occasionally in costume with musical accompaniment. Sometimes this is given a semi-balletic dimension, and while we are sure this is not the intention of the marchers, regrettably this complements the theme tune of those apparently most theologically opposed to the Church. The refrain expresses the desire of this group to march up to the knees in Fenian blood ,a point of view often expressed by the gait of the marching bands.
‘Fenian’ here is a not very subtle code word for ’Catholic’. To save our readers heading for Wikipedia, it refers to a nineteenth century Irish revolutionary group, whose successes were in inverse ratio to those of them which were organised in the back rooms of pubs. It was condemned by Pope Pius IX in 1870 at the special request of the bishops of Ireland. At the moment we cannot go into exactly why ‘Fenian’ should therefore mean ‘Catholic’ in Scotland in 2016, nor frankly do we particularly care, but we assure you that it does. Illegitimacy does not as yet have the same politically incorrect clout as colour or race, but you can take it from us that this delay is thoroughly exploited in Glasgow and Central Scotland by those of a different theological position. In fact, the illegitimate factor always accompanies ‘Fenian’, producing a combination which is as semantically bizarre as it is, shall we say, uncharitable.
In Scotland, Catholics are unpopular. Our religion tries to follow Christ’s precepts , among them to bring the Eucharist to the world. Obviously, the ministers of our religion have done nothing recently which would change that hostile point of view. And that is certainly the most charitable statement of the case as we can make without yielding to physical nausea.
We feel it is our duty to look at why our fellow Christians dislike us and therefore the message which we bring.

Why are Catholics disliked in Scotland ? We propose to look into this

What This Blog Is For

11 Tuesday Oct 2016

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Our quarterly reminder of what this blog is for.
It lends its support to the Pope, to many Bishops and to the dozens of Catholic groups who have advocated the extension of ordination. This is important because about 50,000 parishes throughout the world have no priest. Apart from not being able to receive the Eucharist as Our Lord asked at the Last Supper, they have no spiritual life. Extending ordination to parishioners would end this situation.
It is also of particular importance as China becomes the leading world power. The spiritual hunger of the Chinese people has become obvious over the last forty years or so as millions tried to find spiritual satisfaction in the weird Falun Gong cult. They are well aware of the deficiencies of the defunct Tridentine priesthood. Can we ask them to accept it ?
All that is required, we repeat, is the election by parishioners of some other parishioners to say Mass and provide the Sacraments, but not preach, the Sacrament of Reconciliation being provided by General Absolution once the nonsense about sins having to be forbidden twice is forgotten.
Our message is simple. There is nothing that the now defunct Tridentine priesthood did that cannot be done by a validly ordained layman. To deny this is to deny the Apostolic Succession, which has carried the Incarnation by way of the Eucharist through the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution and the Age of the Dictators. It is carrying it through the onslaught of Islam. It will continue to carry it Christ Himself has assured us into an unimaginable future .
The Tridentine priesthood served its purpose well. The encrustations of possibly inevitable handicaps like celibacy to protect church property , but without the spiritual energy of poverty and obedience, the burden of unnecessary theological intellectualism, and the straitjacket of institutionalised tradition have paralysed it, just as an old ship is slowed and brought to a halt by barnacles and marine growths. . And it has been effectively scuttled by some of its crew.
We repeat : there is nothing that the Tridentine priesthood did that cannot be done by validly ordained laymen. To deny this is to deny that the Apostolic Succession as a vehicle for the Eucharist and the message of the Incarnation for the future.
Those bishops who cannot accept this may be misguided , or not very bright or whatever. Why are they unwilling to tell us why ?

When will the facts be faced ?

