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Post by hibernicus on May 21, 2009 10:21:52 GMT
One of the things that is most disturbing about liberal Catholics (defined very broadly; there are exceptions to this) is their tendency to see doctrine in terms of power politics; they assume that when confronted with a teaching they don't like the appropriate response is not to submit (or to go away and reassess the teaching) but to disregard it out of hands and bring pressure on the Church authorities to change it (often invoking the secular media). The way in which the international network that grew out of the International Centre for Documentation at Vatican II lobbied in advance of HUMANAE VITAE to get Paul VI to change the traditional teaching, and then when they learned that it would be reaffirmed immediately switched to orchestrating a massive rejection of it by clerics and opinion-formers is the classic example of that. The memoirs of "Catholic progressive" journalists like Gary MacEoin and Robert Kaiser give an interesting (though characteristically arrogant and self-righteous) account of this process. What is also irritating is the pretence of many commentators that it was only the wicked conservatives who lobbied and organised at Vatican II, while the liberals were purely and spontaneously moved by the Spirit. I recently read a (very badly organised) book about religious liberty by a retired American bishop (who struck me as fundamentally orthodox) which spoke of the Coetus Patrum (the group of conservative Council Fathers organised by Archbishop Lefebvre and others of like mind) as if it existed at the outset of the Council and the liberals had to make headway against its formidable opposition. In fact the opposite was the case; Wiltgen's "Rhine group" of reformist bishops and theologians already existed at the start of the Council (though it crystallised and in some cases radicalised quite rapidly because so many of its members were brought out of relative isolation and able to share their doubts and concerns) whereas the Coetus only appeared later in the proceedings. The bishop is in fact conflating two separate phenomena. FIRST The curial cardinals like Ottaviani assumed they would be able to control the Council agenda and proceedings and got taken by surprise at the upsurge of resistance to this SECOND the conservatives then belatedly relised the need to organise their own support - hence the Coetus - and were able to limit but not stop the impetus of the reformers. I am not of course saying that the Coetus were all right and the reformers were all wrong; quite a few of the conservatives seem to have seen Franco Spain as the ideal model of Church-state relations, with what long-term results the world now knows, and the reformers soon divided between those who were trying to develop on the basis of the Church's traditions - the current Pope and his predecessor being a good example of this - and those who wished to treat Vatican II as the beginning of a new dispensation. At the Mass I attended last Sunday, the gospel was the baptism of Cornelius the centurion and his household by Peter, and in his sermon the priest quite casually mentioned the changes in the liturgy after Vatican II as an example of God calling us to change. Once we realise that many liberals regard Vatican II in the same light as the move from the Old to the New Covenant, their mindset becomes more comprehensible though noentheless wrong.
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Post by hibernicus on May 21, 2009 10:39:07 GMT
That last post rambled a bit; I was getting a couple of recent bits of reading off my chest. T follow up on alastair's point - a lot of offical Catholic self-presentation acted on the assumption that the Pope/metropolitan/bishop/religious superior always knew best and acted from the highest and most perfect and disinterested motives and to question him was like questioning God. There was total conflation of the man and the office. (This I think was John Charles mcQuaid's central failing; he assumed that because he was the archbishop of Dublin his authority was the authority of God, and any debate or questioning (a) virtually amounted to a revolt against God (b) served only to confuse the simple faithful whose duty ws summed up as obedience). In some respects this sort of governance works well so long as the leader does not make too many conspicuous mistakes, but when he does make them, or even when people realise that some thigns can be changed and are open to debate, it creates a collapse like the impact of European diseases on American Indians who had not previously been exposed to them. Over the next week or so I will concentrate on two series of posts dealing with these issues. The first, on this thread, will discuss the actual achievements as well as the limitations of the old style of centralised church leadership by reference ot a book called THE PRICE OF UNITY by Fr. Basil Maturin. Fr. Maturin, who came from a prominent Dublin Church of Ireladn family and was a celibate Anglo-catholic clergyman, converted to catholicism at the age of 50 for various reasons, one of which was the pastoral advantages of Roman unifortimty in discipline and doctrine as compared to Anglican factionalism. I had meant to post this on the SSPX Schism thread because the SSPX makes many of the same criticisms of the present-day church that he makes of Anglicanism, and they frequently accuse indult traditionalists of being like Anglican Ritualists, (i.e. putting a Catholic gloss on an organisation that at a fundamental level has ceased to be Catholic), but it may as well go here. The second series of posts will be on the old thread about "The scandals" and it will reflect on the horrors revealed in the just-released Industrial Schools report. No words could be adequate to discuss what was doen to those children, and I am not going to defend the indefensible; my discussion will centre on the extent to which the hopes with which these institutions were set up (e.g. the belief in strict observance of a Rule founded on obedience, the idea that religious life automatically conferred holiness and would allow the creation of institutions based on spontaneous Christian faith and love rather than what were perceived as soulless state bureaucracies, an inordinate concern with avoiding public scandal) contributed to these monstrosities.
