Vietato Lamentarsi!

Few symbols can summarize the banality of the current papacy better than this "Complaining is Forbidden" sign on Pope Francis's apartment door. The sign was a gift from Italian self-help writer Salvo Noé, a man with the least sincere smile that side of the Atlantic. News outlets around the world are praising the sign as a sign (ahem) that conservatives are getting too whiny about the disregard The Francis extends to their half-baked heroes like Müller and Burke. It is certainly a sign that Papa Piagnone doesn't mind the paradox of hypocrisy.

To be sure, there are plenty of whiners in the Catholic Alt-Right. Christopher Ferrara, Esq. never ceases to hiss at the Dubia cardinals, no doubt excoriating poor Cdl. Meisner even beyond the grave. Steve Skojec screams about beta masculinity at anyone who contradicts him on American politics. Frank Walker's barrel of sarcasm never runs dry. Louie Verrecchio and Ann "Crazy Eyes" Barnhardt boldly proclaim Long-Faced Francis an antipope. Anonymous traddy priests upload sermons about the dangers of gossip and Harry Potter while the world burns.

And yet...

Last week I had the pleasure of witnessing the marriage of two very close long-time friends. The wedding was beautifully done, the reception was full of decent food and fun dancing, and the send-off was cheerfully memorable. The world may be crumbling, but that is no excuse to forgo feasting and family, to ignore the good things God still gives us. Our pope is at least correct that joy is a necessary part of the Christian life, even in the midst of turmoil. The City of Man can never overcome the City of God.

While it is necessary to point out the nudity of the Emperor, it is unseemly to stare at it for any great length of time. Noe's prudent sons covered his nakedness in his drunken stupor, but if he had belligerently refused to be clothed, what could they have done but walk away? Francis doesn't want complainers near his door because he does not want any harsh truths being spoken in his hearing. No true prophets are desired in his presence.

"For the Lord hath mingled for you the spirit of a deep sleep. He will shut up your eyes, he will cover your prophets and princes that see visions. Wisdom shall perish from their wise men, and the understanding of their prudent men shall be hid."

Papa Bergoglio no longer wishes to hear what his critics have to say. He wishes to have his ears tickled and his feet massaged. The only reason to criticize his words and actions is to remove the stumbling block that is Francis from the path of one's fellow Catholics and inquirers of good will. Let not the Bishop of Rome be a scandal against the practice of the Faith.

After the Reformation IV: Pauline Theology

(source)

One thing you learn when growing up Protestant is that you cannot understand the words of Jesus except as explained by St. Paul. The dominican words of the Gospels are too vague and symbolic, too emotional and hyperbolic, to ever be understood in their plain sense. Christ's admonition to perform good works and the threat of damnation leveled at the justified are simply too complex to be taken at face value. What the average Christian needs is an interpreter who is also speaking divine words: enter Paul the Apostle. Jesus, with whom the Christian supposedly has a personal relationship, takes a back seat to Paul, with whom he is not allowed to have active friendship.

Supposedly one need only look at some of the crazy things Christ said—plucking out eyes and spinning yarns—to see that he was speaking simply and to simple people. For robust theology, one apparently must look elsewhere, and St. Paul's epistles are easy pickins for the would-be reformer.

Not, of course, that any contradiction can actually be found between the words of Christ and the inspired writings of St. Paul, but in many ways his words are easier to twist than Our Lord's. In his writings "are certain things hard to be understood, which the unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, to their own destruction" (II Pet. 3).

These terrible warnings remained unheeded by Fr. Martin Luther, who was so bold as to flagrantly correct St. Paul's epistle to the Roman Church. The Apostle's theology of grace, justification, predestination, and law are highly complex. Because of the density of his writings, the average layman is relieved to rely on a commentary rather than slogging through the epistolatory swamp on his own. If the commentator appears erudite but still writes at a low level, he is almost certain to succeed in convincing many.

When Protestantism began to disintegrate into liberal movements, its overemphasis on St. Paul remained. These new perfidious theologians accused the Apostle to the Gentiles of inventing Christianity and of twisting the true teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. This was nothing more than the flip side of the longstanding reliance on Paul—an inevitable exploitation of an interior imbalance. There has been some pushback among conservative Protestant scholars with a so-called New Perspective on Paul, but most consider this an unwanted compromise.