02 Sunday Oct 2016

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An excuse for the Germans used to be “intelligent but misguided’. Apparently it’s not just misguided . Thanks once again to the ‘Tablet’ – and who knows where we would be without it in Britain? The Central Committee of German Catholics, the umbrella organisation of lay Catholics and Catholic organisations , 20 million strong ,sponsored a debate on the drop in vocations in Germany. Although at least they do have such an organisation, unlike us. But even the president of this, Thomas Sternberg ,was ready to ‘demand that proven lay people be ordained’. He also wanted married deacons to be ordained, but let’s stay serious at the moment.
The word ’proven’ connects with a priest we were speaking to last week. Two boys had passed by him, one of whom he knew from a previous parish. He said, ’Oh, hello, Father’; the other said quite clearly ’paedophile !’. The priest’s reaction to this was interesting. Rightly, he took the second to task for his impertinence. The terrifying thing is not the word, quite inapplicable in his case, but that this reaction to it seemed to be his only one.
Although otherwise highly intelligent, he still seems to be living in an age when the Tridentine priesthood meant something. Even ten years ago, would that situation have been possible ? We have moved on far from the age when parish priests ruled their fiefs like mediaeval barons, when even the most ordinary Catholic priests were treated with respect, even if only because of their office as providers of the Eucharist. But that was then. Now they can be insulted in the street, even if there is plenty of proof of what the boy felt when he saw a priest.
Even if Tridentine priests have to accept eventually that ordained laymen can provide the Eucharist just as effectively as they can, the ordained laymen would apparently have to be ‘proven’ .
‘Proven’ to whom? ‘Proven’ in what? Can this conceivably mean found satisfactory to some group of Tridentine priests? The local press has provided in recent years a variety of reasons why this is going to be very difficult to take seriously . It is not too much to say that the Tridentine priesthood is now an obstacle to our relationship with Christ.
And we must not forget the efforts of the media in this, especially television. Whatever its motives- and what actually can they be- the BBC has worked well at this, in particular on the lines that Anglican curates are largely imbecilic. I think ‘Father Brown’ is an ITV product. The character obviously can hardly be depicted as an imbecile , but wears the ridiculous shovel hat, actually only found in Rome, to make sure he is never confused with real Catholic priests. As the poet once said, ‘others abide our question- thou art free’, and undoubtedly ‘Father Ted’ is the apotheosis of anti-religious proselytism There is apparently a humourous dimension to this programme ; would that there was one to the present position of the Tridentine priest.
When ordained parishioners are accepted, if there is still a Catholic Church in which they can function, it will probably be found that few of these negative qualities exist in the average parish. If they do, their proponents are likely to be well known to the parishioners who alone should have the right to elect . ‘Proven’ must now mean , and we can forget its slightly pejorative connotations here ,’ proved’ only to their fellow parishioners. Any other concept of ‘proven’ would be ludicrous. The German sense of humour is apparently elusive, but two expressions currently in colloquial use express degrees of derisive disbelief : one is ‘You’re having a laugh’, and the other is LOL (‘laugh out loud’ to non-texters) . Both are applicable, especially when we are talking about the approbation of those who satisfied the criteria of an organisation which takes five or six years to assess its entrants, and which has so spectacularly failed to do so accurately. For sheer arrogant dismissiveness, the use of ‘proven’ by the Tridentine priesthood – or some of them- takes a bit of beating.
To get back to the Germans and the other side of the argument: as the Australians would say,’ No worries’ in any case. Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki of Cologne said ’relaxing the rule of celibacy would not help the situation.’ Oh well, that sorts that out. Silly us! He said a new evangelisation is called for, to acquaint or re-acquaint people with the Gospel message. We should all, of course, have thought of that ! OK, there’s a tiny problem in that if there are no more vocations, then there will be no more Church, but the cardinal offers no explanation of how it should be done. A topmost cherry on the Schwarzvalde Kirchetorte, or Black Forest gateau for those who haven’t been to a high class funeral lunch in a hotel recently, was provided by the German bishops’ conference director of vocations, Fr Michael Maas, who said that the root problem was that the church was not flourishing , and it was crucial to win young people back into church. As they used to say in our youth ’Waow’! How lucky we all were that such intellects did not play a more important part in recent German history!
We ask again- and not for the first time- what is special about the Tridentine priesthood as a provider of the Eucharist? Where in the Gospels is this found ? Please tell us what you think. Is there some kind of rationale behind this? Any kind of rationale? Or is it simply a very open and frank refusal to accept the validity of the Sacrament of Holy Orders ?