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Post by hibernicus on May 27, 2009 17:41:56 GMT
Basil William Maturin (Basil was his name in religion) is pretty much forgotten today, but students of Irish literature will have heard of his family, for his grandfather Charles Robert Maturin was one of the leading Irish Gothic novelists (1780-1824), whose novel MELMOTH THE WANDERER depicts a man who has sold his soul to Satan. Basil Maturin is recalled as haivng a fondness for telling ghost stories, but these have not been preserved. The Maturins came to Ireland as Huguenot refugees, and Charles Robert's novels show a keen awareness of this heritage and a preoccupation with religious persecution (especially by Catholics). He was an extravagant man and his eccentiricites led to his being denied preferment; he died in reduced circumstances,and some have thought he committed suicide. Charles Robert Maturin's wife was the aunt of Jane Francis Elgee "Speranza", Oscar Wilde's mother; hence Basil Maturin was Wilde's cousin. I have no evidence that they knew each other, but I often wonder whether it is coincidental that the painter who creates the Portrait of Dorian Gray, and is murdered by his subject, is called Basil. Charles Robert Maturin's eldest son William (1806-87) became famous in Dublin for another reason. The Church of Ireland became more Evangelical during the nineteenth century, but he moved in the opposite direction; whereas his father had been a moderate High Churchman in eighteenth-century style, as Incumbent of Holy Trinity, Grangegorman, he became an Anglican Ritualist who adopted many Catholic practices. For example, he was the only Church of Ireland cleric who openly announced that he practiced auricular confession (i.e. private confession to a clergyman); the incumbent at St. Bartholemew's did so but only let this be known privately. The Dublin Evangelical Press raged against his adoption of such enormities as "the eastward psotion" (i.e. he celebrated services upon an altar against the wall at the east end of the church, so that celebrant and people face towards Jerusalem in memory of the Crucfixion and expectation of the Second Coming - as is the case with the Tridentine Mass) and his services were disrupted by Dublin Orangemen. After disestablishment the Church of Irleadn altered its service books and articles of faith to emphaisise a Protestant position (though they were limited in this by fear that they would be removed from the Anglican communion, then defined by the Book of Common Prayer, or that high Churchmen if driven out by the Church of Ireland might place themselves under Canterbury as in more recent times conservative Anglican parishes in liberal provinces have placed themselves under conservative bishops elsewhere in the world). William Maturin and a few others continued to use the pre-disestablishment books and were tolerated for fear of an open split. William Maturin attracted some intense young men to his services, of whom some later became Catholics while others continued as they were. The most famous were the subsequent Catholic Modernist George Tyrrell and the anglo-Catholic slum missionary RR Dolling (who came from Kilrea in Co. Londonderry). His children were brought up to observe many Catholic devotional practicies. He had ten, of whom two became anglican nuns and three were ordained to the Anglican ministry - two subsequently converting to Catholicism and being ordained priests. Tomorrow if all goes well I shall outline the life and personality of Fr. Basil Maturin. Thereafter I shall post a series of comments on his book THE PRICE OF UNITY about the Anglo-Catholic tradition of his youth and early manhood and the Catholci Church to which he converted and whom he served as a priest. I shall use this to make some comments on the accusation by the SSPX and others that indult traditionalists are the equivalent of Anglo-Catholic ritualists.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on May 28, 2009 9:52:52 GMT
I would like to hear more about this individual - it sounds fascinating.
