Almost

Happy Christmas tree day. I want to be very inclusive to all my not religiously minded readers. 

No... Only joking! Have a blessed and wonderful feast of the birth of the Son of God, the one Saviour of mankind, the way to Heaven. 

Mass Times

Merry Christmas

Naughty but nice!

I hate annotation in library books but this one is fun. 

It comes from H Gunkel's commentary on Genesis. 

If you can't make it out it says "Double Source criticism - blimey! There will be no text left soon"

And my dear chap or chapess that is my considered position also. 

Blimey!

The Gifts and Calling of God are Irrevocable

I like this image. It combines the sacred symbols of our faiths:
the Star of David and the Hanukkah candle stick
... and ...
the Christmas tree. 

The Vatican has issued a document on Jewish/Catholic dialogue called "The Gifts and Calling of God are Irrevocable". Here.

I will have to make a detailed study of this in the months ahead as it will be an essential part of my thesis.

I have one starting reflection...

in Latin, the section on the Jews in Nostra Aetate has 421 words.
My computer says that this one has over 10 200.

Still might be...

Me saying Mass for the Scouts. Nothing to do with the Mass this evening, but a Hell of a shot.

The Mass was a triumph! We had a dozen people there, and to be honest it had not been advertised.

I know that Fr Brown (here) said Mass in the upper chapel, but the Norman chapel is still up for grabs... so was this the first Tridentine Mass there? Only you know dear readers. Ask you friends and foes, ask the spies. (The spies know everything...)

Not this chapel, everyone's said Mass here!!!

But it was wonderful tonight. Thank you to the chaplain.

The first of many, God willing.

The First since the Reformation?

I wonder if the Mass I celebrate tonight at 6pm in honour of the Immaculate Concpetion of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Normal Chapel of University College Durham (Castle) is the first of its type since the (soi-disant) Reformation?

I know that there have been other Catholic Masses said here, but I suspect only since Our Lady forcibly closed the II Vatican Council today, 50 years ago.

I cannot imaging that either side would have welcomed some Catholic Priest wandering along and offering Mass pre-last Council. And since then, while I know that OF Mass has been offered, I wonder if the Old Rite has been said her, or if this is the first.

If anyone knows, then let me know: achaplainabroad@hotmail.fr

Mass in Castle

Thanks to the kindness of my College, I will be saying a Low Mass on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception in the Norman Chapel of University College, commonly known as Castle.

Mass will begin at 6.00pm. You are most welcome.

Advent Calendar 2015

The jury and I are pleased to announce that this year's Advent Calendar award goes to this one, from the film Frozen. I think it is a film. I know it has a song attached to it because I heard it everywhere I went for what seems like forever.

Who could forget such Advent Calendars of yesteryear? The wonderful 2014 "Starwars" edition - Hmmm... the chocolates are tasty in this one.

And also Starwars in 2012 - I must like Starwars... You are an Evangelist, Luke.

Having been kicked off by Smarties in 2011 - Apparently only they have the answer.

So I bid you "Happy Advent!"

-------

A critical response

Tradition is silent as to what happened to the 2013 Calendar. We can only suppose that later redactors removed reference to it for some reason. This would seem logical as there is an obvious continuation of Calendar references which were important to the author. That the 2014 calendar post is silent about any reference to the preceding year and there is no mention of the intervening gap, seems at odds with the authors plain statements in the work, where other such lacunae are observed. Further this seems illogical as the practice of mentioning the calendars was a reasonably recent innovation, the author could easily have remarked on the gap and no offence would have been caused. With such a recent innovation, the readers of the blog would not necessarily have expected or been affected by a year in which the Calendar was either not bought, or not mentioned. Nor should we suppose that the missing calendar reference is as a result of 'self-editing' as the subject of the posts is lighthearted: they neither attack nor reprimand. When other posts are viewed alongside the calendar posts, we could easily see better candidates for removal.