A Cardinal on Bishops

11 Sunday Sep 2016

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Cardinal Nichols has come up with a couple of good ones, as he sometimes does. You may remember his comment on a spiritual communion as opposed to receiving the Eucharist. The Catholic Herald tells us that this week he remarked ’Governance in the name of Jesus has no trace of the patterns of the world’s ways- lording it over them ,’ emphasising that it ‘ was a call to ‘serve’ If by ‘has no trace’ he meant ‘should have no trace’, his comment , of course, could hardly be more correct. Otherwise it flies in the face of common experience. An embarrassing moment at a recent public meeting in Glasgow was the speaker referring to a bishop in indirect speech as ‘M’lord’.
‘In my humble experience, ordination as a bishop brings with it a more radical change than even the change wrought by ordination’ was another comment. ‘( We wrestle here with the temptation to comment on the word ‘wrought’ as opposed to ‘made’ or ‘created’, but we fight it and move on. )
If he means here that ordination as a bishop takes him in 2016 even farther away from what a Tridentine priest is supposed to be doing , he is absolutely correct. The Tridentine priesthood in 2016 is practically defunct. The episcopacy then, and we must imagine that he refers at least to the British episcopacy here, has no interest in providing the Eucharist.
But we knew that, of course, last November, when the Bishops of England and Wales ignored a suggestion to consider extending ordination, although the Pope had just before allowed this to the Eastern Church.
If this is the ‘radical change’ which he feels is brought by being ordained bishop, i.e a quite deliberate refusal to follow the example of the Pope, it is one to which he is welcome.
One recalls again the observation of a child on seeing the late Princess Margaret at some function, and enquiring loudly, ’But what is that lady FOR?’
One must ask with equal curiosity, what are the bishops of England and Wales FOR in 2016 if not to do what the Pope asks them ? Especially if what he asks them will bring the Eucharist to many more of the Flock?

Celibacy and the Bulldog Breed

24 Wednesday Aug 2016

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It is a time when the provision of the Eucharist, despite Christ’s specific request at the Last Supper is grinding to a halt. Despite this there are still people advocating one of the things which is causing this, ie. the necessity for those providing it to be celibate.
We found two beside each other on the web, one on the ‘Catholic Herald’ website, although we stress that they are blogs, and that the magazine does try to let all voices be heard.
The headline of the first is: ‘Those who want to overturn the ancient discipline are energetic, well organised and influential’ , exactly the language use about the Communist Party in the Forties. The writer manages to bring in the BBC programme about St Pope John Paul II’s romantic life ‘to illustrate how alien the idea of celibacy has become in today’s culture’. Anyway, it asks us finally to examine the ’profound implications of changing such a time honoured discipline’, without saying what these are.
Another begins with ‘The debate on married priests is damaged by mythmaking’ .He hits us , tellingly, with a reference to Hugh of St Victor, who with others, ’developed the theology of marriage as something holy’. Hugh of St Victor, OK? You know, Hugh of St Victor. Anyway, it wasn’t right for married men to leave their wives to become priests., and points out that permission to do this, because it is so rare, is now reserved to the Holy See. His conclusion is that ‘Celibacy, the choice of unmarried men for the priesthood became normal precisely because marriage is holy and a sacrament’.
You don’t have to be an oenologist to know that the bottom of the barrel is not going to provide many prizes for vintage. But we are more interested in the opening of this one, with the magic words ‘the debate on married priests’ .
Here we go again. As you will know, the expression ‘married priest’ seems to be deliberately used to strike at a tradition which has now become almost an instinct. It produces a revulsion at the idea of our Tridentine priests being married with families and all the consequence- the precise position of their mothers in law in the parish, chasubles stained by children’s jammy fingers, and the ends of amices being soaked by washing up water as Father does the dishes after he comes in from confessions.
It is rather tricky to mention St Pope John Paul at all on celibacy, as the first writer does, since his lyrical advocacy of celibacy is quite jarring when compared with his welcome to converting Anglican clergy with families. His own complex relationship with someone else’s wife is confusing, to say the least, and probably also to him.
Group solidarity is one of the most powerful of human relationships, especially when cemented by a feeling of common hardship. Think about it. But one despairs of wondering when the Tridentine priesthood will get over this, and remember why they are members of the Tridentine priesthood. Which is to provide the Eucharist.
Its day is done, and there are 50,000 parishes without priests to prove the point and a world shortage of ‘vocations’ . We need a new way to provide the Eucharist. And the valid ordination of parishioners to provide it is the way ahead.
What will it take, before it’s too late ?