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Post by hibernicus on May 28, 2009 17:22:17 GMT
A brief background note before I proceed. the original leaders of the Oxford movement, while tending to emphasise the communion service over the sermon, copied Catholic liturgical practices only to a limited extent. Ritualists properly so called represented a second, mid-Victorian generation, who believed such practices were necessary for the recovery of what they saw as the Anglican Church's true Catholic heritage, for the spiritual growth of members, and to attract worshippers to the beauty of holiness. This led to great dissension within the ANglican Church. Many Evangelicals (and Englishmen of no partcular eligious belief but haters of popery) regarded such practices as outrageous and idolatrous and tried to suppress it, either by force (such as rioting in church) or by calling in the State, either because the State was seen as Protestant or because assecrtions of ecclesiastical autonomy from the state were regarded as usurping state authority. Under Disraeli the Public Worhship act, making it illegal for Anglican clergymen to engage in such practices, was put through parliament at the behest of the then predominantly-Evangelical bishops. Several ritualist clergymen served short sentences in prison; this was seen as excessively harsh and the Act rapidly became a dead letter. This encouraged Ritualsits 9especially thsoe like Maturin junior who ahd been brought up in its pracices) to hold fast to Ritualism and see the Protestant wing of the Church as spieful, persecuting bigots (which many certainly were; it was even widely allegd by such people that the Ritualsit were secret Catholcis aimed at subverting the Anglican Church from within, and if someone knows he is not a conspirator telling them that he is will only make him despise you more). This self-image as martyrs was helped by the fact that Ritualist practices had a strong appeal to sections of the urban poor who were otherwise unchurched, and that many celibat Ritualist clergy (not having to care for a family and being strongly committed) were prepared to live and work in poor slum areas. There is a strong tradtion of Ritualsit mission in the East end of London, for example. More tomorrow
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 2, 2009 17:59:56 GMT
Basil Maturin was born in 1847; initially he had intended to join the army, but a religious crisis caused by a severe illness nd by the death of one of his brothers led him to decide to seek ordination. In 1873 he joined the Cowley Fathers (the Society of St. John the Evangelist, an society of mission priests who take monastic vows - NB I will refer to them as priests for the sake of convenience; this does not mean that I think Anglican orders are valid). Between 1876 and 1889 Maturin ran a church on behalf of the Society in Philadelphia, where he established a reputation as a powerful and effective preacher and retreat-giver. Throughout his career he had a reputation for deep psychological insight as well as eloquence; according to his literary executors it is not possible to recover the full force of his preaching from his notes and published sermons, because at the climax he tended to abndon his script and speak extempore. His work is marked by an insistence on positive as well as negative virtue; he is anxious to counter the view that the pious are somehow unmanly, and stresses that we are not called to renounce those abilities which we may have misused but to re-train and reclaim them so that we may devote them to the service of God. In 1889 Maturin was recalled to the Cowle Fathers' house at Oxford because he had developed doubts about whether he should convert to Catholicism and could not resolve them one way or the other. After several years' agonising, during which he continued to preach and give retreats, he was received into the Catholic Church in 1897 and ordained in 1898. He wished to join the Jesuits and in 1910 briefly tried his vocation with the Benedictines, but remained a mission priest in London until becoming Catholic chaplain at Oxford in 1914. (I believe he was at one time caplain to the Catholic Stage Guild; his name is listed on the World War I Roll of Honour in their chapel, Corpus Christi in Maiden Lane, London). In 1915 he went on a preaching visit to New York, and returned on the LUSITANIA. When the ship was torpedoed he led prayers and assisted other passengers into the lifeboats. He is believed to have given his lifejacket to a woman passenger; certainly his body had none when it was found. His literary remains were edited by his friends , Wilfrid and Maisie Ward (father and daughter; the latter remembered as a prominent Catholic apologist). Tomorrow; a brief outline of THE PRICE OF UNITY, Maturin's apologia for his conversion.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 3, 2009 15:47:24 GMT