Throw a rock into a crowd of Protestant theologians, and you are unlikely to find one that specializes in anything but Pauline theology. Sometimes they possess a passing familiarity with the other books of Holy Writ, but much in the way one might remember the required reading of his youth (Homer and Virgil in a better age, Steinbeck and Salinger in ours), not in the way of an expert or a careful reader. They cannot easily abstract their heresies from the Gospels, and must of necessity find easier targets.

Like many of the theologian-saints who have graced the Church of God throughout the centuries, St. Paul has not been free from the indignity of misuse and exaggerated importance. He had a much more humble opinion of his own person and abilities, and a higher opinion of his office, than most of his commentators have bestowed upon him.

It is unseemly to cast aspersions upon any part of Holy Scriptures, but one does wonder if Protestants will ever be cured of their Pauline madness if they do not put down the Collected Letters of St. Paul and read just about anything else in its place. Their theological tunnel vision has been corrupting Catholic schools for far too long, and if only for our sake it needs to come to an end.

Cut Chasubles, East & West

The history of the chasuble is well-documented on New Liturgical Movement. It is essentially common male clothing that covered the toga and provided protection much like a suit jacket or overcoat might for a well-dress gentleman today. By contrast, the dalmatic—the tunic worn by the deacon—was a uniform of state administrators adapted by the seven deacons of Rome who ran the bureaucracy of the diocese of Rome; Byzantine deacons preceded the Romans in using the dalmatic (sticharion), and their bishops eventually took up the practice in the middle of the second millennium.

Joseph Braun, SJ posited that around the 9th century deacons wore the chasuble during stational processions, but removed the vestment when entering the church. During penitential times they retained the chasuble rather than don their ornate officials' uniforms. The "folded" part of the folded chasuble shares an origin with the practice of lifting the priest's vesture during the incensations and elevations (not that they originated at the same time, they just originated because of the same problem). Chasubles were normally made of layered wool, often embroidered and layered with additional materials to create motifs, scenes, or ornamentation; some even carried heavy jewels and ivory veneers. The ample cuts that prevailed until the Reformation broke out combined with the heavy properties made movement very difficult. Since deacons and subdeacons did quite a bit of carrying things (lectionaries, the gifts, the chalice) they began to roll up the fronts of their vestments.

Good baroque: $$$$

What is fascinating is that the phelonion, essentially the Byzantine chasuble (yes, we can call it that, both originated in the same religion and the same Roman culture), shares its properties with the Western folded chasuble. Rather than rolled, the front is simply cut out for the priest to manipulate or carry books, the gifts, the spear, or to give Communion.
Sadly, the Western way of adapting the priest's vestments to his need to move was an inelegant one: cut off the sides. Silk, which does not breath as well as light wool or cottons, became the preferred material for vestments during the Renaissance and the age of exploration. At first they merely reduced the scope of the vestment, as with the "Borromean" and "Philippian" chasuble styles. Eventually, someone just cut off the arms and snipped the thing at the knees to create the sandwich board style we all know and don't love. It would be wrong to call the vestments most popular before Vatican II, and hence what it almost exclusively used in Traditionalist circles today, "Roman." Roman vestments were a bit more ample, almost like the Borromean and Philippian styles, and had the perpendicular inserts in the back, a continuation of the medieval parish chasuble style. The dominant pre-Vatican II style is really French: still material, bulging maniples, open fronts, no break in the back, and always a Cross on the back. As with most baroquerie, it can work, but only with the best and most expensive of materials. Otherwise, the chasuble becomes a canvass for kitsch.

In a fit of ludicrous regulation befitting an Italian bureaucracy, the Vatican decreed that traditionally cut Latin rite vestments should not be made without the permission of Congregation for Rites. Pius XI eventually dismissed this rule, but it ranks with some of the sillier things anyone has seen worthy of regulation.

St. Augustine & the Single Life

"Ball and chain." That is the term we use to describe the wife in marriage these days. Before tying the knot we call the process "settling down." Contemporary society holds marriage in derision, and not without good reason. What was once a promise before God to care for the other and to provide souls for the Church is now a nod of recognition to preceding love, or lust, between two people with the option to leave at any time; children are optional. No wonder modern Christians are unable to contest the pseudo-unions of homosexuals. Today the single life reigns supreme. Even those in relationships treat them as expensive, voluntary associations: I will share the bed with you and split the bills till death do us part, or till something better comes along. It was not always like this for the married, and certainly not for the single. A clerk in a cigar store summed up the modern prescription when he advised me, "Don't get married, dude. Just get some and make money."

