Month: November 2015

O beatum Pontificem qui totis visceribus diligebat Christum Regem

If you sing or recite the Divine Office according to the Roman Breviary of 1960, as we do, then you may have noticed something strange today. November 11 is the feast of St. Martin of Tours, Bishop and Confessor, a third-class feast. But St. Martin’s office is nothing like the usual third-class feast. Martin’s office is different—and has been since the earliest days of the Roman Rite as it has existed since Trent.

The third-class feast in the 1960 Breviary is, in some way, a compromise between celebrating the saints’ feasts and preserving the order of the psalter. That is, the third-class feast, as you probably already know, uses the antiphons and psalms from the occurring feria. The rest of the third-class office is supplied by the common of the saints, more or less. This represents not only the longstanding objective of preserving the order of the psalter as closely as possible but also the horror of repetition, which will find fuller expression ten years later. It also is but one of the reasons why some folks, devoted to older forms of the Roman Breviary view the 1960 Breviary as transitional and, to be blunt, part and parcel of the reforms that led to Paul VI’s Mass and the Liturgia Horarum. But St. Martin’s office is different.

To begin with, it has proper antiphons for the psalms of matins, lauds, and vespers. It also has elaborate proper antiphons for the Benedictus and the Magnificat. But it doesn’t stop there. Not to get too technical, but: the psalms for matins are taken from the common of one martyr, though the hymn is Isti confessor Domini, not Deus tuorum militum; there are proper responsories; the psalms for lauds are the psalms from lauds of Sunday in the first place, not the occurring feria; the psalms and antiphons for the little hours are taken from the occurring feria, but the little chapters, short responsories, and verses are taken from the common of a confessor bishop, not the common of one martyr; and the psalms for vespers are the psalms of second vespers of Sunday (with a substitution for the fifth psalm), but compline is of the feria. While one can trace the individual components of St. Martin’s office to their original sources, their combination means, essentially, that St. Martin’s feast has a proper office. (Which resembles a second-class feast much more closely than a third-class feast.) This is no ordinary third-class feast.

So we did a little digging, and found that Gregory DiPippo anticipated our curiosity today with a fascinating article at New Liturgical Movement on St. Martin’s office. In short, St. Martin’s feast has always, for our purposes, had special treatment in the Roman Rite. Discussing William Durandus‘s commentary, DiPippo observes,

only Martin’s was considered important enough to be kept with an octave, as was the general custom in the Middle Ages, and in many places well beyond that. It was also the only feast of a Confessor kept with a proper Office in the medieval use of the Papal chapel at Rome, which formed the basis of the Tridentine liturgical books; not even the four great Doctors or Saint Benedict have their own Offices in the Roman Use.

(Emphasis supplied.) DiPippo tells us the astonishing fact that Isti confessor Domini—the great hymn for confessors—was originally composed for St. Martin. Dom Prosper Gueranger fleshes this bit of information out and tells us that St. Odo of Cluny, a canon of Tours before going to Cluny, composed Isti confessor Domini for Martin, to whom he had no small devotion—no doubt as he was imploring Martin’s help in converting the monks and canons of Tours from their laxity. (As you might expect, Urban VIII improved Odo’s composition in Papa Barberini’s inimitable, impeccable Latin. Immeasurably, no doubt.) DiPippo and Gueranger tell us also that there were other compositions dedicated to Martin, particularly Adam of St. Victor’s sequence Gaude Sion, which DiPippo discusses at some length. At any rate, the office of St. Martin was (essentially) a proper office well before 1568/1570, when the Tridentine books were established. As we said, St. Martin’s feast has always received special treatment in the Roman Rite as we know it today.

And it still does. In the Liturgia Horarum, St. Martin’s feast is an obligatory commemoration, with proper antiphons and psalms at morning prayer and evening prayer, proper antiphons for the Benedictus and the Magnificat, and Isti confessor Domini as the proper hymn for the office of readings and evening prayer, instead of the hymns set forth in the common of pastors with the verses for bishops (another point in favor of the contention that Isti confessor Domini was Martin’s hymn before it was most confessors’). We find this point really extraordinary, given the fact that the Liturgia Horarum generally minimizes the saints’ offices in favor of the occurring offices. (As we noted above the revisions to the office beginning with Pius X have favored preserving the integrity of the psalter over the saints’ offices; the Liturgia Horarum just carries that idea forward a little bit.) But not Martin’s office. Acknowledging the major differences between the 1960 Breviary and the Liturgia Horarum, Martin’s office still looks like Martin’s office.

And it is easy to understand why with a little digging. The excellent Veneremur Cernui (A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics) this time last year had a post recounting Gueranger’s entry for St. Martin’s feast. From Gueranger:

Has that history of the brightest days of the Church, of the reign of Christ as King, come to an end, O Martin? Let the enemy imagine he has already sealed our tomb: but the story of thy miracles tells us that thou canst raise up even the dead. Was not the catechumen of Ligugé snatched from the land of the living, when thou didst call him back to life and baptism? Supposing that, like him, we were already among those whom the Lord remembereth no more, the man or the country that has Martin for protector and father need never yield to despair. If thou deign to bear us in mind, the angels will come and say again to the supreme Judge: “This is the man, this is the nation, for whom Martin prays,” and they will be commanded to draw us out of the dark regions where dwell the people without glory, and to restore us to Martin, and to our noble destinies.

