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Scalia’s Death

It is hard to imagine America without Antonin Scalia. Hero to conservatives, bête noire to the left, Scalia was a judge unlike any other judge in the history of the Republic. And his death seems momentous in a way that other events in the life of the Republic in recent years have not. There will be more politicians, more elections, more crises, domestic and international, and more wars. (At least until the Lord returns and this world passes away.) But there will not be another Scalia. And we have lost something with his passing that we will not likely get back.

We recall, on June 26 last year, when the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, scrolling quickly past the majority opinion and Chief Justice John Roberts’s dissent to get to Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent. We assumed, given the indications of Justice Kennedy, that the majority decision would say that marriage extended to same-sex couples. We assumed that Chief Justice Roberts would deplore the way in which the decision was reached. And we didn’t really care. What we wanted to see was what Scalia had to say. And his dissent in Obergefell was a barn-burning attack on the reasoning (or lack thereof) of the majority opinion.

It was not the first time that we wanted to see what Scalia had to say first. And we were not alone in skipping the boring parts to see the fireworks. (Unfortunately, like the professor he was at heart, Scalia punished those of us who didn’t read the majority opinion by referring to it and quoting from it at length, requiring us to scroll back up repeatedly to see what he was talking about.)

It is unlikely that any other justice on the Supreme Court occupied the imagination of the public—lawyers and laymen alike—quite the way Scalia did. His public persona—blunt, witty, and brilliant—was balanced by stories of his devotion to Christ and Christ’s Church, his unlikely friendship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and his role as patriarch of a large family. Some of our acquaintances in the Washington area reported seeing Scalia regularly at the traditional Latin Mass offered at Mary Mother of God. But above all of this was his reputation as a writer: usually incisive, often witty, occasionally caustic, but always clear and always tightly reasoned. And we imagine that judges across the land, at every level, took a cue from Scalia and started expressing themselves and their views clearly and directly, too. (And some state courts we could name have, we think, very mightily struggled to avoid Scalia-style opinions. But even this is a testament to his influence.)

Even people who did not especially like Scalia were impressed by his incisive intellect. We had a very slight connection to him—to outline it would be a little gauche, so we’ll say it was on the order of a friend of a friend or something like that—and the impression we got was that he was blunt, witty, and brilliant, even as a young man. But the impressive thing is how many people, even his ideological adversaries, liked Scalia tremendously. There was something about his “Italian from Queens” style that was charming and disarming, even to his opponents.

And for all these reasons, as we noted above, Scalia’s death seems momentous in a way that other events in the recent life of the Republic have not. Perhaps coming very near the reason why, at First Things, Elliot Milco has a brief appreciation of Scalia. He writes,

Antonin Scalia was a hero to me, as he was to thousands, perhaps millions of conservative Americans. He was brilliant. He was morally engaged. His prose sparkled. He was the great champion of the Right, and he could not be silenced or voted out, no matter how much the press despised him. While his enemies pushed relentlessly to have their views enshrined as fundamental principles of free society, Scalia fought to keep the moral question open for debate, to maintain the possibility of reasonable dissent, because he believed that in a fair fight, we could still prevail. He was the mighty rearguard in our long and slow defeat.

The passing of Antonin Scalia is the passing of a great figure in American political life—a true jurist of the sort rarely seen in recent decades. For those of us on the Right, the death of this great man is devastating. In the past forty years the Supreme Court has been the site of so many crucial revisions of the fundamental law of our government. Who can say how his successor will affect the balance of power in this country, or for how long? Without him, or someone like him, we can guess what’s to come. More revision, more exclusion, more decay.

(Emphasis supplied.) This seems correct to us. It is unclear to us that anyone else could step into the breach and mount the thunderous defense of reason and justice that Scalia did for so long. Even when the forces of this world and the lord of this world won great victories—and they did win great victories, though only for a little while—Scalia could always drive them to paroxysms of fury with a turn of phrase or a careful dissection of a non-argument. They might have won, but they undoubtedly didn’t like how hard they had to work to do so when Scalia was watching. And, as we say, it is far from clear that anyone can fill that role quite like he did.

And, in all the memorials and remembrances, we think it is especially important to remember that Scalia was a champion of civil liberties, especially liberties that are important for criminal defendants. Scalia did much to save the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment from the constitutional dustheap, and he routinely voted in favor of robust Fourth Amendment protections. For him, these provisions were not impediments to effective police work, but necessary guarantees that protect citizens from police overreach. And he formed a remarkably durable coalition with liberal justices to provide much needed majorities to protect these rights. (We suspect that, very soon, the people thrilled today that their old nemesis is gone will miss him.)

Of your charity, pray for the repose of his soul.