From ancient times until a century ago marriage meant many things: the promise between two people, the maturity and responsibility of the two, the man and woman coming into their independence, the creation of a family unit with its associated trappings of home and business, and the union of two other families. Marriage was the natural end to which a grown man aspired. To forfeit marriage was an unusual, even extraordinary act. And yet this is what St. Augustine did.

Augustine worked in Rome and Milan, then capital of the Western Roman Empire, as court orator primarily, while also taking students who wished to imitate his rhetoric and segue into political life. Augustine kept a concubine (today called a live-in girlfriend) and recalled his fidelity to her bed as God's way of showing him what a genuine marital union is not. His relationship bore him a son, a bright young boy named Adeodatus ("given by God). Still, Augustine's saintly mother, Monica, was embarrassed and sent the concubine back to Carthage after arranging a marriage with a woman of good repute.

Augustine declared himself a catechumen in the Church and intellectually assented to the Church's teachings, albeit with difficulty towards the understanding of evil, yet he could not accept Baptism while he "was in both the flesh and the spirit." More self-aware than the hedonists of today, pagan Augustine found himself a slave to sex and none the happier for it. "But it was my own doing," he wrote, "that habit gripped me so fiercely."

He founds some solace in the friendship of Alypius, another pagan of some natural virtue who, like young friends today, joined Augustine in becoming mutual bad influences on each other. Alypius and Augustine shared a villa outside of Milan where they made conversation and contemplated philosophical questions after working hours. It was in this villa that a local named Ponticianus brought St. Athansius' Life of Saint Anthony and read it aloud to them, as was the custom before St. Ambrose popularized sub-sonic reading.

"But as Ponticianus told his story, the more ardent the love I felt for those men who, as I was hearing, had been moved to such a wholesome frame of mind, in that they had entrusted themselves wholly to you for their healing, the more I loathed and execrated myself in comparison with them. Many years—perhaps twelve—had flowed away (and my life with them) since in my nineteenth I had read Cicero's Hortensius and been stirred up to a zeal for wisdom, and all that time I had postponed the decision to despise earthly happiness and leave myself free to hunt for wisdom instead."

Grief and regret overtook Augustine. He and Alypius sauntered through the villa garden until he had to be alone. It was in this solitary, twisting, gnarly moment that Augustine heard a child singing in a neighboring house "Tolle, lege." The African expatriate took the child's song to have a spiritual meaning; he looked down and found a binding of the Pauline epistles, he opened it at random and read, "Not in riotousness and drunkenness, not in lewdness and wantonness, not in strife and rivalry; but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh and its lusts" (Romans 13:13-14). As would happen with the Angelic Doctor eight centuries later, in this moment God released Augustine from his fleshly temptations and enamored him with a life detached from all worldly cares, even those of the family.

"For, from the direction in which i had set my face, and towards which I hesitated to go, Continence was now revealed to me in all her chaste beauty. Serene she was, not full of dissolute mirth, and nor was there anything dishonorable in her alluring voice as she bade me to come and not to doubt, and her pious hands, as she stretched them out to welcome me and fold me to herself, were full of sheep of your flock, good examples for me. There were many boys and girls, men and women newly come to adulthood and of every age, grave widows and aged virgins; and in not one of them was Continence barren, but a mother of children."

It was precisely in this context—a lament over sexual sin and the prospect of a marriage for the sake of getting on with it—that Augustine took the book and read St. Paul's words. Augustine resolved to receive Baptism, which he did, along with Alypius and Adeodatus, from the hand of bishop Ambrose in Milan at the Paschal vigil in 386. Augustine brought the Italian phenomenon of continent men, ordained or lay, living in community back to Carthage and Hippo when he returned there. What had been the way of hermits and monks now became a common bond between men who wished to live singularly for God in an age still weaning off paganism and slowly embracing a Christianized outlook on family life. Augustine and his community lived apart from the world in plain sight.

How St. Augustine's liberation from sensual bondage and resolve to live for God contrasts with our modern view of the celibate parish priest as a limp-wristed eunuch! Before the 20th century, the continent life was viewed an nigh impossible, save for men with remarkable self control. The joke had been that "Father is a man and must be seeing someone in the rectory." Even Hitler perverted celibacy to his own end, hiding Eva Braun and presenting himself as a man whose sole purpose in life was the betterment of Germany.

Christian society has enough ground to make up merely in sanctifying the institution of marriage again that consideration of holy bachelorhood seems frivolous, but is it? A man or woman who has not castrated himself from family life, but rather who has found the world wanting and instead embraced the friendship of God is a sermon unto itself. A habited nun looks enough like a walking prayer to give pause. What of a man who does the same? What a contrast to the wisdom of the age... and to the clerk in the cigar shop....