It would seem then that the most likely possibility is that a later redactor of the blog removed the 2013 post about Advent Calendars for an unspecified reason. We can make a hypothesis that that year the author bought a religious Advent Calendar which was at odds with the other Calendrical posts. Rather than creating a post to replace the religious 2013 original, a difficult proposition concerning the particular style and syntax of the author, the redactor simply removed the offending post to keep the overarching mood and type of the original posts.

This may also be the reason for the absence of posting in December 2013 as a whole. In order to disguise the Advent Calendar post removal, the redactor removed the whole of the section.

The traces of this action can only be seen when identifying the authors commitment to recording the Advent Calendar purchases from year to year, be they sacred or secular (for surely in this case the presence of the Calendar takes priority over its form or type) and remarking on the striking omission of 2013.

We can only say that this 2013 post must have infuriated the redactor to such an extent that he was willing to mutilate the very texts of that year's blog.

If this was because of the blog's fundamental religious nature, then we must conjecture that this redactor was radically critical of the religion as espoused by the blog: honouring tradition, a deep and profound love of scripture; a sense of humour in the essential human condition viz a viz the figure of God and/or organised religion.

Or else he was a Bishop.


I have been reading too much Old Testament criticism from the 1940s

The Change in the Good Friday Prayer

The call from the Bishops of England and Wales that the Good Friday prayer concerning the Jews is quite extraordinary.

It concerns a prayer said in not more than half a dozen churches once a year, and was composed by a still-living Pope.

But even that is not the worst thing. The really worrying thing is the bad theology which underlies the request. The explanatory statement (here) runs as follows: The 1970s prayer reflected the new thinking on the position of Judaism with regards to Catholicism found within Nostra Ætate. This was because Nostra Ætate “acknowledged the unique spiritual bond between Christians and Jews since it was the Jews who first heard the Word of God.” Even St John Paul II had said in 1980 that the covenant had never been revoked. Since the church is giving inconsistent messages the Jewish community is upset, so the new prayer of Pope Benedict XVI should be changed.

Let us leave for a moment that this quote of St John Paul II was made during a speech, and so when he said that the covenant had never been revoked, it has little, unspecified, doctrinal weight. Let us also leave for a moment that if a newer prayer has been issued to replace an older one, then it would seem logical that the newer (Benedict XVI’s) should have priority. If there are mixed messages being given (one of the problems cited by the Bishops), then they should be modified in line with the newer not the older prayer – 1970 out, 2008 in.

But ignoring all this, the truly worrying thing is that this comes from a misreading of Nostra Ætate and the Vatican II documents as a whole. Yes the documents continually stress the close bonds between the Jews and the Church. Yes they are the community who first heard the word of God. But in no place does the Council state or even imply that the message of the Kingdom should not be preached to all people, including the Jews. The forgotten document Ad Gentes is clear on this point.

And what exactly is this covenant that is being appealed to? Which one? Is it one of the Ancient ones of the Old Testament: Sinai, David, Abraham, Adam, Noah, Phineas, the New Covenant? The Old Testament does not speak of ‘the’ covenant, so why is Judaism now to be defined as ‘the people of the covenant’? They aren’t in their own scriptures, they aren’t in the New Testament, they aren’t in the early church, they aren’t in the Vatican II documents.

In trying to avoid charges of supersessionism, the Bishops are proposing an imperialist Christian definition of Judaism which straitjackets it into Christian terms. Oh, and subsumes all of the ‘Jews’ into one undifferentiated lot.

So what are the theological implications of the Bishops’ calls? A dual covenant theology, where one is ‘never revoked’ and the other, in Christ, is the one that we Christians go by? We would have to repudiate Dominus Iesus (2000), ignore Ad Gentes, rewrite the rest of Vatican II, reformulate our Christology and theology of redemption. This is just the beginning. Why should we ignore the covenant with all creation in Noah? How dare we bring the message of Christ to anyone… did not God make them all? Should they not all grow in their revelations of the divine?