Thy zeal, however, for the advancement of God’s kingdom knew no limits. Inspire, then, strengthen, and multiply the apostles all over the world, who, like thee, are driving out the forces of infidelity. Restore Christian Europe, which still honors thy name, to the unity so unhappily dissolved by schism and heresy. In spite of the many efforts to the contrary, maintain thy noble fatherland in its post of honor, and in its traditions of brave fidelity, even though it now be so sadly fallen. May thy devout clients in all lands experience that thy right arm still suffices to protect those who implore thee.

(Emphasis and a few alterations supplied.) Gueranger’s full prayer to St. Martin may be found through Google Books, too.  With that in mind, it seems entirely appropriate that St. Martin is entitled to his privileged place in the Roman Rite. And with that in mind, it seems entirely appropriate at this moment to beseech Martin’s intercession for both Church and state.

O beatum Pontificem qui totis visceribus diligebat Christum Regem, et non formidabat imperii principatum: o sanctissima anima, quam etsi gladius persecutoris non abstulit, palmam tamen martyrii non amisit!

You’ll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn

Today, in Bologna, the Holy Father delivered an address to the Fifth National Convention of the Italian Church, which his close collaborator, Fr. Antonio Spadaro, S.J., has already called a mini-encyclical about Christian humanism. This passage hearkens back to one of the themes we have previously identified. (We present it in Italian, which we machine-translated for ourselves):

Però sappiamo che le tentazioni esistono; le tentazioni da affrontare sono tante. Ve ne presento almeno due. Non spaventatevi, questo non sarà un elenco di tentazioni! Come quelle quindici che ho detto alla Curia!

La prima di esse è quella pelagiana. Essa spinge la Chiesa a non essere umile, disinteressata e beata. E lo fa con l’apparenza di un bene. Il pelagianesimo ci porta ad avere fiducia nelle strutture, nelle organizzazioni, nelle pianificazioni perfette perché astratte. Spesso ci porta pure ad assumere uno stile di controllo, di durezza, di normatività. La norma dà al pelagiano la sicurezza di sentirsi superiore, di avere un orientamento preciso. In questo trova la sua forza, non nella leggerezza del soffio dello Spirito. Davanti ai mali o ai problemi della Chiesa è inutile cercare soluzioni in conservatorismi e fondamentalismi, nella restaurazione di condotte e forme superate che neppure culturalmente hanno capacità di essere significative. La dottrina cristiana non è un sistema chiuso incapace di generare domande, dubbi, interrogativi, ma è viva, sa inquietare, sa animare. Ha volto non rigido, ha corpo che si muove e si sviluppa, ha carne tenera: la dottrina cristiana si chiama Gesù Cristo.

La riforma della Chiesa poi – e la Chiesa è semper reformanda – è aliena dal pelagianesimo. Essa non si esaurisce nell’ennesimo piano per cambiare le strutture. Significa invece innestarsi e radicarsi in Cristo lasciandosi condurre dallo Spirito. Allora tutto sarà possibile con genio e creatività.

La Chiesa italiana si lasci portare dal suo soffio potente e per questo, a volte, inquietante. Assuma sempre lo spirito dei suoi grandi esploratori, che sulle navi sono stati appassionati della navigazione in mare aperto e non spaventati dalle frontiere e delle tempeste. Sia una Chiesa libera e aperta alle sfide del presente, mai in difensiva per timore di perdere qualcosa. Mai in difensiva per timore di perdere qualcosa. E, incontrando la gente lungo le sue strade, assuma il proposito di san Paolo: «Mi sono fatto debole per i deboli, per guadagnare i deboli; mi sono fatto tutto per tutti, per salvare a ogni costo qualcuno» (1 Cor 9,22).

Una seconda tentazione da sconfiggere è quella dello gnosticismo.Essa porta a confidare nel ragionamento logico e chiaro, il quale però perde la tenerezza della carne del fratello. Il fascino dello gnosticismo è quello di «una fede rinchiusa nel soggettivismo, dove interessa unicamente una determinata esperienza o una serie di ragionamenti e conoscenze che si ritiene possano confortare e illuminare, ma dove il soggetto in definitiva rimane chiuso nell’immanenza della sua propria ragione o dei suoi sentimenti» (Evangelii gaudium, 94). Lo gnosticismo non può trascendere.

La differenza fra la trascendenza cristiana e qualunque forma di spiritualismo gnostico sta nel mistero dell’incarnazione. Non mettere in pratica, non condurre la Parola alla realtà, significa costruire sulla sabbia, rimanere nella pura idea e degenerare in intimismi che non danno frutto, che rendono sterile il suo dinamismo.

(Emphasis in original, hyperlink removed.) Vatican Radio has translated some excerpts in its story about the speech.

At this point, the battle against “Pelagianism” and “fundamentalism” are major themes of the Holy Father’s reign.

On the Feast of Dedication of the Archbasilica of the Most Holy Savior

There is something special, we think, about celebrating—as both the Forma Ordinaria and the  Forma Extraordinaria do today—the Dedication of the Archbasilica of the Most Holy Savior, known, more commonly, as “St. John Lateran.” (We’ll call it the “Archbasilica” here, though we acknowledge that “St. John Lateran” is what everyone calls it.)

