Teresa, One of the Wise Virgins

“I thought of the soul as resembling a castle, formed of a single diamond or a very transparent crystal, and containing many rooms, just as in Heaven there are many mansions. If we reflect, sisters, we shall see that the soul of the just man is but a paradise, in which, God tells us, He takes His delight. What, do you imagine, must that dwelling be in which a King so mighty, so wise, and so pure, containing in Himself all good, can delight to rest? Nothing can be compared to the great beauty and capabilities of a soul; however keen our intellects may be, they are as unable to comprehend them as to comprehend God, for, as He has told us, He created us in His own image and likeness.” (Interior Castle)

From her Chapter Hymn Verse:

God’s messenger, Teresa,

Thou leav’st thy father's home

To bring mankind to Jesus

Or gain sweet martyrdom.

But milder death awaits thee,

And fonder pains are thine,

God’s blessed angel wounds thee

With fire of love divine.

Sweet virgin, love’s pure victim,

So fire our souls with love,

And lead thy trusting people

Safe to the realms above.

Give glory to the Father,

The Spirit and the Son,

One Trinity, one Godhead,

While endless ages run.

Amen.

State of Apologetis Part I: Preliminary Question

source: EWTN Books
Let's hope they don't want money for this.

Modern apologetics are quite stuck in 1991 and I would like to spend a few posts on why. First, let's start with a preliminary, and very serious, question for readers:

How do we know God exists and why

do we even care?

He Has His Own Gloria

Doubling at readings.
source: orbiscatholicus.blogspot.com

"You finally converted, John?"

"Yes, so to speak, but it was so annoying. He has his own Gloria and I hate it."

That morning Mr. Grump attended his first sung Mass in a considerable time and was maladjusted to the tremorous experience of not kneeling for 45 continuous minutes.

"No he doesn't," interjected Mr. Grump's little lady. "He just starts the Gloria and sits, and then we sing it with him. Don't we?"

"No," Grump grumpily disabused her. "No, he starts our Gloria and our Creed, but then we sung it while he recites his own and then he sits down while we sing. It's stupid and I hate it. It's one Mass; there should be one song of praise and one profession of faith."

Thus Mr. Grump grouchily discharged his mind concerning the great matter of liturgical "doubling," a squabbling point of many reformers and traditionalist Romans in the last hundred years. Doubling is not a uniquely Roman corruption of a pristine liturgy which unified past congregations in audible acts of latria. Doubling is done in the Byzantine rite, especially after the Creed: the priest in most of Byzantine Christianity will recite the Cherubikon while the choir sings it; he will recite the text after the preface dialogue until "singing, proclaiming, shouting the hymn of victory...." to begin the Holy, Holy, Holy, which he in turn also recites so he can say the anaphora until "Take, eat....", which is done aloud. In the old Mass—not 1962, except for the ICRSS and courageous diocesan types—there are many acts of doubling. At solemn Mass the priest and deacon follow the epistle from the Missal while the subdeacon sings it; the priest and subdeacon read the Gospel pericope during the Gradual, during which the deacon receives the Evangelium and makes his preparations; and of course the priest reads antiphons throughout the Mass.

The reading of antiphons by the priest, much like the recitation of the Cherubikon in the Greek rite, has never bothered me. The celebrant is engaged in other acts during the Introit, Offertory, and Communion verses, so he "catches up" on them. The Dominican and Norman rites also have a similar provision in the first half of Mass for the readings and gradual from the sedilia, as the priest and subdeacon are preparing the gifts throughout the Mass of the Catechumens. I have also never been bothered by the reading of lessons by the priest in the Roman rite. At first one is tempted to say it is an intrusion of the Low Mass ceremonies into the Solemn Mass, but this is not quite the whole story. The presumed setting of the Roman Mass is Papal or Pontifical Mass, during which the bishop officiates from his throne. At Masses celebrated without a bishop, the priest is not necessarily presumed to sit; indeed, prior to 1960 the rubrics for Mass assumed a low Mass, and high Mass was a matter of tradition. Without sitting, the priest is left at the altar with little to do other than follow the text printed in front of him.