The Ordinariate Office and the laity

David Clayton has a lengthy, excellent piece at New Liturgical Movement about the Customary of Our Lady of Walsingham (that is, the English Ordinariate’s version of the Divine Office). He argues,

From what I have seen I am excited. I think it provides great possibilities for lay people especially to start praying the Office. The Anglican Office has a proven record not only in enabling laity as well as clergy to pray the Office, but also as a public celebration of Morning and Evening Prayer. I heard recently from Mgr Andrew Burnham in England, who was instrumental in producing this, that this continues to this day. As he told me, the English Anglican cathedrals and choral foundations are in the midst of a golden age, as regards both attendance and music, and clearly meet a very deep need.”

(Emphasis supplied.) He makes several points, and, for that reason, we urge you to read the whole thing at New Liturgical Movement. We have a few observations, though.

First, one of the key drawbacks of the Liturgia Horarum is the four-week psalter. While some may argue that the Roman Breviary of 1960 was essentially a transitional breviary, pointing the way toward the Liturgia Horarum—and, in many respects, they may be right—it must also be said that the 1960 Breviary preserved the one-week psalter, which had been the ancient custom of the Roman Church, going back all the way to St. Benedict’s Regula. The four-week psalter loses through dilution some key dimensions of the psalms, not the least of which is the all-important Christological dimension. It also, in our opinion, reduces the centrality of the psalter in favor of other aspects of the Office, especially the readings in the Office of Readings and the preces at Morning and Evening Prayer. (In fact, the four-week psalter is the primary reason why we do not regularly recite the Liturgia Horarum ourselves, notwithstanding some of its advantages over the 1960 Breviary.)

It appears, unfortunately, from Clayton’s description that the Ordinariate Office preserves a four-week psalter, though one that does not suffer from some of the omissions that the Pauline psalter does:

First, convenience and simplicity: the psalm cycle is designed such that it is possible to sing the whole Office with just two Offices in the day – the hybrid Morning and Evening Prayer which allow us, one might say, to sing four Offices as two, and to sing the whole psalter in the course of the monthly psalm cycle. This means that it really is the Office for those who do not have many hours in each day to devote to singing the psalms. However, for those who do have more time, and wish to add more Offices in the day from time to time, there are simple options to add Prime (yes Prime!), Terce, Sext, None and Compline.

(Emphasis supplied.) We do not know enough about Anglican liturgy to know for certain whether or not the four-week psalter is a part of the Anglican patrimony. Looking, however, at a website devoted to the so-called Book of Common Prayer, it seems that the Anglican psalter, or at least an early version of the Anglican psalter, did indeed use a monthly psalter.  So, on one hand, the four-week psalter may be consistent with the patrimony of the Ordinariate, but it is not especially consistent with the customary use of the Roman Church. And the Ordinariate Office, however good it may be, is still hobbled by a four-week psalter.

Second, it seems to us that Clayton’s argument essentially is that this version of the Office is one that may well get laity interested in the Office. (For the record, we agree with Clayton that a spirituality based upon Mass and the Divine Office has distinct advantages.) However, we do not think that the problem is so easily solved by another version of the Office.

There are plenty of versions of the Office available right now. An American Catholic who wanted to recite or sing the Office according to an approved version could recite the Liturgia Horarum in Latin or English, the 1960 Roman Breviary in Latin, the traditional Benedictine Office in Latin, or some other approved Office. (The Cistercian Office of Heiligenkreuz Abbey has always seemed hugely fascinating, if a little exotic.) Additionally, there are those who say the Roman Breviary or the traditional Benedictine Office in an English translation, though the extent to which those translations were approved is sometimes a matter of debate. Moreover, the English translation of the traditional Benedictine Office contained in the Farnborough Monastic Diurnal is reverent and hieratic. (And that’s before we get into Anglo-Catholic things like the so-called Anglican Breviary or the Lancelot Andrewes Press edition of the Monastic Diurnal.)

The problem is not that there aren’t enough options for Catholics. There are options, as we have noted, to suit almost every liturgical taste. The problem—as a comment at NLM notes—is that the Office has become something (apparently) reserved to clergy. The Liturgia Horarum, which seems designed to be recited all at once and in private, has contributed to that perception. A new option is not going to change it. (We would, of course, be very happy to be proved wrong on this point.)

Finally, we wonder if another comment at NLM doesn’t have a point: the Ordinariate liturgy—both the new (and by all accounts splendid) Divine Worship, or the Pope Francis Missal as Fr. John Hunwicke has called it, and the Office—is the product of a very specific need in the Church. It seems to us that one’s experience of the Ordinariate liturgy may well be richer and more meaningful if one has a deeper understanding of the Anglican patrimony that is part of the life of the Ordinariate. Obviously, such an understanding is not strictly required to recite or chant the Office meaningfully and prayerfully, but the fact is that many Catholics do not have much experience with some Anglican traditions, such as Evensong. (Indeed, as we have noted repeatedly, many Catholics do not have much experience with their own vespers.) How one would go about obtaining that understanding is, of course, a different story.