THE PRICE OF UNITY, which appeared in 1912, to some extent invites comparison with Cardinal Newman's APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA in that it tries to explain to a naturally unsympathetic audience how an apparently contradictory position can be held in good faith, and what suffering was involved in coming to believe that the church of their baptism was not the true church and that like abraham they must go into another country whence God called them. Newman, addressing himself to a Protestant audience who might be receptive to Charles Kingsley's accusation that only someone wth no regard for truth could have held the Catholic doctrines he held while still remaining a member of the Anglican Church, or indeed could hold those doctrines at all without deliberate equivocation and deception, tries to explain how and why he and his friends developed their belief that the Church of England represented a middle way between Rome and Protestantism, and that the Roman doctrines and practices which they sought to revive were part of the lost patrimony of their Church; it then traces how, with much fear and suffering, Newman came to believe that Rome was the true Church and he must leave Oxford, freinds and family to minister in the Birmingham slums and teach in a boys' school. Maturin is trying to explain to a Catholic audience inclined to see Anglo-Catholics as spoofers and play-actors (as one Catholic commentator described them, "hypocrites who are trying to be both Catholic and Protestant at the same time") how these members of what to outsiders seems very obviously a Protestant church could sincerely believe what they did and practice Catholic rituals without wishing to be reconciled to Rome, and detailing the agonies which such converts as himself experienced when they came to entertain the possibility that after all Rome might be right and they might be wrong. Maturin suffers by the comparison, as just about any writer would do under the circumstances; to write on the subject after Newman is like writing on the siege of Troy after Homer or the siege of Derry after Macaulay. The APOLOGIA is centrally the story of a soul and part of Newman's enterprise of what it is to beleive anything at all; hence even those who think Newman was wrong and the conversion he describes a disaster can appreciate his retracing of the strnads of doubt and certainty and the sensitivity with which he recalls the breaking up of friendships and his farewell to the snapdragon on the walls of Oriel College. Maturin is not so personal; when he speaks of the doubts and sufferings of the potential convert hesitiating on the brink, although he draws on his own experience he presents this not just as what he went through himself but as the epxerience of a generic convert, and his account is much more bound up with the details of Anglican-Catholic controvers and the internal divisions of the Church of England than Newman's is. Hence though THE PRICE OF UNITY has its own poignancies its interest is more specialist than Newman's work, and it is of its moment as the APOLOGIA is not. Tomorrow I will try to summarise the book, then conclude this series of postings with a discussion of how it relates to the present-day situation and to the Lefebvrist schism. I may not be able to conclude this before Friday, after which I will be away for 10 days or so; if it is not concluded then I will try to conclude it when I get back.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 4, 2009 18:06:50 GMT
Maturin explains that ritualists, especially those like himself who were brought up in the movement, genuinely see it as the "real" Anglican church. He notes that this is reinforced by the obvious bigotry and stupidity of their most vocal evangelical opponents (note to any evangelicals who read this; Evangelicalism in the C of E was going through a weak patch at the time and he is talking about the sort of people who violently disrupted church services and assumed that the Ritualists could not possibly be sincere but must be secret Jesuits) and by the rapid growth and obvious spiritual fruits in terms of deeper devotion, willingness to suffer, missions to the poor etc which the adoption of Ritualist devotional practices has produced. (His comments on this I must say make painful reading when our own Church has abolished or downgraded many of the practices in question and many can be found to deny that they ever had any spiritual value at all.) The Ritualists, Maturin recalls, can make a plausible historical case that the "Catholic" features of the Anglican tradition represent the essence of the Church which has always been present, with the "Protestant" elements seen as the unfortunate product of compromises at the time fo the Reformation or as creeping in during periods of spiritual dryness and neglect. They can also reasonably argue that many Catholic practices are not found in the early Church [which of course begs the question of whether they are legitimate developments or not]. He emphasies that Ritualists do show great devotion, sometimes even more than Catholics. Furthermore, they see the Roman Church as foreign and unEnglish in a way the anglican Church is not. [Remember that the Anglican Church was much more prominent in english life then than it is now, and the King James Bible and book of Common Prayer more prominent in their influence on literary English and in the church services.] They also tend to see it as tyrannical and authoritarian.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 4, 2009 18:30:40 GMT
Why then did Maturin convert?