The Gloria and Credo are another matter entirely. The act of the priest reciting the text on his own and sitting has nothing to do with the received liturgical praxis, nothing to do the tradition of the rite, and nothing to do with architecture. It has everything to do with polyphonic music. The priest traditionally sang these texts with the congregation and other ministers, but polyphonic Masses precluded singing, so the priest said his part and had a seat. The scarcity of sung Masses in the Counter-Reformation and abandonment of the Office inculcated the idea that polyphony was the normal when the abnormal Solemn Mass was celebrated. There is no real reason for this to continue in Masses where Mass is chanted. I knew one Polish priest, ordained by Archbishop Wojtyla in Krakow and no lover of the reformed Mass, who sometimes sat for these parts and sometimes remained at the altar to sing with the people.

The only hard line advocates of doubling in the Roman tradition are sedevacantists along the lines of Fr. Anthony Cekada and bishop Dolan, who view the removal of some doubling in the 1960 rubrics as a creeping tendency towards the Pauline liturgy.

At least the priest doesn't have his own Mass!

Reading Louis Bouyer: Newman's Son or Cousin Once Removed? Orthodox Ecumenism?

Some time ago I ordered the recent English translation of Louis Bouyer's memoirs, which have received several positive reviews from Catholic writers of traditional and mainstream bends. The back cover has several short commendations from the non-FSSPX luminaries of post-1988 traditionalism: Msgr. Fabian Bruskewitz, Dr. Uwe Michael Lang, Scott "Alcuin" Reid, Tracey Rowland and Dr. Peter Kwasniewski, who also penned the forward. Everyone who endorses the book wants to make Bouyer their own in a quest to question Vatican II, the liturgical reform and the related changes. Having read half his Memoirs today, I see little ammunition for them, although I am not yet at the chapter on "the Council." Thus far Bouyer is less a son of Ottaviani and more a son of John Henry Newman, or at least a close cousin.

Bouyer's conversion parallels Newman's very closely, a fact Bouyer never shies from from broadcasting to the reader, but it is very true. Their conversions were similar, although not identical. Both entered the Church beginning with a genuine, youthful love of the Gospel in its simplicity. Bouyer emphasizes early that he never conscientiously disbelieved the Church's teachings, he just happened to be born into a protestant family. His studies of the Church Fathers, especially of the Alexandrian Fathers who inspired Newman, and of St. Thomas Aquinas nurtured a healthy diet of continuous doctrine and dogma from ancient days until the middle ages. He read the Greek Fathers, too, and, as was the fashion until quite recently, spent time with several men of the Eastern Orthodox Churches (Robert Taft once wrote that the "Western romance with the East" ended in the 1980s). Through praying the Roman Office and spending a great deal of time with Benedictines and Oratorians, he was received into the Catholic Church a few months after the Second World War began.

Unless one is an Anglo-Catholic, one has difficulty reading of the cast of characters in Newman's conversion with any excitement; modern followers of Dr. Pusey are confined to St. Giles Street in Oxford. On the contrary, Bouyer's more experiential conversion involved the who's who of early 20th century ecumenism, which, for good or ill, influenced the direction of the Church in the 1950s and 1960s. He met or knew Beauduin, Lealine, Conger, Brilioth, Ramsey, Gillet and many others before his conversion. Newman's conversion involved substantial reading and a bit of travel Bouyer's was uniquely reliant on travel and popular interaction, which placed him into the center of the rapids when the waves of change rushed into the Church.

This work has some memorable phrases and probably deserves a review on its own later. Here is a quotation about the spirit of conformity that arose within the Latin Church, speaking specifically about a fellow priest:

"The more I became familiar with this new milieu, the more I was struck by the fact that its best elements in the generation before mine, such as Father Brillet, seem never to have recovered from the brutal repression of modernism. Sheltered under a half-skin-deep, half-sincere conformism akin to a kind of family loyalty, they had concocted their own little religion within Catholicism...."

On a friend:

"I cannot complain since this excellent man paid me a very decent salary for the thankless task [of editing his book]. The poor man was saddled with a wife who must have been very beautiful once, but whose stupidity, alas, had never waned."