As most folks know, the Archbasilica is the cathedral church of the bishop of Rome and, therefore, the “mother church and head of all the churches of Rome and the world.” And the Lateran basilica traces its foundation back to Constantine’s gratitude to Pope Silvester for his baptism and miraculous cure. The feast of its dedication therefore points to the unity of the Church throughout the world and to the history of the Church, as the persecutions ended (for the most part) and the Church began its progress in the light of day.

It seems to us that the feast of the Dedication of the Archbasilica is exactly the sort of salubrious ultramontanism that we ought to celebrate more. Not the sort of super-dogmatic ultramontanism that devolves quickly into what Elliot Milco has called Mottramism—after the hapless convert Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited. You know the sort. “Everything the Pope says must be absolutely true and correct no matter what.” “This Pope is the best exponent of such-and-such doctrine.” So on and so forth. Such Mottramism does a real disservice to the Church, which is forced to depend on one man’s off-the-cuff statement, to the pope, who may not have signed up for the job if he knew his every thought was going to be treated as dogma, and to the faithful, who ought not to be deprived of the teachings of so many good and holy popes over the centuries. This is not a good ultramontanism. But the feast we celebrate today is good ultramontanism.

The feast of the Dedication of the Archbasilica reminds us first that we are members of one Church. We can look at the Archbasilica and see the church of the bishop of Rome, who is, ultimately, our bishop, too. This is a key point from Milco’s exposition of Pastor aeternus: the pope is everyone’s bishop—that’s what universal, immediate, and ordinary jurisdiction means—he is not merely the bishops’ bishop or some higher, appellate instance of the Church. He’s our bishop and your bishop and our bishops’ bishop, too. Thus, when we look at our bishop’s church, we see a building that represents in some way the unity of the Church.

The Archbasilica reminds us also that there is an unbroken—if a little bruised, frankly—cultural trajectory from ancient Rome through the Church to the present day. We can look at the Archbasilica and see an unbroken path leading all the way back to Constantine’s baptism by Silvester all those years ago. The Archbasilica represents, to put it another way, continuity between ancient Rome, those parts of it worth saving, at any rate, and the Church of today.

This is a sort of ultramontanism that we need more of. Not the pope as some sort of magical figure, but the pope, and his cathedral church, as a sign of unity and continuity.

Postscript:

We were in the process of writing this post when we were called away from our desk on some business. When we got back to our desk, we found that Pater Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., had reposted his 2011 piece, “The Dedication of the Lateran as the Feast of the Church Militant,” from his blog, Sancrucensis. A brief selection:

The Apostles shed their blood in Rome, but their blood became the seed of the conversion of the whole city and all that was great in it. And the symbol of all this is the dedication of the Lateran Basilica to ‘Christ the Savior’.

While we hope for the final peace of the heavenly Jerusalem we are at war. The Church on earth is Roman, She is militant. The daily combat combat waged in our souls against the false gods of this world is more than a merely individual struggle; it is one battlefield of a great war that is to spread the new pax romana throughout the world. It is sweet and noble to fight and suffer for such a City!

(Emphasis supplied.) Read the whole thing there.

Have we lost the Latin Liturgy of the Hours, too?

A few days ago, Kevin Di Camillo posted “Why the Devil Hates Latin” at the Register. It’s essentially a brief narrative of his journey from the English Liturgy of the Hours to the Roman Breviary of 1960. The thing that surprises us, however, is that Di Camillo seems not to have considered the Liturgia Horarum in Latin. Certainly the paucity of editions cannot help—there’s only the cheaply made Vatican edition and the sturdy and expensive Midwest Theological Forum edition, as far as we know—but it is not as though there are options upon options upon options for the 1960 Breviary. Furthermore, the MTF Liturgia Horarum, while expensive, is not leaps and bounds more expensive than either the Baronius or Nova et Vetera editions of the 1960 Breviary. However, Di Camillo does not seem to write from the perspective of one who found it easier or cheaper to obtain a 1960 Breviary than a Liturgia Horarum. He seems to write from the perspective of one who never considered the Latin Liturgia Horarum.

We note that the Holy Father is a priest who has apparently long prayed the Liturgia Horarum in Latin. We recall especially this passage from the long 2013 interview with Fr. Antonio Spadaro in America:

At this point the pope stands up and takes the breviary from his desk. It is in Latin, and is worn down by continued use. He opens it to the Office of the Readings of the Feria Sexta, that is Friday, of the 27th week. He reads a passage to me taken from the Commonitórium Primum of St. Vincent of Lerins: “ita étiam christiánae religiónis dogma sequátur has decet proféctuum leges, ut annis scílect consolidétur, dilatétur témpore, sublimétur aetáte” (“Thus even the dogma of the Christian religion must proceed from these laws. It progresses, solidifying with years, growing over time, deepening with age.”)

(Emphasis supplied.) Others have noted that the interview with Spadaro took place in August 2013, but the 27th Week of Ordinary Time in 2013 didn’t begin until October 6. In other words, the Holy Father knows the Liturgia Horarum well enough to remember a particular passage from the Office of Readings without having just read it. One would think, as folks respond so favorably to the Holy Father’s example, that the Latin Liturgia Horarum would be experiencing a revival. However, we suspect that the Holy Father remains one of only a small minority of clerics and laity so intimately familiar with the Liturgia Horarum.

