The classic example of the Jewish humour trope has been the man who murdered his parents then asked the judge for mercy because he was now an orphan. Well, perhaps until evening Mass in a Glasgow church at the weekend. Feinting with a quick reference to Pope Francis, he hit us with the difficulty of being a disciple. Especially being a priest, him and his fellow priests. What they need, he told us, is encouragement.
We’re all pretty poker-faced now in Church, but that was a strain for others too, I imagine. One of the things not going to plan was that apparently things can be arranged, and “not as many come as were expected”, etc. But ‘encouragement’ was the thing.
I know of only two moments of drama at Mass in a Glasgow church, possibly because those who would be interested in providing one now don’t come. I’m told that in one quite recently the priest said he had a surprise for the congregation, and a couple were to be married during Mass. A man with a young child stood up and said that wasn’t why he had come to this mass, and that it wasn’t the kind of surprise he appreciated, being there with a young child. The other occasion was when the parish priest had to apologise to the congregation for providing them with general absolution on a Christmas Eve, his fellow priest having taken ill, thus leaving a church with a large number of would-be penitents . This of course was the usual ‘Code of Canon Law’ nonsense.
Last night was a temptation, we must say. Some kind of congregation involvement must come. It’s bound to happen, and the sooner the better. Encouragement ? Encouragement ?? It was a bit like listening to Bishop Robson on Pope Francis, Jesuits in general, and ‘Pastors Not Princes’ and being ashamed of not having spoken up, although one person did, very courteously.
Encouragement ? To the Tridentine priesthood? To a group of people in whose hands the provision of the Eucharist rests almost exclusively, and which takes no heed of the Pope’s suggestion that ordination be extended to married parishioners, and who has already done this in the Eastern Church? To a group of people which in fact is preventing the Flock from receiving the Eucharist ?
The concept of ‘encouragement’ has apparently been re-defined . Never afraid of a ‘Titanic’ image when discussing the Church in 2016, we wonder if the passengers fighting for the boats would have been ‘encouraged’ by somebody punching another hole in the side of the liner from inside.
That was all bad enough, and believe us, it was bad enough. But just last week, the local broadsheet as obligingly as ever, provided yet another example of a dirty old man /priest brought to court for paedophily. Yes, another one.
Interestingly, this bizarre sermon may have a positive side. There is a well-supported belief that some animals may be able to detect not merely an oncoming earthquake, but also an oncoming tsunami. Is it possible – is it just possible-that an appeal for ‘encouragement’ suggests a subconscious realisation that perhaps all is not well ? That a microscopic crack has appeared in the adamantine carapace of the concept of ‘Alter Christus’ ? That perhaps the many websites like this which advocate that the Flock should be able to receive the Eucharist , even if it doesn’t suit the Tridentine priesthood, are getting through ?
In other words, is it being realised that Christ’s Eucharistic imperative , which can transform our world , does not have to be the exclusive property of the medieval concept of celibates with an intensive theological education and supported by a parish, but by newsagents, taxi-drivers or engineering technicians chosen by their parish , validly ordained and valid participants in the Apostolic Succession?
If so, why can’t we get on with it ?
We refer you to ‘kintsukorol’ or ‘kintsugi’, the Japanese method of repairing a treasured piece of porcelain by glue mixed with gold . The end product is therefore more valuable than the original. Why cannot our priests add the gold of their dedication and worthiness to the repair of the Church by throwing their weight behind a new kind of Church and enhancing it by getting behind the cause of extended ordination?

He has risen, as he said he would. Alleluia, alleluia.

“..in his accepting death as a human being and in his rising from the dead, he achieved a new phase of evolutionary existence for the human species, into which he could then usher his fellow humans. In this way he would save them from individual death and extinction, which appeared to be the evolutionary fate of all human things,and would impart to humans through that association with him that richer share and eternal communion in the divine Trinitarian life that is God’s evolutionary design for them ” (Jack Mahoney, SJ :’Christianity in Evolution’)