Of a peculiar interest to me was chapter four, "Initiation". It was not an initiation into the formal Catholic Church, but an initiation into Christian prayer life through the influence of Orthodox ecumenists around him. Bouyer met Fr. Lev Gillet, who surreptitiously received him into the Orthodox fold while still a Lutheran seminarian and on his way to ordination in the Lutheran church. Gillet was himself a Benedictine monk who left for Ukrainian Greek Catholicism, received ordination from the Ukrainian patriarch, and then was received into the Orthodox fold without renouncing a bit of his prior establishments; he happily received Bouyer secretly without asking him to change anything about his life. An episcopus vagans who was unable to rejoin the Catholic Church after marriage found his way into Orthodoxy and created "Occidental Orthodoxy" in France and named his church St. Genevieve. The Moscow patriarch got word of this and, rightly in Bouyer's mind, excommunicated the bishop. Fr. Gillet took over the effort of Western Orthodoxy, despite having written a book on the Jesus Prayer under the nom de plume "A Monk of the Eastern Church." Despite his Orthodoxy, Gillet calls Francis of Assisi, Bernard of Clairveaux, and many other Latin Churchmen saints. Kallistos Ware, in the introduction to my version, recounts Gillet's "reception" into the Orthodox fold without having to make a profession of faith and seems quite at peace with the method. I doubt many Orthodox would be at peace with this reception; I myself am not. 

To readers with more knowledgeable Orthodox connections: do the Orthodox have an ecumaniacal problem, or did they in the 20th century? If so, is it prevalent or restricted to the English and French Orthodox diaspora? Can it be traced to certain individuals or is it, like Latin ecumenism at the same time, a gradual acceptance of elements of the world at large?

To digress from the digression, read the Memoirs. Bouyer's was an eager and genuinely Christian soul with a love of Christ and a yearning to live with His truth, something we should all aspire to want.

Her First Divine Liturgy: Very Colloquial

In the tenth century, emissaries of St. Vladimir wandered into the Church of Holy Wisdom in Constantinople and were raptured into religious ecstasy at the sight of the Byzantine Divine Liturgy. Those pagans converted to Greek Christianity and even ensured its survival after the fall of Constantinople and its surrounding empire in 1453. The Prince's men recounted, "We knew not whether we were on earth or in heaven." So, readers, you can understand my interest in the reaction of a dear friend, nominally an Armenian Christian, to her first Divine Liturgy.

I took my friend to another Church of Holy Wisdom three Sundays ago for the usual obligation to sanctify the day of the Lord. Having grown up in one of Russia's puppet states, she speaks fluent Russian and understood the Divine Liturgy, even in its Ukrainian elements, perfectly. After the Liturgy, after lunch, and after some socializing, I asked her, "So, what did you think?" Her answer could not have had less to do with those of the Prince's pioneers. She replied, "It's very.... colloquial."

At some level she is right. The Byzantine rite is the most self-referential rite in the Church, the Pauline liturgy excluded. The Greek work leitourgia betrays that the ecclesiastical liturgy has a source origin in public works of service, the creation of monuments, and other things for popular benefit at the cost of the state. Constantinople's liturgy remained a work by the empire's Church for the benefit of the empire's people. The litanies and diaconal exclamations of the Greek liturgy were originally public prayers led by men in administrative roles while the priests performed duties germane to the Sacraments. It would only be natural that the assembled congregation have an element of self-reference. Indeed, these elements survived the monastic and hesychast makeover the Divine Liturgy received in the 11th-15th centuries.

This is not a fault of the Greek liturgy, just a fact. The city of Rome retained a spiritual identity longer after the political cohesion behind the Western empire evanesced. The Latin liturgy, not unlike the various far Eastern and north African rites, became applied on too wide a scale to be owned by any one culture or polity. Such was not the case of the Greek rite. Greek Christians held their state for twelve centuries. 

The Great Doxology in the third Greek tone, a personal favorite.