The Liturgy of the Hours was intended, more or less, to lighten the burden of the Office for priests engaged in active work. Now, whether or not the Office was actually a great burden on the majority of priests is an open question. (We have been told that Archbishop Lefebvre, a tireless missionary in his day, argued for some modifications, since some missionaries found it burdensome in the context of their work.) That aside, it makes some degree of sense that most priests say their Offices in the vernacular. Certainly, vernacular recitation is in keeping with the spirit that motivated the design of the Liturgy of the Hours, if not the intent of the fathers who voted for Sacrosanctum Concilium.

However, as Di Camillo noted, there is something to be said for praying the public prayer of the Church in the Church’s own language. More than that, there is something to be said for praying the public prayer of the Church using, by and large, language that would be as familiar to Pope St. Gregory the Great and Pope St. Pius V as it would be to us. (The Nova Vulgata resembles fairly strongly the Gallican Psalter, though it follows the Bea psalter into some Hebraisms.) Yet, when Di Camillo went to pray in Latin, he went, first, to the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary and then, after Summorum Pontificum and Universae Ecclesiae, to the 1960 Breviary. And he is far from alone: many people turn to the 1960 Breviary and the traditional Benedictine Office when they want pray an Office in Latin. In other words, Di Camillo’s perspective—one who seems not to have considered the Liturgia Horarum—is not unique.

As we discussed a little while back, we—the Church, that is—seem to have lost a sense that the Divine Office ought to be sung or recited publicly. And it seems that we seem to have forgotten that the Liturgia Horarum is out there as an option even for private recitation.

Told me we’d all be brave

Some outlets have started using, well, bellicose terminology to discuss the situation—crisis?—in the Church today. We are apparently in the midst of “a civil war.” We wonder if such warlike terminology is entirely necessary, especially since we are not talking always about a battle against “principalities and power,” Eph. 6:12, but against men and women within the Church. It seems to us that it would be far better to adopt a language of fraternal correction.

Better than a language of fraternal correction it seems to us that we need to adopt a practice of fraternal correction, rooted in scripture and the teaching of Thomas Aquinas, for this situation. Remember that Paul withstood Peter to the face when the faith was at stake. (Gal. 2:11-21.) And remember that the Common Doctor teaches us,

Consequently the correction of a wrongdoer is twofold, one which applies a remedy to the sin considered as an evil of the sinner himself. This is fraternal correction properly so called, which is directed to the amendment of the sinner. Now to do away with anyone’s evil is the same as to procure his good: and to procure a person’s good is an act of charity, whereby we wish and do our friend well. Consequently fraternal correction also is an act of charity, because thereby we drive out our brother’s evil, viz. sin, the removal of which pertains to charity rather than the removal of an external loss, or of a bodily injury, in so much as the contrary good of virtue is more akin to charity than the good of the body or of external things. Therefore fraternal correction is an act of charity rather than the healing of a bodily infirmity, or the relieving of an external bodily need. There is another correction which applies a remedy to the sin of the wrongdoer, considered as hurtful to others, and especially to the common good. This correction is an act of justice, whose concern it is to safeguard the rectitude of justice between one man and another.

(ST IIa IIae q.33 a.1 co.) (emphasis supplied). In other words, we think that it might do traditionally minded Catholics well to get off the war footing and start talking about love. Not a cheap love that passes over faults because they’re awkward or we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but real love. And part of that is charitably correcting our brothers’ faults, even when our brothers are high prelates in the Church (cf. ST IIa IIae q.33 a.4 co.; Gal. 2:11–21). We ought not to do battle with the adherents of Cardinal Kasper’s theories or the Modernists or any other clique or gang: we ought to try to drive out their fault. In the case of the theory currently rocking the Church, we ought to try to drive out the fault that leads some people to think that practice and doctrine are somehow separable. Not because we want to win, but because we want to get our brothers and sisters back on the narrow path. Because we love them.

And because the faith is at stake.

Now, as Aquinas tells us, fraternal correction is an act of virtue, IIa IIae q.33 a.2 co., which means doing the right thing to the right people at the right time in the right way (Ethic. II.5, 1106b20–24). The extent to which one deviates from this mean is, of course, the extent to which one’s actions are blameworthy (Ethic. II.9, 1109b20–23). And getting serious about fraternal correction means getting serious about finding the right way to do it. Or, as the Philosopher would say, getting serious about fraternal correction means figuring out how to hit the mean (cf. Ethic. II.5, 1106b24–28). We suspect that this discussion would be lively, not to say contentious, since there is a wide range of opinion on the proper response to the situation in the Church. However, it seems to us that the group of people best equipped, philosophically and doctrinally, to have this discussion are, in fact, traditionally minded Catholics.

Such an approach has two benefits. One, it seems to be more consistent with scriptural mandates in this context (cf. Matt. 5:43–48; Rom. 12:14–21). Two, building on the comment of an acquaintance of ours, a consistent language of love and charity goes a long way to rebutting allegations of hatred, bitterness, or outright aggression. And, if there is one thing that life in 2015 teaches us, leftists (or progressives or what-have-you) are not above alleging hate or aggression against those who uphold the Apostolic faith. Or even against those who refuse to surrender to disordered individualism and abolition of values Benedict once called non-negotiable.

Does the Church really need a new “Pastor Bonus”?