A great buzzword among what were called ‘conservative Catholics’ use to be ‘cafeteria Catholicism ‘. This of course was uncharitable at least, and possibly even intended to be offensive. It suggested a ‘pick and choose’ mentality rather than a considered opinion that something was past its best. Although why go to a cafeteria and choose to get food poisoning ?
Representatives of Glasgow’s clusters- ours is Cluster 21-were invited to St Andrew’s Cathedral on Monday evening. There was some kind of service, we presume. Then it and other clusters were to file through the Holy Door. The congregation was likely to be 70+, and on what was a chilly night- it is still March- they were to shuffle through the Holy Door. Any of them with any grasp of symbolism would no doubt try not to consider that other door they may well soon be going through, but that’s a detail.
The cathedral is situated on Clyde Street, a dangerous street for large crowds because one side of it is the bank of the river. Crowd control for those willing to see this procession will be essential/. But wait, there’ll be no teenagers there. Or few if any twenty-year olds. Or thirty-year olds, Or forty-year-olds. Or fifty-year olds. Or even positive thinking 60 year-olds. They have mostly given up on the Tridentine priesthood. Well, they live in Scotland .
This is an interesting service, this. Now Pope Francis inaugurated this ceremony as part of the Year of Mercy. So they’re doing what the Pope wants. But he has also asked for other things. Yes, you guessed- dialogue with his bishops about extending ordination. A possibly inebriated local theatregoer is said to have stood up in a Glasgow theatre after a particularly turgid drama of local interest , and cried ’Whaur’s your Wullie Shakespeare noo?’ (to translate for overseas readers: ‘Where is your W.S. now ?’) We would echo him simply by saying ‘ And where’s your cafeteria Catholicism now ?’ Why aren’t Scottish bishops discussing with us the possibility of extending ordination to parishioners and thus providing the Eucharist for more ? And just think of the impact on the Church if even Catholic Scotland, given O’Brien and all the rest of the sad paedophile parade, were to express their loyalty to the Pope by doing this? Who knows what other countries would follow?
Instead on Monday night, the Seventies, a group well used to shuffling through church doors behind a coffin, will be doing so behind this time an invisible coffin. Guess? Correct: the future of the Church in Scotland.
The Scottish episcopate is given to moving abroad at the turn of the year to one of its now disused seminaries in Spain- last year Salamanca, this year Valladolid, I’m told- to discuss what’s what. Abroad, of course, to gain maximum objectivity.
Was there a discussion about Getting Them Used To the Idea Of Clusters ? They’re going to have clusters and like it, so let’s go?
Once again, to put it colloquially, do they think we’re daft? Abraham Lincoln may be long dead, but his axiom on kidding the people lives on. The pioneering work of people like Vance Packard in ‘The Image Makers’ has been going on for about fifty years . Honest, we all know about consumer manipulation. Really, we do. Or are they inspired by the almost equally pedestrian if temporarily successful Scottish National Party image makers and their Wallace the Bruce, Rabbie Burns, Bannockburn, etc, etc, claptrap? And the free prescriptions, of course.
The great Thirties Catholic G.K. Chesterton controversialist once demolished the pietistic rhetoric of a famous advocate in a poem with the simple refrain :’Chuck it, Smith’.
We would say , equally simply, ‘Chuck it, bishops !’. Listen to the Pope. Accept that the Tridentine priesthood is not the only way to carry out Christ’s Eucharistic imperative. Think of the poor in huts and leantos in places like the Philippines and the Honduras. Give an example to the rest of the Church’s equally slow episcopates.
Instead of a rather elegiac backward-looking service like Monday’s, think what we might have had. Ordination services in local churches, with a group of parishioners, preferably young, duly ordained to provide the sacraments for the parish , and at ceremonies like it all over the world, new vitality breathed into the life of Catholic Scotland, and to parishes all over the world.
There’s an old saying : ‘A son is your son till he meets a wife, but a daughter’s your daughter for all of your life.’ In 1175 Pope Alexander made the then Diocese of Glasgow a ’Special Daughter of the Roman Church). Everybody- and we mean everybody- knows that it’s been a bit of a Prodigal Daughter, although not in the same class as Edinburgh, etc. Wouldn’t it be nice if the Archdiocese of Glasgow came back home to Pope Francis and said –right, Ordained Celebrants from the parishes, as you allowed in the Eastern Church-can we help? What a lift for the bruised and battered Catholics of the Archdiocese.
Face it. It’s even an Oscar winner. The day of the Tridentine priesthood is done.
Give the people the Eucharist. And again we ask as Holy Week approaches , why not ? Literally in Heaven’s name, why not?