This supposed self-reference does draw attention to the mystical development of the Greek and Latin liturgies. My friend's only prior exposure to traditional rites of Christian worship are the old Latin Mass on a few occasions and the Armenian liturgy for weddings, funerals and Christmas. She said of the Divine Liturgy, "You just don't feel like your in the presence of God, watching Him as He is, like at the Latin Mass." My initial reaction to the Greek tradition could not have been more agnostic to her own. I walked into a Melkite parish during Orthros while the deacons and choir sang the Evlogitaria and became immediately aware of the Holy One's presence. This does underscore the different ways in which the Divine Liturgy and Roman tradition gained their grandeur. The Greek liturgy always had an extroverted element, to which the akathist hymns, public incensations, litanies, and processions give witness. The Roman tradition had litanies and processions in a far quieter way; the Roman emphasis was originally on the texts, almost always taken explicitly from Holy Writ or the saints' writings. The Greek liturgy gradually gained a more mystical element as the Palestinian monks of Constantinople imported their simple psalter and their hymnody, supplemented two centuries later by the hesychasts' antiphons. Rome moved from a communal (understood in the sense that the people of Rome were a community who often gathered in churches, not to be conflated with modern concepts of religious communitarianism) to a mystical setting with hardly any innovations to the texts. Elements unique to the city of Rome acquiesced to local variations when the Roman rite traveled throughout Europe and found eccentric, elaborate, divine expressions in the cathedrals of the Latin Church. The Greek liturgy retained the ritual and changed the text, the Roman liturgy kept the text and altered the ritual. 

In either case, I will not recycle that familiar "two lung" phrase of a previous Roman ordinary, but will instead leave the reflection that the Greek and Roman liturgies really should be seen as complimentary. The Roman rite presumes the presence of God, the Greek underscores it. The Roman rite basks in the truths of Christ, whereas the Greek rite explicitly states them three times a piece.

Pray for my friend, that she may see the light!

The Vision of St. Bruno

(José de Ribera, more or less)

Happy feast of the founder of the Carthusian Order! O Bonitas!

Dionysius the Areopagite on the Angels

(Eugène Delacroix)

Today is the feast of the Guardian Angels, placed on the general Roman kalendar in 1608 by P. Paul V, having been previously celebrated as a local feast in many places for some time.

From The Celestial Hierarchy, ch. ix:

There remains for us the reverent contemplation of that sacred Order which completes the Angelic Hierarchies, and is composed of the Divine Principalities, Archangels and Angels.

The choir of the holy Archangels is joined with the Angels because it belongs to the interpreting Order, receiving in its turn the illuminations from the First Powers, and beneficently announcing these revelations to the Angels; and by means of the Angels it shows them forth to us in the measure of the mystical receptivity of each one who is inspired by the divine illumination. For the Angels, as we have said, fill up and complete the lowest choir of all the Hierarchies of the Celestial Intelligences since they are the last of the Celestial Beings possessing the angelic nature. And they, indeed, are more properly named Angels by us than are those of a higher rank because their choir is more directly in contact with manifested and mundane things.

The Word of God has given our hierarchy into the care of Angels, for Michael is called Lord of the people of Judah, and other Angels are assigned to other peoples. For the Most High established the boundaries of the nations according to the number of the Angels of God.

If someone should ask why the Hebrews alone were guided to the divine illuminations, we should answer that the turning away of the nations to false gods ought not to be attributed to the direct guidance of Angels, but to their own refusal of the true path which leads to God, and the falling away through self-love and perversity, and similarly, the worship of things which they regarded as divine.

For there is one Sovereign and Providence of all, and we must never suppose that God was leader of the Jews by chance, nor that certain Angels, either independently, or with equal rank, or in opposition to one another, ruled over the other nations; but this teaching must be received according to the following holy intention, not as meaning that God had shared the sovereignty of mankind with other gods, or with Angels, and had been chosen by chance as ruler and leader of Israel, but as showing that although one all-powerful Providence of the Most High consigned the whole of mankind to the care of their own Angels for their preservation, yet the Israelites, almost alone of them all, turned to the knowledge and light of the true God.

Therefore the Word of God, when relating how Israel devoted himself to the worship of the true God, says, “He became the Lord’s portion.” Moreover it shows that he too, equally with other nations, was given into the charge of one of the holy Angels, in order that he might know through him the one Principle of all things. For it says that Michael was the leader of the Jews, clearly showing that there is one Providence established superessentially above all the invisible and visible powers, and that all the Angels who preside over the different nations lift up to that Providence, as to their own Principle, as far as is in their power, those who willingly follow them.

(Benjamin West)