The central issue for him is the role of the Church. If, as a Ritualist or a Catholic would say, the church is part of God's plan from the beginning (i.e. it is divinely founded rather than being a purely human institution or an association of believers without a corporate identity of its own, which would be the Protestant view); if it is bound together as the parts of a body - the metaphor St. Paul very clearly uses, then how could it be justified for the English Church to separate from it? Even if it had become corrupt, if it is the true Church surely it would have been better to stay with it and reform it from within? What right had the English Church to break away unilaterally?
He notes being attracted by the rituals of Rome and by the evidence of holiness visible in the widespread presence of Catholic monasteries and convents (compared to the relatively marginal existence of such groups in Anglicanism) but the central issue for him is unity. He emphasises four aspects:
First - He came to realise that the Evangelicals had as good a prima facie case as the Ritualists to represent the "real" Church. If there had always been High churchmen, so there had always been Low Churchmen; the Ritualist argument that the Protestant language of the 39 articles must be read by the light of the Catholic-sounding Prayer Book could just as easily be reversed, so that it is the articles which govern the interpretation of the Prayer Book. Furthermore, the mass of the English people clearly see themselves as Protestants and distrust Rome, and regard the Reformation as making the C of E a Protestant Church. Who is to say the Evangelicals are wrong when there is no central Anglican teaching authority? SECOND It is the poor and uneducated who are the most unchurched and whom the church must reach, but who can they be attracted if the Church does not speak with one voice - indeed if its sections teach clearly incompatible doctrines? He recalls the bewilderment of simple people whom, having been catechised in a Ritualist parish, are brought into contact for the first time with Evangelical clerics. (This was a fairly common reason given by Ritualists for converting, especially in relation to the upheavals of the World Wars. I believe this is why Nick Lowry's father converted.)
THIRD The natural consequence of such confusion is the growth of the third or Broad church faction and of doctrinal indifference, which he, like Ritualists, saw as the natural fruit of Protestant private judgement.
FOURTH The Ritualists believed that they would eventually permeate and take over the whole Church, but so long as they remained in union with the Broad and Low Churchmen the influence would flow both ways. Many Ritualists were so anxious to distinguish themselves from Rome that they denonced Rome for suppressing the Modernists, even though the Catholic Modernists had rejected far more of traditional Christian faith than the Broad churchmen whom some of the same Ritualists had condemned.
Here Maturin's diagnosis was particularly acute, for what happened in the first half of the twentieth century was the dominance within the Anglican communion of "liberal Catholicism" - a combination of High Church ritual and Broad Church theology. The present-day church of England looks far more like Catholicism than 100 years ago but has much less of traditional Christianity (except among the resurgent Evangelicals). the Anglo-Catholci fringe have been progressively marginalised and are now being eliminated after the adoption of women clerics and other such departures.
Tomorrow - how does Maturin's description of the true Church correspond to the Church now? Could Maturin be used to support the SSPX claim that it is now the indult Catholcis who are the Ritualsits and the SSPX who are the faithful remnant upholders of Tradition?
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 23, 2009 12:44:31 GMT
Feeling my way back into this gradually. It might be noted that, according to Wilfrid Ward, although maturin thought some aspects of the anti-Modernist reaction were taken too far he had no sympathy whatsoever for Modernism; he was deeply saddened by the apostasy of George Tyrrell SJ both because of his family's old acquaintance with Tyrrell (see above) and because he had derived help from Tyrrell's earlier (orthodox) writings. I might note by the way that in response to the scandals some traditionalists have been cting Tyrrell as evidence against the view that Irish catholicism was largely unaffected by Modernism. Tyrell was brought up in the Church of Ireland; when he converted to Catholicism he went to England, e served in the English Jesuit province until his dismissal, and he never returned to Ireland in later life. If one wre looking for an early Irish Modernist Walter McDonald (about whom I hope to post sometime) would be a more promising candidate (amongst other things, he was an interesting early example of a Maynooth theologian who had no ambition to become a bishop - as most of the professors in his generation did - and who therefore developed something of the attitude found among many present-day professional theologians that bishops, rather than being the natural teachers of the Church, are mere administrators who ought to defer to academic theologians in maters of doctrine) but MacDonald always denied he was a Modernist.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jun 23, 2009 15:01:41 GMT
I think given some of Walter MacDonald's observations in 'Reminiscences of a Maynooth Professor' and his criticism of the bishops for switching support to Sinn Féin ahead of the 1919 general election, you can make the case for his traditionalism. He was an eccentric character though.