Edward Condon, who, if you’ll remember, broke the news about Cardinal Coccopalmerio’s letter about the question of consent to the processus brevior, has a piece at the Catholic Herald about Francis’s ongoing project of Curia reform:

Rereading Pastor Bonus, it is hard to see where that document could be meaningfully changed to prevent the kind of financial chicanery we are reading about, other than by the creation of a Secretariat for the Economy, which has already been done. Pastor Bonus outlines what the various Vatican departments are and what matters they deal with, it is not the curial equivalent of a civil service code; that does exist and is called the General Regulations of the Roman Curia, and about the reform of this we have heard next to nothing.

While the reordering of the curial departments might be useful in some respects, like the creation of one department to handle everything pertaining to the laity, it cannot prevent or address ongoing abuses by those who work in those departments.

Pope Francis has spoken strongly and often of his disapproval of careerism in the Curia, yet we have seen sadly little, if anything, done to discourage it. While the C9 group of cardinals was drawn from around the world and could at least have represented an outside perspective for reform, this has not carried over into actual curial appointments. The most high profile appointments under Francis have continued to go to career Vatican civil servants, including Cardinal Parolin, as Secretary of State, and Cardinal Mamberti as head of the Apostolic Signatura, the Vatican Supreme Court, to say nothing of the highly controversial appointment of Mgr Ricca to the IOR, or Vatican Bank. All of these appointments were made by Francis under advice from the very Curia he is trying to reform, with the ridiculous consequence that he has had to write to his own Secretary of State reminding him to run the Church according to the rules.

(Emphasis supplied.) If you’re especially interested in the Church’s administrative regulations, the General Regulations of the Roman Curia are available in Italian here. We have remarked a couple of times that the project of sweeping reform of the Curia, so much on the cardinals’ minds as they prepared for the conclave, seems to have fallen into second or third prominence on the Holy Father’s agenda. Certainly, the promised rewrite of Pastor Bonus has not appeared. And on this issue, Condon’s point is pretty sound: where could Pastor Bonus be improved? We’re not so sure.

Certainly, codifying, for want of a better word, the competence of the Fidelis Dispensator entities would be nice, as would long-term clarity on the role of the Council of Cardinals. And, if the Holy Father does erect a super-congregation for family, laity, and life, as he promised at the Synod, it would be nice to have its competence codified. But, in the main, as Condon notes, Pastor Bonus only sets out the competence and jurisdiction of the various dicasteries, and even then only in very broad terms. The implementation of that competence and jurisdiction comes in other sources of law. For example, one has to consult sources other than Pastor Bonus to figure out what the penal jurisdiction of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is—an important issue if one is worried about allegations of heresy, for example—especially the so-called Substantive Norms.

A brief digression: we have long complained that the Church’s sources of law are remarkably opaque, and that real transparency will not be possible until all the faithful can access, in a language they can understand, all of the relevant law. In the United States, most states make not only statutes and regulations but also judicial decisions available for free via the internet. (The federal government is very good about statutes and regulations, but less good about many judicial decisions.) In addition to the states’ publications, private services like Westlaw and Lexis provide access to statutes, regulations, and judicial decisions at all levels. Compare that to the Church of Rome, which makes some things available, but not all, and not always in widely spoken languages. (Italian is not widely spoken outside Italy, as some Synod fathers noted.) One big gap is the relative unavailability of Rotal jurisprudence, which provides hugely important glosses on the relevant canons, especially in matrimonial cases. The Vatican’s website is also a mess, which is a problem when it comes time to access important legal documents.

Put it like this: while “apostolic constitution” is a term of art, it is helpful to think of Pastor Bonus as a constitution for the Curia. And, as with any constitution, it deals in broad strokes. The detail work comes later and elsewhere. So, the question is, really, whether the broad strokes of Pastor Bonus need to be replaced with the broad strokes of another document. And that is not so clear. But even if Pastor Bonus needs to be replaced by a new document, it is not clear that that fixes the problem of the Curia. Condon again:

While a new version of Pastor Bonus will be an interesting, and probably helpful, development in the governance of the Church, it is not going to be the panacea of reform many are hoping for. If we ever hope to see real transparency in the governance of the Church, there needs to be reform, not of the Vatican departments, but of those working in them.

(Emphasis supplied.) On this point, given the Holy Father’s stringent Christmas speech to the Curia, it seems that Holy Father agrees.

You’ll never watch your life slide out of view

David Mills, writing at Aleteia, has “A Marxist Lesson for Breeding Catholics.” His argument opens (and boils down to):

Only the affluent will find being open to life easy. For us, another child means an adjustment downward, but he doesn’t tip the family into poverty, or into deeper poverty. He may mean giving up a vacation if the family’s wealthy, or the Thursday family dinner out if the family’s middle class. Her arrival won’t mean giving up food, or rent or the parochial school that can make all the difference to his older siblings’ future.

Most of us who write about these things can afford to be romantic about them. Those in the Catholic chattering classes who compose warm glowing stories about the beauty of the Catholic teaching—as I have here, for example—tend to forget that we write from privilege. We forget what Marxism 101 would teach us, that we see the world from a specific place in society and favor its interests, and without great effort will be blind to the perspectives and interests of others, especially the poor.

There is in much Catholic writing on married sexuality a reflection of bourgeois good feeling; it treats the Catholic teaching as a pure blessing, with formulaic nods to its difficulty, when for others, not so privileged as we are, it can be a burden and a threat. Catholics who write and speak on sexuality tend to be perky.