Are we really to believe that the Bishops suddenly woke up one morning, seven years after its promulgation and though “wait a minute… there might be a problem with this prayer”. And if not, why have they ignored the deeply seated concerns about the hurt ‘Judaism’ felt for those same seven years?

Or is this internal church politics, where suddenly the Bishops feel brave enough to ask Rome to roll back the theology of Benedict XVI and the use of the Latin Mass? Like some child sneaking into the classroom at the end of the day and scribbling on someone else’s work when the teacher has gone home.

Perhaps this really is out of concern for Jewish/Catholic relations, but the implications are massive. It is based on bad theological foundations and will ultimately lead to more hurt and offense. Bad theology will never lead to good praxis. Bad theology leads to bad situations.

-----

As an aside I wonder which theologians the Bishops consulted. There are few of us in this field. Admittedly I am just a second year PhD student working on ‘Covenantal Theology in Catholic/Jewish relations after Nostra Ætate’ supported by my Catholic Diocese, but hey, what would I know.

Juventutem Hexham and Newcastle

Do come along if you can.

Remembrance Sunday

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: 

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. 

At the going down of the sun and in the morning 

We will remember them.

We will remember them.

Poor Guy

Today our country celebrates the burning of a Catholic. The historical situation was one of treason, but its continued celebration was one of anti-Catholicism.

I am fond of Guy Fawkes, my first dry Mass as a seminarian was a requiem for the repose of his soul. And I remember a poem I wrote in my primary school about him:

Under the clock of Big Ben
Lay Guy Fawkes and his men
With one and a half tonnes of dynamite
Guy Fawkes waited until night.

But the cellar was searched the night before
Guy Fawkes' companions watched with awe
Guy Fawkes was placed upon the rack,
They made a plan to rebel back.

Not high art, I know, but I was only nine - give me a break. Funnily though, I have remembered it for 36 years.

So today Lewis will burn an effigy of the Pope (here) to continue the anti-Catholic atmosphere. Actually I hope they do burn an effigy of him. If not, then the Pope is reconciled to the world, accepted by it, and we are no longer counter-cultural and no longer represent Christ.

Burn baby, burn.

Synodality 4

Back to synodality.

What was the Synod on the family doing? I think it might have been one of two things. First it might have been an exercise in bringing to a public forum the thoughts of the Church was a whole: laity, religious, clergy and the Holy Father. I suppose this is why there was a consultation from each Bishop to His diocese. These were brought together by the representatives of the Bishops’ Conferences to the Synod.

Or second perhaps it was a synod of Bishops, who in order to take the temperature of their dioceses, consulted the clergy, religious and laity, and then got together to talk about it.

And the purpose of both of these was to let the Pope know what was going on, so that he could either (i) be informed or (ii) issue a statement. We have seen in the past how this helped Saint John Paul II know what was going on in parts of the world that he didn’t have too much knowledge of, like Asia for example.

If the synod thought it was doing the first of these things (bringing the thoughts of the Church together in the public forum), then there are some practical problems. The most obvious is the question of whether Cardinal Nichols and Bishop Peter Doyle represented the views of the Church in England and Wales. And how did they know our views, and how do we know what they actually said. 

This is the place for wonderful paranoia – however I know that some voices are listened to more than others. If someone is agreeing with you, you rate it much more highly than a voice which is diametrically opposed. That is human nature. Where was I at the synod? Where was my voice? Or yours? Or anyone’s?

It is, I’m afraid the problem of representative democracy. The synod could not possibly be that, and I do not think that it was.

So we are left with the second view – a meeting of Bishops, who, in order to be informed, consulted their clergy, religious and laity. They chose how it was going to be done, and collated the information and used it in whatever manner they wished. It does not matter if they represent anyone’s views. And they do not have to reference either their own people, nor, importantly, their fellow Bishops, who were not chosen for this august honour.

In my opinion, the synod on the Family was essentially a group of Bishops who had been chosen by the Pope to advise/inform him. This was done either through direct Papal choice or by ‘allowing’ Bishops’ Conference to elect from among themselves who was to go to Rome.