Archbishop Martin and the Glass Ceiling

31 Sunday Jul 2016

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Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin can talk good sense, as in his use of the phrase ‘credibility deficit’ when speaking of Irish Catholics and the Church, on paedophily, when suggesting that the Vatican deal a little quicker with things and on other occasions. But he is still trapped under the glass ceiling.
Cardinal Burke is not a favourite on this blog, but we have to object to Archbishop Martin commenting on the Cardinal’s recent book, in particular its view that Islam seeks to rule the world and that the only solution is to return to its Christian roots. He was unfortunate enough to remark ‘I don’t think that helps at all ’ ,considering that he also thought that interreligious tensions are caused by inequalities and the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. To be fair, he did add perceptively that long-term solutions would come from education.
Cardinal Marx said he felt the intention of the act of terror in the French church (the murder of the parish priest) was to stir up hatred between religions.
Now is it the long years of training away from the world which they see themselves as the only possible means of changing, or too much brooding about the early Fathers of the Church , but how do churchmen get this way ? Where are all those cynical, world-weary but worldly, sophisticated old clerics like Cardinal Richelieu when you need them?
The two Moslems- and may they rest in peace- who entered the French church, cut the throat of the old parish priest and took hostages , armed only with knives , in a country where every policeman carries a gun and special security units are on high alert, knew what they were doing. They were not interested in inequalities, or the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, or in their lack of education. They were committing suicide in slow motion by security squad , so that each could meet his 72 virgins. They knew that they would not get out of that church alive. And they didn’t care. And what can be done about that ?
And yet, Archbishop Martin , quizzed on TV, did say that the only way to combat evil is ‘by bringing a similar force of goodness into our society’, without expanding on this, adding that ’goodness will always win in a combat with evil’ . Left at that, his statement that ‘I don’t think that helps at all’ is ironic. Especially when he must know that there is a way of ‘bringing a similar force of goodness into our society’ and yet , as a bishop under Pope Francis, he shows little interest like his fellow bishops in bringing it,i.e. ordaining parishioners to provide the Eucharist.
We wonder more and more if the six years of theological education undergone by the Tridentine priesthood is in fact simply a form of celibacy training. They must pick up some other stuff, surely.
Pope Benedict points out :’We cannot approach the Eucharistic table without being drawn into the mission which, beginning in the very heart of God, is meant to reach all people. Missionary outreach is thus an essential part of the Eucharistic form of the Christian life.’
Or as St John says,’..you are in Me, and I am in you’ .
50,000 parishes are without clergy, ie a Tridentine priest, theologically educated, celibate and parish supported, and therefore unable to receive the Eucharist.
And yet Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin and his fellow bishops are unwilling to accept Pope Francis’s invitation to discuss extending ordination to parishioners, and therefore providing the Eucharist to all, and therefore ‘bringing a force of goodness into our society’ and to the world.
We ask, as we have done so often on this blog, why in Heaven’s name, not ? Why can’t the Tridentine priesthood let go ?