(Emphasis supplied and hyperlink removed.) He goes on in this vein for a little while, coming to this conclusion:

It can’t be acceptable, from the Catholic point of view, that the marital act is so strictly bound by economic status that husbands and wives can enjoy the divine gift of sexual union only if they can afford the result. The Catholic teaching is not for the middle and upper classes alone.

We the comfortable, who speak so romantically of being open to life—because for us, with our privileges, it is a romance—could find ways to make it a romance, and not a terror, for others too.

(Emphasis supplied.)

The comments, perhaps predictably, have a roughly bimodal distribution. For our part, we think, on one hand, Mills’s comments are sort of trivial: yes, financial stability and reasonably good health may make the material and physical aspects of children easier; yes, the financially stable and reasonably healthy may have a particular set of biases that informs how they approach Church teachings; and, yes, Catholic commentators on these issues can be, as an acquaintance noted elsewhere, a little glib—even, horribile dictu, a little perky—about these issues. On the other hand, as another acquaintance noted, Mills seems to miss an obvious issue in this context: the extent to which the Church proposes solutions to the problems he identifies. We think that the Church’s social teaching—especially the Church’s economic teaching—provides important solutions to and conceptual frameworks for the problems Mills identifies.

Consider first this passage from Quadragesimo anno,

In the first place, the worker must be paid a wage sufficient to support him and his family. That the rest of the family should also contribute to the common support, according to the capacity of each, is certainly right, as can be observed especially in the families of farmers, but also in the families of many craftsmen and small shopkeepers. But to abuse the years of childhood and the limited strength of women is grossly wrong. Mothers, concentrating on household duties, should work primarily in the home or in its immediate vicinity. It is an intolerable abuse, and to be abolished at all cost, for mothers on account of the father’s low wage to be forced to engage in gainful occupations outside the home to the neglect of their proper cares and duties, especially the training of children. Every effort must therefore be made that fathers of families receive a wage large enough to meet ordinary family needs adequately. But if this cannot always be done under existing circumstances, social justice demands that changes be introduced as soon as possible whereby such a wage will be assured to every adult workingman. It will not be out of place here to render merited praise to all, who with a wise and useful purpose, have tried and tested various ways of adjusting the pay for work to family burdens in such a way that, as these increase, the former may be raised and indeed, if the contingency arises, there may be enough to meet extraordinary needs.

(Emphasis supplied and footnote omitted.) One can, if one is so inclined, also look to Rerum novarum itself for further guidance on the role of a just wage in supporting a family. But wherever one looks, the point is largely the same: workers are entitled to a just wage, suitable to permit those workers to support their families. And it seems to us that in this principle is the solution, at some level, to Mills’s basic problem regarding wealth and openness to life. Put another way, Mills says it cannot be acceptable to the Church that economic circumstances restrict couples’ openness to procreation according to God’s plan. And it isn’t acceptable. The Church says that workers are owed a just wage, and a just wage ought to be sufficient to support a family, if perhaps a little frugally. If economic circumstances are such that one cannot support a family, then it seems to us that one not being paid a just wage.

To expand upon this issue briefly: the question of just wages (or living wages or what-have-you) is politically a sensitive question in the United States today. However, it is, we think, safe to say that most jurisdictions have not adopted a living wage, and to the extent that a living wage is a just wage, those jurisdictions have not adopted a just wage. However, we acknowledge that following Quadragesimo anno, it is an open question whether a living wage is always a just wage, especially if the condition of the business (employer) is not taken into consideration in arriving at a living wage. However, in many cases, a living wage may approximate fairly reasonably a just wage. In this regard, therefore, these jurisdictions have failed to follow the teachings of the Church (or, more precisely, they have permitted employers to deviate from the demands of justice). And if this failure has caused the consequences Mills identifies—that is, economic circumstances chilling parents’ openness to procreation according to God’s plan—then it seems to us that those jurisdictions have a double responsibility to rectify their failure.

Mills also identifies a risk—to his way of thinking—for affluent Catholic parents:

The affluent for whom the Catholic teaching is not a great burden can fall to the temptations of their class, one of which is to think of their children as lifestyle accessories. The Catholic just has more of them than his secular and Protestant neighbors and can feel a little proud of it. It is easy to feel smug when you can say that you have X number of children when speaking to someone who has X minus 2 or X minus 3 children. You can feel that God rewarded your obedience and sacrifice by giving you more “toys” than your friends have.

(Emphasis added.) Now, consider this passage from Laudato si’:

A misguided anthropocentrism leads to a misguided lifestyle. In the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, I noted that the practical relativism typical of our age is “even more dangerous than doctrinal relativism”. When human beings place themselves at the centre, they give absolute priority to immediate convenience and all else becomes relative. Hence we should not be surprised to find, in conjunction with the omnipresent technocratic paradigm and the cult of unlimited human power, the rise of a relativism which sees everything as irrelevant unless it serves one’s own immediate interests. There is a logic in all this whereby different attitudes can feed on one another, leading to environmental degradation and social decay.