We now have to ask if this is synodality…

Pray for the Dead

Memento Mori

On All Souls' Day, remember you obligation to pray for the dead, not just today but throughout the year.

I recommend the Friends of the Suffering Souls, FOSS.

The link is here. Their website says:

Welcome to the website of the Friends of the Suffering Souls, a Catholic Lay Association conducting a perpetual novena of Masses for the Holy Souls in Purgatory.
This association was inspired by the 100 consecutive Masses offered for the Holy Souls by the Venerable Archdeacon Cavanagh, Parish Priest of Knock prior to the appearance there of Our Blessed Mother in 1879.
Each member undertakes to arrange at least one Mass each year for our deceased members and for all the Holy Souls.
But you can arrange as many Masses as you wish for this novena.
It is our goal to reach an average of 200 Masses for the holy souls each and every day of the year.

I have been a member for a number of years. You undertake to have a Mass said (in the new form or the Traditional form) at least once a year - they suggest on your birthday, as it is a date that you always remember.

Purgatorial societies were always a part of the life of the Church and are still essential.  There were whole Churches dedicated to it. See here, for example.

Please pray for the souls in purgatory, and have masses said for them. It is the only help that we can now give them.

Synodality 3

So what is this synodality business about anyway?

The term has been used by some as a short hand for ‘the governance of the Church’, and this is, I think, incorrect. People have started to think that synodality can be equated with the way the church should be run. They are confusing synodal governance with synodality.

Synodal governance is exercising authority through synodal means, and rather like democracy, could take many forms. It could be that different constituents come together and vote and that if all of the ‘synods’ agree, then this becomes law. Or that a majority of them do. Synods here are shorthand for ‘groups of people’.

We could put this forward in the following manner that a synod should contain its own type of people – a synod of laity, of religious, of clerics, of Bishops etc. And that they could the generate ideas, correctives, advances, restraints, and that the whole would then function like a well oiled machine.

Or we could have an idea of synodal governance where each synod would comprise all of the elements mentioned above – a synod would have Bishops, clergy, religious, laity and would similarly function to propose certain elements of governance for the people of God.

Of course we would have to remove the bar from governance strictly being limited to the ordained, but that could be done.

We might run into problems of one geographic synod opposing another – what is forbidden in Poland is allowed in England and Wales for example. Or a synod of Bishops opposing a synod of laity.

But of course both of these, I submit, are flawed interpretations of synodality.

Synodality is not about governance. It is not about who rules what and who decides what. In founding the Church, Christ was clear that there were different gifts, different charisms given to different people, and types of people within His Body, which is the Church.

And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then workers of miracles, then healers, helpers, administrators, speakers in various kinds of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret? (I Cor 12)

Governance is a gift of the spirit. It finds its place within synodality. Synodality does not exist to exercise authority any more than the National Health Service exists to have a chief executive, or the UK to have a monarch.

When synodality is deformed simply to talk about who makes decisions, then it is pointless, and rather at odds with our founder, who, let us remember happens to be God.

So are we any closer to knowing what synodality is? And what actually was the synod on the family doing?

Synodality 2

I previously said that synodality as a concept was a little fraught as no one really knows what it is. I stand by that. And also I gave a brief, very brief, overview of what it could mean on a supra-ecclesial level (of how particular churches or groups of churches inter-react). The model which we can see working in the Anglican Communion, of Synodal/democratic governance has led to its inevitable conclusion: to all intents and purposes the destruction of unity, with just a fig leaf of respectability. This is described as the genius of Anglicanism. It is a new thing.

Now, I do not want to bash other Christian communities, so I will leave Anglicanism for a moment, though it can never be taken as a model for Catholicism.

I also had a bit of a swipe at Bishop’s conferences. This is for a specific purpose. If you wish to propose synodality as a vision of the correct interplay of the different groups of the Church, then you have to do it properly.