But you are absolutely right to say that George Tyrrell's modernism had nothing to do with Ireland.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 25, 2009 14:04:42 GMT
MacDonald is difficult to pin down. His big areas of doctrinal doubt were over scriptural inerrancy and I think could have been accommodated without any serious infringement of dogma. What he has in common with modernists is (a) sociological - he sees academics rather than bishops as the supreme teachers in a way that was unusual in the Irish church of the period (and again is unusual in the Church's overall history - the roles of bishop and theologian have generally been much more closely related than nowadays). The experience of Protestant denominations is that the theological liberals/heretics (whichever is considered more correct as a description) generally make their first appearance in the theological academies and spread outwards. That was what happened with the Irish Presbyterian church - I don't know about the Church of Ireland. (b) MacDonald emphasises the intellectual over the pastoral role - to such an extent that he suggests the American Church should abandon the attempt to maintain a Catholic school system and put the money saved into theological institutes, and he has a tendency to despise bishops as bricks and mortar administrators. This approach had soemthing to be said for it, but it tends to lead to a situation where th church is run largely for the benefit of professional theologians and soon consists largely of professional theologians. His works on ethics and on war and peace certainly are in the old-style Thomistic manual format and rest on a concept of prescription that is not much in favour nowadays (though it should be borne in mind that his opponents inhabited the saem intellectual structure). They make interestign reading.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 26, 2009 15:51:41 GMT
Back to Fr. Maturin - in THE PRICE OF UNITY he says that what surprised and refreshed him most when he came over to Rome was a sense that where anglican Ritualists spoke of an idealised Church of the Apostles and Fathers which they were trying to recover, here he had found a Church which simply took for granted that it was the Church of the apostles adn fathers and went about its daily business. He found that where Ritualists saw themsleves as greatly daring in introducing certain "advanced" devotional or sacramental practices, Catholics simply took these as a matter of course and practised them for their own sake. The modern emphasis on change and self-criticism as good for their own sake, and the fact that what seemed unchangeable was subjected so such an enormous upheaval after Vatican II, tends to obscure the fact that many people saw this predictability and uniformity - Evelyn Waugh's praise for the Catholic priest saying Mass as a craftsman doing a piece of work which exists separately from self-expression or self-projection - as a blessing. It used to be a boast of the Catholic Churhc in engaldn that whereas no-one going to an Anglican Church for the first time could be sure whether he would encounter a High, Low or Broad liturgy or one of their multifarious shadings, any Catholic Church would be more or less the same in its practices. Indeed it was a matter of pride that Catholics were expected to stay loyal to their local parish rather than go "parish-shopping" on the basis of ideological affinity as anglicans did. This distaste for parsih-shopping caused some distress to certain old-fashioned Englsih Catholcis after Vatican II. For example, the actor Alec Guinness deeply missed the Tridentine Rite but chose not to attend indult Masses and to continue going to his parish church every Sunday because he felt that to do otherwise would be disloyal to the parish. When Guinnness's parish priest was shown Guinness's journal entries about this by a biographer after the actor's death he was deeply surprised, for he had never realised Guinness felt any regret over the old rite at all. (This may not be so obtuse as it seems, since Guinness was a very private man; given that his acting style had a certain impersonality about it I can see how he might feel a certain affinity with the Old Rite.) Alas, nowadays Catholics have to go parish-shopping just like Anglicans if they want to find a liturgy that suits them - traditionalsits as well as the rest. Worse still, whereas Maturin, whatever his doubts about certain aspects of how the Modernists were treated, saw the condemnation of the Modernists as the Catholic Church behaving just as the Apostles and Fathers behaved when confronted with heresy, and lamented that by remaining in communion with a church which contained such people the Anglican Ritualists would become contaminated just as a whole body is