(Hyperlinks and footnote omitted and emphasis supplied.) It seems to us that the problem of children-as-reward—we have long called children in such unfortunate situations “trophy children”—is very much of a piece of the “misguided anthropocentrism” and “practical relativism” that puts the individual ahead of all others, including one’s children. In this case, the attitude Mills identifies has a certain spiritual dimension, especially since whether one has children and how many is a matter fundamentally left to God’s designs, but to the extent that one views one’s children as a reward or something like that, that attitude is essentially anthropocentric. While this insight is not as concrete as Pius’s discussion of just wages and their relationship to proper family life in Quadragesimo anno, it must be said that Francis provides a framework to think about the phenomenon of trophy children. Within this framework, it may well be possible to arrive at more concrete discussions of the problem.

In sum, the doctrinal issues that Mills identifies—particularly the economic pressures on procreation—are addressed, more or less directly, in the Church’s social teaching. Other issues can be understood better, if not solved, through other themes in the Church’s teaching. Now, we acknowledge that these doctrinal issues are not entirely Mills’s point, which is that healthy and wealthy Catholics tend not to understand that the Church’s teaching on procreation may be daunting to less healthy, less wealthy folks. However, it seems to us that the glibness, as one of our acquaintances put it, of some Catholics toward the question is a function of an incomplete understanding of the Church’s teaching on these issues.

Keeping all my secrets safe in Rome

Edward Pentin has a good summary of Vatileaks II at the Register. He spends a little time talking about the relationship of the scandal to George Cardinal Pell, the Holy Father’s prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy:

Sources have told the Register that Msgr. Vallejo promoted Cardinal Pell for the position of prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy and that the Spanish priest hoped to become its secretary. Instead, due to an “incompatibility of functions,” that position went to Msgr. Alfred Xuereb, the former Maltese private secretary of Benedict XVI.

Some have seen this as a possible indirect attack on Cardinal Pell, whose financial reforms have drawn opposition, especially in parts of the Curia and the Italian media. But a spokesman for the cardinal insisted that was not the case. “The reforms are moving forward,” he told the Register, and the arrests are “the effect of the reforms that are being put in place.”

“The leaking of documents isn’t acceptable in any government, and it’s not acceptable here,” he said. “The Church is getting its house in order.”

(Emphasis added.) The question we have—and if anyone would like to leak anything to us, well, we’re flattered—is whether the leak of what appears to have been an early draft of the Cardinals’ letter to the Holy Father during the Synod has any connection to the Vallejo-Chaouqui situation.

On the absence of the Divine Office

At Opus Publicum, Gabriel Sanchez makes this point,

What the Byzantine Rite has not lost, and the Roman Rite surely needs, is the central importance of public prayer to the life of the Church. For most Catholics, that prayer is the Mass and only the Mass. If there is ever anything “more” it is typically a para-liturgical devotion such as the Rosary or a novena. There is nothing wrong with that per se, but for most of Church history reciting the Divine Office in choir was as natural as serving Mass. Today, unfortunately, that is simply not possible for most parishes to carry out all of the time, but why can’t more Latin churches strive to serve hours like Vespers and Compline at least some of the time? The easy answer is, “Because there’s no demand for it.” But the chances are there will never be a demand unless the clergy, in concert with dedicated members of the laity, create one.

(Emphasis supplied.)

The Divine Office has always occupied a tricky place in the Latin Church. Everyone agrees that the Church has to pray the Office as its public prayer, though precisely how has, as nearly as we can tell, always been a matter open to discussion. Callewaert, in his De Brevarii Romani Liturgia, outlines admirably the Apostolic origins of the Divine Office and traces its development from the days of the persecution of the Church through the reforms of Pius X. It makes for interesting reading. Of course, you know the rest of the story: the reforms continued apace through Pius XII and John XXIII’s pontificates with the help of Annibale Bugnini and his clique of liturgists, and culminated in Paul VI’s Liturgia Horarum, which bears little resemblance even to John XXIII’s Breviary, which itself was a revision of Pius X’s Breviary, which was in its turn a revision of Pius V’s Breviary. (It is passing strange that people who get incensed about the implications of Quo primum for the Mass almost never get incensed about the implications of Quod a nobis for the Office.) However, throughout this development, the laity participated regularly in the Divine Office, as Sanchez notes.

In fact, if there was one constant in the Church’s liturgy between Pius V’s Quod a nobis in 1568 and Paul VI’s Laudis canticum in 1970—a time of almost 400 years—it was that the breviary was constantly tinkered with. (Think of Urban VIII’s hymns, for example.) Benedict XVI in Summorum pontificum and its instruction Universae Ecclesiae reinstated the Breviary of John XXIII, apparently because Archbishop Lefebvre decided for some reason to stick with the books in force in 1962 (even though the Bugnini-driven reforms really started in 1955 with the revised Holy Week rites and Cum hac nostra aetate and continued with the 1960 Breviary and 1962 Missal). The upshot of all of this is that, notwithstanding the Church’s centuries of tinkering with the Breviary, the faithful have at least two Church-approved options: the 1960 Roman Breviary and the 1970 Liturgia Horarum, as updated, which is its own thing. (We will omit discussion of the traditional Benedictine Office.)

But with two Church-approved options, it should be easy as pie for any parish to provide congenial celebrations of the canonical hours regularly. Got a parish where the high altar was never jackhammered out, where the hymnals smell of incense, and where the choir calls itself a schola? Great. Offer sung second vespers of Sunday according to the 1960 books. Got a parish where Paul VI’s Mass is celebrated ad orientem in Latin and where “the reform of the reform” has appeared more than never in the bulletin? Super. Offer sung vespers according to the Liturgia Horarum on Wednesday nights. Got a parish full of felt banners and the rushing sounds of the spirit of Vatican II? Recite Morning Prayer according to the English Liturgy of the Hours on Fridays before Mass. Right? Something for everybody.