Ratzinger's Private Latin Mass?

Le Barroux, 1995
source: Una Voce, Venice

We kept hearing from wishful thinkers that Benedict XVI either privately celebrated the 1962 Mass or assisted at it in his chapel (cf. Bishop Fellay) when he sat on St. Peter's chair. There was even some aspiration that he might deign to offer the Vatican II Mass is public, which would give traditionalists ammunition to fire upon everyone else and South American bishop license for open schism. It never happened. In fact, did he even celebrate the EF of the Novus Ordo privately? Fr. Lombardi says no, but Thomas Woods says yes.

On the whole it seems extraordinarily unlikely. Joseph Ratzinger was a reformed theologian and "Vatican II man" through and through; his Introduction to Christianity would have had him before the Inquisition in the days of S. Pius V. Ratzinger, however, favored organic liturgical development and also had some modicum of compassion for traditionalists after he botched negotiations with the FSSPX and Archbishop Lefebvre died under canonical interdict. If anything his description of the Pauline Mass as a "banal fabrication" suggests he wished something less mediocre evolved through the traditional means of changing the liturgy, but he still wanted a different liturgy.

His interest in the welfare of traditionalists and in the [impossibly post-Modern concept of] hermeneutic of continuity may have motivated his half dozen or so celebrations of the 1962 missal prior to his papal election, among them with the nascent FSSP, a conference at Fontgambault, at the monastery of Le Barroux, and a few times for diocesan seminarians in Weimar.

Francis is the modern antidote to Ultramontanism, so why weaponize a past papacy?

Readings: Part of the Roman Rite?

Discussion at New Liturgical Movement has come around to positing that the Roman liturgy proper is composed of "elements more and less central" to its identity rather than a minimal statement of validity. This touches on what has been said on this blog for years, that the Roman liturgy is not to be found in a given set of books ("pre-'55", 1962, "pre-Pius X" etc), but rather a series of characteristics either ancient in origin or synthesized by gradual acceptance over the course of several generations. Some elements, like the Eucharistic Canon of Mass and the Kalendar, are irreplaceable as essentials of the rite. Others, like the offertory prayers and choir ceremonies, form unique aspects of the Latin liturgy that distinguish local "dialects" from the mother tongue. The Sacramentary, Psalter, and Sunday lectionary are essential aspects of the Roman rite, while ritual books and private prayers have always permitted some local variation. However, one aspect of the Roman liturgy that we have not argued as an essential on this blog is the Mattins cycle of readings.....

....Why?

Simply because they changed relatively often before Trent. St. Pius V's commission to pare down medieval exuberances also looked at the inherited Curial breviary's reading schedule for the Office and found it wanting in the age of sola Scriptura. As of 1529 most of the readings for feasts, aside from the Gospel lesson in third nocturne, were edited Patristic sermons of variable, and occasionally dubious, origin.

It was not always this way. Six or seven centuries earlier readings tended towards Scriptural passages, often at lengths that discouraged concentration by the canons and monastics praying the Office. The Cluniac Divine Office often covered an entire Pauline epistle in two days of Mattins; this proved so onerous during the evening vigil that the abbot regularly appointed a monk to roam the Choir with a wooden stick and call inattentive monks to attention when they dozed off.

Centuries before then the readings may have been an odd mix of Scripture and contemporary sermons. Pierre Batiffol recounts St. Augustine advising a pastor as to which of his sermons he thought worthwhile to read during the Office.

The Tridentine commission assigned Scripture to the first nocturne of Mattins for feasts, often taken from the same book and chapter as the pericope at Mass, and a gradual reading of St. Paul on ferial days. The unique Masses of Lent already possessed proper Gospels and hence required no revision in the study group's mind. Local uses seem to have revised their vigil readings in line with the Scriptural revival in the Roman Office, although some, like Sarum, died out as they were, leaving Origen's sermon on the Incarnation for us on Christmas Eve.

After the Reformation III: The Incomplete Christian

The battles for orthodoxy have left many losers throughout the centuries. With the wealth of divine revelation that came from the Incarnate God through his Apostles, misunderstandings and intentional perversions abounded almost immediately in the infant Church. Simon Peter's paternal mission of protecting the treasure of revelation was opposed by Simon Magus, the father of Gnosticism and—according to many Church Fathers—all heresies. Since the expulsion of Simon from the Church, ecclesiastical history has seen similar treatment given to the Arians, Montanists, Pelagians, Docetists, iconoclasts, Albigensians, Lutherans, and many more. The errors that degrade and deform the true Faith are necessarily anathematized and cast into the outer darkness.