St Maeve’s and The Sacrament of Matrimony

24 Sunday Jul 2016

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We have been prevailed upon, once again, to permit a little carefully controlled nostalgia into the blog, despite our fears as to the popularity of life in St Maeve’s among our presumably elderly readers. Our caveat is as always- those were the days and they’re not coming back ! They can’t !
The Sacrament of Matrimony is far from dead. Weddings have in fact been canonised, or the equivalent in a secular society, by being given what might be called a culture slot on television. Actually up there with sharks, Stephen Fry, Hitler, Egyptian mummies and the dissection of bizarrely murdered corpses, on programmes like CSI
In St Maeve’s, in the Forties and Fifties, a marriage was a marriage, but a wedding was also a wedding . A choice of time other than ten o’clock Mass was considered to be Bohemian. Nuptial Mass, with Papal Blessing, preordered from the Vatican in a cardboard cylinder, with exotic postage stamps from the Vatican City itself, was statutory.
It was the custom as a new baby was going to its christening to give a “christening piece”, a bread and butter sandwich with a coin , as a gift to the first child met on the way to the Church. As dead nowadays is the custom of scattering money to children as the bridal car left the Church , both gone thanks to potential litigation on the grounds of food poisoning on the one hand, and possible injury under the wheels of the car on the other.
Wedding photographs are now taken at the reception, and in a world full of conspiracy theories which are not always just theories , it is possible to believe that the amount of time it takes to produce the wedding photographs is the result of an arrangement between the photographer and the bar staff . The impact of this delay on guests who have been unwise enough to approach the wedding Mass on an empty stomach can be considerable, even if it is an effective anaesthetic for some of the speeches.
The thousands of cabinet photographs still in existence also show that white weddings are comparatively modern. Good suits and “costumes” were the order of the day for bridegroom and bride, and for most people. The photographs were limited in scope to the bride and groom, and probably also the best man and best maid, sometimes in a photographer’s studio, and that at the double. Little attention was paid to the possibility that low-grade members of the groom or bride’s party might be offended by the omission of their poses, however artistically arranged in these photos, or to the rather improbable possibility of the photos being reprinted in “Vogue”.
Next stop was the wedding breakfast, in Glasgow in places like the Ca’doro, for the well fixed, or Miss Buick’s, or for most others the many branches of the City Bakeries. At that time, it was still possible for the Best Man to make the statutory thanks to the Best Maid without embarrassing the entire company and the catering staff. A problem still to be solved after the meal itself , for the Best Man, and one which still exists, was what was to be done with the wedding telegrams. What does one do with wedding telegrams? It is easy to read out “Best wishes from Bert and Maisie- and remember yon day in Palma?”. It is difficult , as a Best Man, to bring the emotional impact of this telegram home to a company, when it is painfully obvious to everyone that neither the bride nor bridegroom can remember who Bert and Maisie were, or what happened yon day in Palma, and exactly how they are supposed to respond to this. . Once the painful ritual of telegrams is over, nowadays, the dancing begins. But before weddings were held in functions suites, the guests simply went to the cinema, family parties to follow.
Earlier wedding breakfasts,before and at the turn of the 20th century, were held at home, the guests appearing after a twelve hour day at work whenever they could. This meant that weddings could last for several days. It is a family tradition that on one occasion, a four day wedding celebration disintegrated only after the groom, who had been present obviously throughout the celebrations, and whose perceptions had become increasingly blurred took exception to the best man being described as such, and what are euphemistically described as ructions ensued. The lengthy wedding breakfast survived until the Fifties, and especially among the Italian community, and I recall my father and mother appearing several times, on several days, at the same Italian wedding .
Wartime shortages affected our lives , sometimes permanently, and without our realising how much , the impact being forgotten as time goes on. One of these was the paper shortage, which restricted the size of all newspapers. The local “Scottish Catholic Observer” suffered from this, and from it went the rather pleasant prewar way in which it described weddings. For instance, :
” A wedding of great interest took place in St
Patrick’s Anderston on Thursday morning when Joseph, eldest
son of Mr and Mrs James Kelly, of 17 McIntyre Street,
Anderston, was joined in holy matrimony to Alice Moira,
eldest daughter of Mr and Mrs John McKerrell, 39
McIntyre Street. The ceremony was performed with
Nuptial Mass by Rev. Father Lynch.
The bride, who was a well-known member of
the choir, looked charming in a pretty dress of duck egg
blue georgette, embroidered with powder blue silk, with
flounced skirts and puffed sleeves, with straw hat to
match. In place of the usual bouquet, the bride carried a
missal. The bridesmaid, Miss Annie McKerrell,M.A.,sister
of the bride, wore a beautiful dress of floral ninon, having
a coatee with puffed sleeves and a silver lace bodice and a
large picture hat of blue. She also carried a missal.”

As well as this, there followed the entire guest list, and therefore a wonderful souvenir of the occasion. In an era in which the Sacrament of Matrimony is under attack from some remarkably bizarre angles, perhaps the Catholic press might consider reviving this treatment of one of the Church’s most important Sacraments.