The image for synodality comes from Eucharistic or Communion Ecclesiology. This uses the picture of the Bishop celebrating Holy Mass, assisted by priests and deacons and the laity taking their place and role in the Eucharistic assembly. Each has their place, and each are needed for the image to be completed. This, I would say, is in accord with documents such as Lumen Gentium §7.

But this is diocesan based, and has nothing to do with Bishops' conferences. If we are to take seriously the idea that my Bishop is a successor of the Apostles, and that as such is a member of the Sacred College which is the continuation of the Apostolic College, and further that he, with me and the deacons, religious and laity make up the image and icon of the Church, then where exactly does a Bishops' Conference fit in? They are not the Apostolic College working together. They are bits of it, not the whole thing. And neither are they the full synodal image of the Church. In fact, they are nothing in Eucharistic or Communion Ecclesiology.

It may be that we want to use Bishop’s Conferences in this way or that, but they are not essential to the Church, either practically or theologically. It may be that they are a way sneaking in localism (heaven forfend!) with this bunch doing this, and that bunch doing that, but if their competency does not have theological roots, and I would strongly argue that they have no theological roots whatsoever, then they should not be left in charge of anything more important than which comics to buy, and whose turn it is to do the washing up.

I find it ironic then, that one of the things which is threatened from this exercise in ‘synodality’ is the strengthening of something which does not exist within it.

More anon…

Synodality 1

It has been bothering me for quite a while now, that no one actually knows what synodality means. In this VERY interesting interview with Cardinal Pell, here, he says:

Catholicos, a Greek word, means universal, it doesn’t mean continental or regional. Synodality – I’m not quite sure what it means when it’s applied to the whole of Church life as distinct from the existence of a synod like this. But these things are to be the activities that are to continue to flow along.

I find this worrying, because Cardinal Pell is an informed intelligent man. Some of the others who graced the scene of the Synod, I fear, are neither so well informed nor intelligent. So if Pell didn’t know what synodality is, who exactly did?

This is important as this was what was supposedly going on. Just because they met in a thing called a ‘synod’ does not mean that they were participating in synodality. And just because they said ‘we’re acting synodically’ similarly does not mean that they are. Me and a few mates can turn up to a parliament and say that we’re acting democratically, but we could just be having a game of Poker, a few beers and a packet of crisps. The meeting and the words do not indicate what was actually going on.

So what is synodality. Well, as a callow youth, I wrote a thesis on it. Although you can buy a copy, here, I do not really recommend you do, it is extremely dull (get the one on confession instead, here). The only reasonable definition of it I came across was from ARCIC The Gift of Authority, 1999

In each local church all the faithful are called to walk together in Christ. The term synodality (derived from syn-hodos meaning “common way”) indicates the manner in which believers and churches are held together in communion as they do this. It expresses their vocation as people on the Way (cf. Acts 9.2) to live, work and journey together in Christ who is the Way (cf. Jn 14.6)

So synodality is the way in which the people of God journey along the Way to Him who is the Way. It is the interplay between the different people/roles/elements in the church and between local churches. You can easily see how this definition comes from the Protestant Anglican worldview. And you can see how it can easily be dangerous to a Catholic sensibility. 

Here, the danger is in the local/universal church relationship. For Anglicans there is neither need nor, in some cases desire, for close unity, except in name. Thus you can have all being in an “Anglican Communion” looking to Canterbury as a See that once held the whole thing together. But let’s be honest, when you have the position of one bit of the Anglican Communion rejecting the ministry of another bit, and that being accepted, you have to ask in what meaningful sense there is unity. Is it simply a shared history?

I would say that this ‘supra-national’ use of synodality cannot have any meaning if the local churches are equal in authority, and here we see the age old danger of Kaspar’s priority of the local church, wonderfully squashed by Ratzinger/Benedict, but rather like Japanese Knotweed, with deep pernicious roots. It’s evil daughter is Bishop’s Conferences with doctrinal power.