contaminated by a gangrened limb, nowadays many people holding similar heresies (and even worse) live and flourish in official Church positions. We have a Maynooth professor who preaches moral relativism and situation ethics; a theologian who holds the Modernists were right and Pius X was wrong, and joins the Church of Ireland in celebrating George Tyrell as God's gift to the Irish Churches; an abbot of Glenstal who praises WB Yeats as a sort of saint and uses language reminiscent of pantheism, and so forth. Given this development, might the SSPX be right when they maintain that only a body purged of such heresies and holding firm to the old to the exclusion of the new can maintain the faith? If Basil Maturin were alive today, would he side with the SSPX? I think not, and next week sometime I will give my final post on why not.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jul 13, 2009 14:26:20 GMT
I am waiting for this.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 23, 2009 10:38:24 GMT
I'll try to finish this up with two posts: FIRST - Basil Maturin saw as one of the central differences (if not THE central difference) between Rome and Canterbury that Rome simply took its continuity with the apostles, and its liturgical practices for granted, and that it rejected false teaching in the same way that the Apostles and Fathers of the Church did - in a forthright manner which even Anglo-Catholics shrank from (partly becase their own habitual disobedience towards bishops of different parties gave them a certain instinctive sympathy with dissent). Any Catholic Church would offer the same liturgy and teach the same doctrine, while the Church of England taught and practised at least three incompatible doctrines, to the great scandal and confusion of the faithful.
Nowadays, however, the Catholic Church has acquired much of the same confusion we see in the Church of England. Indult traditionalists are one clique among many; we are overrun with Father Trendies (and lay Ms Trendies and Dr. Trendies) who believe liturgical and catechetical experimentation is desirable for its own sake; we can no longer be certain that because someone is a certified Catholic theologian they teach sound doctrine.
Hence, the SSPX often argue, indult traditionalists are in the same position as the Anglo-Catholic Ritualists, pretending that they represent the whole Church when they are only a fraction of it and sharing communion with manifest heretics and apostates. Nothing short of the wholesale return of the Church to Tradition as represented by the SSPX is acceptable.
The problem with this view is that it either cuts too far or turns back on those who wield it. If the SSPX are the sole guardians of Tradition and the Magisterium has forfeited the right to authority over it by betraying Tradition, does this not amount to saying that the SSPX alone are the Church, that the Pope has forfeited his right to rule, and the SSPX superior is or ought to be Pope? Those blessings which Fr. Maturin enumerates and of which we have to a considerable extent been deprived, were for him and for other Ritualists subordinate to the central issue of unity - SECURUS JUDICAT ORBIS TERRARUM (the judgement of the whole worl is certain - St. Augustine's criticism of the local schismatics of North Africa, which when reading one day, Newman recalled "I looked in the mirror and saw I was a Monophysite"). Remember the question which tormented Maturin for years; even granted that the Latin Church was corrupt before the Reformation, given St. Paul's insistence that the Church must be united as a single physical body, what right had part of that Church, an arm or a leg, to separate itself from that Body rather than working to reform it from within (as did St. Francis and St. Dominic, or St. Gregory VII, or st. Ignatius, or St. Alphonsus)? Worse still, from the SSPX's point of view, one of the central Catholic criticisms of the Ritualists (made by Newman amongst others) was precisely that they were inconsistent in recognising the Anglican bishops as their lawful bishops and then refusing to obey them. (Newman's final breach with Canterbury came because when he published his theory that it was possible to hold most or all Roman doctrines and still be a faithful Anglican, the Anglican bishops specifically repudiated this view and he recognised this as the judgement of the Anglican Church against him). If Joseph Ratzinger is Pope Benedict XVI, and the bishops in communion with him are the successors of the Apostles, how can the SSPX justify setting up bishops and altars against them, any more than the Ritualists were jsutified in setting themselves up against the Archbishop of Canterbury's express will and still calling themselves Anglicans?
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