Also, the Office would be little but lay participation in most parishes. While a priest or deacon ought to lead celebrations of the Office, the laity still have significant roles in the Office—especially if the Office is sung. For example, unless one is at a monastery or a seminary, it is unlikely that the antiphons, psalms, and canticles could be chanted without substantial help from the laity. Furthermore, the General Instruction of the Liturgy of the Hours provides rubrics for celebrations in the absence of a cleric, if it comes down to that. In other words, the Office provides, really, more opportunities for lay involvement in the liturgy, if that sort of thing is important to you.

But, as Sanchez notes, nothing doing. Laity still prefer para-liturgical—or quasi-liturgical, we suppose—devotions like the Rosary and the clergy does not appear to want to push the Divine Office in either of its forms. There are, in essence, two forms of the Office, which, between them, appeal to almost every sensibility, and neither of which are especially widely used. Why? We think there are essentially three reasons. One, the Liturgia Horarum, which most clerics use these days, practically begs to be recited either privately or in common with other clerics and all at once. Two, most parishes simply don’t have a deep enough bench, musically, to support a sung Office, even one or two days a week. And three, the Mass, having been reconceptualized as a communal celebration ordered toward the reception of the Eucharist, has sucked all the air out of the room as far as the laity are concerned. But these are just guesses.

What we talk about when we talk about the Pope

David Mills, at Ethika Politika, writes “The Bitter Sons Speak,” a piece criticizing some the Holy Father’s critics. His point?

Francis can be criticized and criticized strongly. The critics I’m talking about distinguish themselves from other critics by reading Francis as unscrupulous prosecuting attorneys, who care only to get the conviction and the maximum sentence. They say nothing in his favor, unless they say it as the beginning of a sentence that ends in a sharp criticism.

Words they would have quickly posted on Facebook had Benedict said them they leave unreported, because those words would disturb their narrative about Francis. This is true of some of the more moderate critics, who protest their loyalty to the pope. The “presence of an absence” suggests what they really feel.

Nothing he can do, short of saying what they would say were they him, will change their minds. I was wrong to hope that they might grow out of it.

(Emphasis supplied and hyperlink omitted.) For our part, we think that some of the Holy Father’s critics do go far too far. Asserting that the Pope is a Peronist economic dilettante bent on the destruction of the capitalist West goes too far. (For one thing, such an argument assumes that the capitalist West, which has taken every available opportunity to toss Christ and His Church out of public life and replace them with disordered individualism, is good in and of itself. A highly debatable proposition at best and flatly false at worst.) Likewise, there are some commentators who are, probably, inflexibly opposed to the Holy Father, or at least inflexibly reflexively suspicious of him. This is all true, and we have not found such commentary to be always spiritually improving. Or even merely spiritually non-harmful.

We have written here previously that it is pretty obvious that the Holy Father does not especially like traditionally minded Catholics. If his public statements are to be credited, it seems to us that he seems them as rule-quoting scolds who do not always (often?) mean well. Father John Hunwicke has wondered whether this is simply the Holy Father inviting traditionally minded Catholics to a rough-and-tumble debate, where, after some stringent language, everyone goes out together afterward for cocktails and laughs, or whether the Holy Father is putting everyone on notice. Perhaps that explains it. However it is clear that people speculate on why the Holy Father expresses himself this way. Likewise, instead of criticizing these critics as “bitter sons,” Mills ought to ask why they feel the need to express themselves this way.

We think there are fundamentally three reasons:

  • One, the internet breeds flamboyant, hyperbolic expression. This is so obvious as to require no further comment.
  • Two, in any small, ideological community—and traditional Catholicism is at least that—there is an impulse to make ever more hyperbolic declarations of orthodoxy, either to be heard among people who all think more or less the same way or to fit in with the group. Call it a positive feedback loop.
  • Three, people are really scared right now.

Mills goes on to say,

The critics don’t speak as disappointed or worried sons. They don’t read the pope with deference and humility, as an adult son listening to his father. My own father rarely gave advice, but when he did, I listened to him carefully. I stifled my desire to object or contradict and even when after much thought I still disagreed, I tried to find ways in which he was right, because he was a wise man who loved me. He was not infallible, but as I look back now, he was right more often than I saw then.

Even Francis’ bitterest critics should speak of him the way one speaks of a father when one has to be publicly critical, which is far less often than his critics think: To say what you have to say but not more, and certainly not bitterly, and to say the hardest things in a way to protect his good name. What you say of him you say of yourself and your family and for that family’s good name you are jealous. That is especially true when that family is the Church, into which you want others to enter.

(Emphasis supplied and hyperlink omitted.) Fair enough, for people motivated by the distorted sense of liberty that the internet provides and for people who are simply proving that there is no more more traditional than they this side of Cardinal Ottaviani. But not so fair for people who are genuinely worried—genuinely afraid—of what they see in the Church today. Maybe some of those fears are unreasonable, though it is fairly clear that Francis personally likes the Kasper proposal, whether or not he feels free to implement its strongest form, but that’s a different conversation than the one Mills is having.

And as long as we are lecturing the critics of the Holy Father for their lack of charity, perhaps we should also be charitable toward the critics.