By the way, why should it be Bishop’s conferences? In the image of synodality, which I’ll look at later, the overriding icon is the Bishop celebrating Holy Mass, surrounded by Priests, Deacons, and the Laity. Synodality explicitly takes its image from the diocesan church. Nothing at all to do with Bishop’s Conferences. Indeed I would go so far as to say that they are alien and poisonous to the very idea of synodality.

But we cannot have a bunch of churches with no authority structure, as this would make 'synodality' not work. Imagine a parliament without a speaker, image a family where everyone has an equal voice, and the three children decide to spend the mortgage money on sweets and comics. This is the reason why the Anglicans are currently drifting further and further apart. Synodality on this level demands that something holds it together.

If synodality is the correct interplay within visible elements making up the Church, then the role of the Pope is essential.

So, is this what the Synod was doing? In a word, no. And in a word, it was getting there. 

To be continued...

A visit to Ryhope

 

In my role as 'random priest always willing to cover a Latin Mass at the drop of a biretta' I found myself in Ryhope in Sunderland to sing Mass last week. The Mass has been going there for twenty years and is a good and holy thing.

The Church is pretty spiffy also.

Chavagnes

A lovely film about the school I was chaplain of.

The Plural Problem

This afternoon, reading the Latin text of Nostra Ætate, the Vatican II document on non-Christian religions, (it was a slow day in Great Swinburne) I came across the following quotation from St Paul’s letter to the Romans 9.4-5. The Revised Standard Version (the one I invariable use) has it thus

They are Israelites, and to them belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ.

So far so good. I know this bit, and can go on about it for AGES… blaa, blaa, blaa.

But, you see, (and you will remember if you have kept up thus far) I was reading it in Latin. Now my Latin is enough to order a newspaper and say how I want my eggs in the morning, and there is no way on this planet that I would say I’m even proficient in the language, but I, even I, can spot an erroneous plural when I see one. (Also remember that my PhD thesis is on covenants so I have a head start).

This translation says ‘covenants’. The text of Nostra Ætate says ‘testamentum’ – one covenant, singular.

“Yikes and Yowzers” I cried!!! A mistake!!!

So I checked the Vulgate (the official Bible in Latin) and it said ‘testamenta’ – covenants, plural.

You can image that by this point I am in a tizz, all a-shock and a-shiver. But then my old memory came cranking into play.

“Wait a minute” I said to myself “which version of the Latin Bible are we dealing with here?” And therein is the solution… and the problem.

The Council Fathers were using the Clementine Vulgate (no, not the citrus based fruit… keep up!) used from 1592-1979. It says ‘testamentum’ – covenant. But the New Vulgate, 1979- , says ‘testamenta’ – covenants. New Bible plural, Old Bible singular.

Ahh, I hear you sigh, problem solved.

But just you wait a minute! This is not solved at all. The official Bible of the Church says something different to a text in an Ecumenical Council of the Church. So which do we follow?

Should Vatican II be updated with the New Vulgate (thus riding a coach and horses through any idea of trying to critically engage with the ‘text’ of the conciliar documents – after all their very words can now be changed by subsequent documents. Let me at them... there's a few changes I'd like to make)?

Or should we mistranslate Vatican II in line with the New Vulgate (dodgy on so many levels)?

Or should we keep the primacy of an Ecumenical Council over subsequent Papal acts (a hoot and a riot since most stuff that a Catholic comes into contact with post Vatican II bears little relation to the Church as the Council Fathers knew and experienced it)?

It all so difficult!

All over a plural!

Library View

I'm sitting in my college, supposedly working, but actually looking at the view. This is ridiculously beautiful. It is very difficult at times to work...

You can see the website for the college here. When I came to Durham, I had to choose a college. They of course then decide whether or not you will be accepted. I had to give a reason for choosing University College (commonly called Castle). I claimed that it would be ideal for me as it would be close to the Theology Faculty.

I ACTUALLY chose it because it is beautiful.