Teilhard de Chardin and Cardinal Sarah

17 Sunday Jul 2016

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Teilhard de Chardin conceived the idea of Omega Point, a maximum level of complexity and consciousness to which he believed the universe was evolving. Well, if you’ve still to finish decorating the back bedroom or cleaning out the car- relax. Judging by some churchmen, this may not be for a week or two.
We’re doing this blog without having looked at the response to last week’s, but we are geared up to cope with any number of congratulations on how well we sussed out Cardinal Robert Sarah , as the comment from the Vatican showed. The expression ‘slapped down’ has been freely used. As a priest pointed out in the Tablet;’When we stopped muttering Latin over infants and over couples on their wedding day, and over corpses, we did more than make the prayers intelligible. We said we belong to the same world as the rest of you.’ He adds ’We need to ask if our notion of God is inspired by looking outside of our world and mediated by the priest who stands between God and us. That was certainly an important part of the Tridentine theology of worship, expressed by the spatial arrangement the cardinal is promoting, ‘ This point, you must agree, is most beautifully made. We borrow it with acknowledgments to the Tablet.
Spielberg’s otherwise superb ’A Bridge of Spies’ contained several scenes which we found unspielberglike. We checked on Wikipedia, to find that he was – inexplicably- assisted by the famous Coen Brothers, there apparently to pick out the humourous aspect of nuclear annihilation in 1961. Having been there at the time, we found this a demanding concept to grasp. Anyway, although the Church is functioning and no more ,due to the shortage of people permitted to provide the Eucharist, there is also a humourous- if unintentional- aspect to this. Practically the next day , a blog , that of a Catholic clergyman, leapt into action to defend the good cardinal. Apparently under the assumption that those of its readers who were not Tridentine priests needed help, it provided two drawings, in sets of two. One was a priest facing the congregation with a crucifix at his back. One was a priest with his back to the congregation facing the crucifix. We have to sympathise here with Catholic apologists who have spent years of their lives assuring non-Catholics that we don’t worship statues- even crucifixes. For particularly dense lay readers of the blog, the other pair was of a bus. In one, the driver was driving the bus and looking ahead. But in the other, he was driving the bus with his back to the road. Talk about putting your cards on the table !
The same blog if we understand it correctly- tears of laughter can so interfere with accurate comprehension- suggests that young Catholics find this attitude to Cardinal Sarah’s suggestion as ‘reactionary’. We’ll leave that with you at the moment. We simply repeat the mantra of this blog, excluding as ever the religious orders.:
Only Tridentine priests can provide the Eucharist. At the moment.
There are now practically no Tridentine priests coming up to do this.
Therefore the Flock cannot receive the Eucharist as Christ commanded.
We have no artists in the group, so we can’t provide a drawing.
But you get it, don’t you?

East, West-it’s the Mass that’s best

10 Sunday Jul 2016

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Blog Sarah
While we were away- and we’re not saying the two are necessarily connected- Cardinal Sarah has been in the headlines of the ecclesiastical press. Cardinal Sarah wishes his name to be pronounced with stress on the second syllable, and he was made a cardinal by Pope Benedict. Anyway, he would like priests to begin celebrating Mass ad orientem, ‘that is facing east rather than the congregation’, the Catholic Herald tells us.
He said we should have confidence that ‘this is something good for the Church, good for our people.’ Having heard once that God doesn’t like families who celebrate the First Communion of a child with a bouncy castle, if we understood correctly, we are a little bit cautious about accepting sweeping statements like that of Cardinal Sarah too quickly. But we have decided that we cannot any longer resist the temptation to say ‘Well, que sarah, sarah’.
But we will point out that the good cardinal’s wish , of course, is going to present many Glasgow parishes with problems. In St Andrew’s Cathedral it means we’ll see the priest’s right profile, and in Our Lady of Perpetual Succour his left. It seems at first sight like business as usual in St Aloysius or St Patrick’s, although how this can be done without facing the congregation is tricky. The priest could do it if he stands at the back of the church, right enough.
‘How shall the world be served ?’ as one of Chaucer’s characters remarks.
This praying to the east is a very old idea, although the great Christian intellectual Origen commented that ‘the reasons for this, I think, are not easily discovered by anyone’ , and this in the fourth century.
St Charles Borromeo – he was like that- said if you’re going to build churches designed for this east thing, then get a compass and do it exactly right. He also said he didn’t care if it had to be done north and south. Even more interestingly, he also said the altar could be at the west end where- and this is the interesting bit- ‘in accordance with the rite of the Church it is customary for Mass to be celebrated at the main altar by a priest facing the people’ . No wonder Wikipedia says that today the custom is ‘little observed’
Cardinal Sarah also remarked that it is essential that priest and faithful look together towards the East, again without saying why. We , on this blog, can hardly let the whole thing go without pointing out that it is also a symbolic representation of the Tridentine priest as leader of the congregation.
That, it has to be accepted even by Cardinal Sarah, was then. This is now.