The cult of the Last Stand has created what is almost an entire school of English painting. The most famous may be ‘The Last Stand of the survivors of Her Majesty’s 44th Foot at Gandamak’, but there’s plenty of them. Google and see.
This week in Glasgow we’ve begun the first stage of ‘The Last Stand of the Catholic Church in Scotland’, the withdrawal from the perimeter. How they’re to be clustered is being revealed to parishes.
The Last Stand is quite a study, actually, There are even rules of a kind, according to Wikipedia. It is essentially a defensive position. It’s a last resort tactic, and is chosen because the defending force realises the benefits of fighting outweigh the benefits of defeat or surrender. Don’t ask what the benefit of fighting is here. It seems to be a way of showing people who want to provide the Eucharist and the other sacraments that only Tridentine priests are going to get doing that here in Scotland, even if it means no Church eventually. It’s as simple as that. Catholic bishops in Scotland and in England and Wales too of course are in the huff, and they’d rather bring down everything than admit that any validly ordained parishioner can say Mass. By denying this, of course, they’re attacking Canon Law, having hid behind it since 1917.
Now nobody can deny that the Scottish clergy see what they are doing as a Last stand. There has been no attempt even to discuss, least of all with us, the Pope’s frequent offers to listen to his bishops on extended ordination, or to admit that in 2014 he permitted it in the Eastern Church , our fellow Catholics, all over the world. All we’re told is there are no priests. The matter of whose fault that is never seems to come up. Just to make it a good week, as well as STJP2’s romance , yet another old priest is in the papers for historic paedophily. 2+2 =4? Not here. It’s busy, busy, busy ,a preoccupation with clustering, about as big a problem as the average crossword puzzle. This process is described as if it were an abstruse physics problem, although it’s really very straightforward, we would think.
The only ‘enemy ‘we in TSTF can imagine they see is people who want to extend ordination to validly ordained parishioners .
The problem with Last Stands is that they are usually ordered by generals and officers. We obviously have would-be Custers among the Scottish hierarchy. Do they privately wonder who’ll be the last, the Scottish Catholic Episcopal Custer? Although he was a notorious halfwit, who disobeyed orders , causing the death over 200 men, who had little option but to what he said.
Why be a Custer at all ? The psychologists might suggest this desire is yet another problem of celibacy. They want to leave something behind them, but it can’t be a family. So it’s to be a reputation, that of people who were loyal to something to the end, in this case the Tridentine priesthood . As if future generations will feel anything but irritation and embarrassment. To leave behind for future generations of Church historians the label of being a Custer – well, it takes all kinds. This is just Kamikaze Clericalism. And it didn’t work for the kamikazes either.
We almost forgot the cause. You need a really good cause for a Last Stand, surely. And what is it in Scotland? Loyalty to the now defunct Tridentine priesthood? To Cardinal O’Brien? To group solidarity? To the idea that the Tridentine priesthood died to the last man, determined to prevent the Flock from getting the Eucharist unless they got to provide it?
We’ll say more about the famous six years of theological education in due course . But you’ve got to ask yourself if any time was spent on the Last Supper.

Our local broadsheet, ‘The Herald’ reported on January 12 2016 a statement by Archbishop Tartaglia on parish closure . You know the kind of thing . There was a mention of ‘clustering’, although not of the problems which this has caused elsewhere, say in Boston. His remarks displayed a diplomatic approach to the situation, and no exception could be taken to them.
But the final sentence of the article is worthy of careful examination, no mention of which is found elsewhere. We quote it:
‘ The Archdiocese also denied it was attempting to create superparishes and that only in some circumstances would formal amalgamations be an option, while some within the Church have accused the hierarchy of procrastination and seeking to avoid any conflict at all costs.’
Ignore the ‘superparishes’ bit, despite the element of humour which this introduces into a grim subject. Look again at the last clause.‘ ..while some within the Church have accused the hierarchy of procrastination and seeking to avoid any conflict at all costs.’
What we want to know is who are these ‘some’? They obviously resent the diplomacy with which Archbishop Tartaglia has broached the subject in general to an ageing and embattled Catholic population. Possibly, lacking his intellectuality, they simply don’t understand the concept of diplomacy. Surely it cannot be that, should they be clerics, they resent as well an apparent concession to mere layfolk? Dinosaurs, they say, may still survive in the depths of the Congo. But in Glasgow in 2016 ?
Look at the next phrase:‘accused…of seeking to avoid any conflict at all costs’. Now ‘within the Church’ can mean anything. But here we seem to have apparently spiritual(!) descendants of the old top-hatted parish priests, feudal barons in their own parishes, who, if only according to legend, armed with a blackthorn stick and (then) incomprehensible Latin abjurations, would soon knock sense into recalcitrant poor Paddies . Can there really still be lurking in the Archdiocese priests ordained according to the order of Melchisedek, whatever that may actually mean, spoiling for a fight ?
‘At all costs’ What costs? Listening to a flock which has had to cope with Cardinal O’Brien ? Which has had to cope with Currypowdergate in Lanarkshire ? Which has had to cope with an apparently unending succession of paedophile priests ? Which has had to cope with all this in their daily life at work and among neighbours in the bizarre sociological jungle which is life for Catholics in the West of Scotland ?
Who are these ’some within the Church’ mentioned in the article?
We would like to hear from them. If you know who they are, let us know. We would like to reason with them.