Some of these heresies lingered for centuries after their explicit condemnation. Arianism was anathematized in AD 381, but St. Boethius was sentenced to death by an Arian king in 524, and it survived in organized form until at least the 7th century in North Africa. There's an old joke that goes like this:

Two men considering a religious vocation were having a conversation. The first asked, "How can we compare the Jesuits and Dominicans?"

The second replied, "Well, they were both founded by Spaniards — St. Dominic for the Dominicans, and St. Ignatius of Loyola for the Jesuits. They were also both founded to combat heresy — the Dominicans to fight the Albigensians, and the Jesuits to fight the Protestants." 

"Then what's different between the Jesuits and Dominicans?" 

"Met any Albigensians lately?"

But that isn't entirely fair. While the Lutheran heresy has lingered for five hundred years, it has done so by way of constant mutation, and it is hardly unique in its longevity. By the time the Church condemned Protestant errors at Trent, men of notable intelligence had already been getting creative with Luther's theology and making it their own, and papal respect had been so greatly diminished among the populace that few cared any longer what the bishop of distant Rome had to say.

The Counter-Reformation fought back with a renewed sense of Thomism, but Protestants were so successful everywhere they went that the Church had to take a defensive approach in places where the Catholic Faith had once reigned uncontested. A siege mentality may be necessary from time to time, but it is not conducive to social health. A city under blockade will not survive for long without suffering from famine and plague, even if it is not ultimately conquered. Likewise, the Church suffered for centuries under a war of attrition by Luther and his armies, and the wide open fields of Christendom were traded for bunkers and priest holes. P. John XXIII's admonition to "throw open the windows of the Church" was not a sign that the enemies of God had stopped lobbing mustard gas our way, but that he was tired of smelling his fellow bishops' funk.

Since then we have engaged in an uneasy truce with the mutant grandchildren of Luther and his fish-barrel wife. The alternative to closed-door, manualistic gas was the recognition of our former enemies as fellow men of faith. The condemnations of Trent died the death of a thousand qualifications, and only positive acclamations of Protestant doctrine and practice were permitted to be voiced. The mere practice of baptism was enough for the Council Fathers to declare them as "separated brethren": "For men who believe in Christ and have been truly baptized are in communion with the Catholic Church even though this communion is imperfect"—surely this was a surprise to the millions of Evangelicals who still considered the papacy to be something akin to the Whore of Babylon!

So now we have Christians who are in "imperfect" communion with the Church of God (e.g., Lutherans and Presbyterians), and those who are in "perfect" communion (e.g., Cdls. Kasper and Mahoney). Catholic clerics endlessly praise the love Protestants have for the Holy Writ, and their desire for a "personal relationship" with Jesus. The Protestant is idealized and made an exemplar of Catholic piety, even though his spiritual life is often composed of a series of existential crises rather than solid faith and hope.

Some Catholic converts from Protestant sects refuse to even call themselves converts, preferring rather to express their move as a growth into the fullness of Christian reality. No longer is Luther a heretic to be condemned, but a misunderstood German theologian—aren't they all?—who only wanted the best for the Church. The traditional anathema was necessary for the mental health of Catholics cleric and lay, for it allowed them to see reality as it actually was. Now we are forced at gunpoint to see only the good in the enemies of the Church, and so we have descended gradually but inevitably into actual madness.

The Protestant milieu is not "mere Christianity" as C.S. Lewis would have it, nor is Catholicism simply "more Christianity" as Fr. Dwight contends. Catholicism is Christianity, and Protestantism is something else; that the latter happens to contain elements of Christianity is ultimately immaterial. We would never call Arianism an "incomplete Christianity" because Fr. Arius happened to say many true things in between his lies.

Heretics are men who have made shipwreck of their faith, and they visit their sin upon their third and fourth generations by denying them the means of salvation. If they are mindful enough to baptize their sons, even these deny themselves salvation as soon as they are old and knowledgable enough to repudiate the Catholic Faith. (In some Protestant circles this is practically a rite of passage.) Since more and more Protestants no longer even baptize in an acceptable manner, the single Sacrament they could once boast is slipping from their grasp. They stand naked and trembling before the gaze of Heaven. It is a terrible thing to possess knowledge of Christ and salvation, but to lack the means to attain it.

"The devils also believe—and tremble."