 

Update on Catholic Action

Updating our Link Roundup from yesterday, we note that, at The Josias today, “Petrus Hispanus” responds to Gabriel Sanchez. Notably, “Petrus Hispanus” argues,

Leo XIII and St. Pius X favored the strategy of Catholic Action because they came to believe, as a matter of strategy, that still-dominant Catholic majorities in many countries could be rallied under a single party in order to use democracy as a weapon against liberalism. The faithful majorities, it was hoped, would vote liberalism out of existence under the leadership of Catholic Action parties. From this miscalculation, possibly brought on by the success of German Catholics against Bismarck, would ultimately come that spectacle of progressive alignment of Catholic politicians with liberalism that was “Christian democracy.”

All of this, of course, is not to impugn on the many excellent things done by Catholic Action in many countries, or to judge the motives these saintly and venerable Popes had in favoring it. Indeed, under the circumstances they faced, it is difficult to imagine what alternative they had in most cases, seeing as the political links with the ancien régime had almost entirely vanished and a new way of “doing Catholic politics” needed to be implemented seriously, one to which the example of Germany and others gave true practical plausibility.  

(Emphasis supplied.) This is a fascinating debate, which we shall continue to follow with great interest.

Some remarks on Kaveny and Neuhaus

A sharp young Catholic of our acquaintance has pointed us to an interesting exchange over the past couple of weeks. At Commonweal, Cathleen Kaveny argued that the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus sowed division in the Church by articulating a vision of conservative Catholics collaborating with evangelicals and Jews on points of agreement for political reasons. In Kaveny’s opinion, Neuhaus led conservative Catholics away from progressive Catholics for political reasons, and this fundamental rift has become more obvious since the Holy Father marked out a course in his reign not wholly consonant with the political views of these conservative Catholics. In other words, political expediency drew Neuhaus and his circle away from Catholics and toward protestants and Jews, laying the groundwork for the debates we see in the Church today.

This argument was, well, received as well as one would expect. At First Things, R.R. Reno responded with a thorough rebuttal, making the essential point that, in some respects, conservative Catholics do, in fact, have more in common with conservative protestants and Jews than they do with their progressive Catholic brethren. Robert George responded, a little haughtily, and suggested that Caveny was running at Neuhaus only because she could do so without fear of hearing back from Neuhaus. And, at the National Catholic Reporter, Michael Sean Winters has responded a couple of times, first by sort of coming to the point that there’s division in the Church because the conservatives are no longer in good odor in Rome, and later by suggesting that progressive Catholics also made political deals that weren’t good for the unity of the Church. (Although how Neuhaus could have sown dissent is unclear, since the conservative faction of the Church was itself in good odor in Rome from October 1978 to March 2013. But we’ll pass over the anachronism.)

Read through the posts when you get a free minute. It’s practically a who’s-who of Catholic thought leaders.

For our part, it is really unclear what Kaveny thinks her argument is, since it seems to us that she has argued, more or less, that Neuhaus agreed with people he didn’t really agree with because they took similar political positions, and he turned his back on people he really agreed with because they took different political positions. But—and this is the problem—she compares apples and oranges to get there. As for her points of commonality between conservative and progressive Catholics, she looks toward the broadest possible points of agreement:

Does honoring Jesus as the Son of God count as a commonality? Like their conservative counterparts, progressive Roman Catholics acknowledge the divinity of Jesus Christ, and find the interpretive key to the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament. Orthodox Jews do not—indeed, must not—treat Jesus as the Messiah foretold in the Book of Isaiah. It would be blasphemous for them to do so.

Does living in the grace imparted by the sacraments count as a commonality? Both progressive and conservative Roman Catholics believe that God’s grace is channeled through the seven sacraments. Many Evangelical Protestants do not have the same view of grace or the sacraments; they often view the Eucharist as a memorial of a past event, not a way of being present with Christ here and now.

(Some of these things are exceptionally weird ways of expressing these commonalities, but we will pass over that quickly and assume that she means essentially what an orthodox Catholic would mean by these expressions.) But as for the points of agreement between conservative Catholics and conservative protestants and Jews, she looks to some very specific issues to find hidden disagreements.

Neuhaus’s defenders might say that he was concerned with commonalities among conservative Christians and Jews on hot-button issues: the ordination of women, contraception, same-sex marriage, and abortion.  But how deep are those commonalities? Many Evangelical Protestants, for example, believe that women should never exercise authority over men, especially but not exclusively in an ecclesiastical context. But the Catholic Church officially and vehemently denies that its exclusion of women from the priesthood is based on their inferiority to men—and points to the centuries old tradition of powerful, independent women religious as evidence. Orthodox Jews may oppose abortion—but not because they believe the fetus is an equally protectable human being. Under Jewish law, full protection for a new human person is triggered at birth. But in Catholic circles debates about abortion are usually about when a human life comes into being biologically.

In other words, Kaveny’s argument is that conservative and progressive Catholics agree on the broadest possible issues about Christ and his Church, but conservative Catholics reach the same conclusions as conservative protestants and Jews for different reasons. (So what?) She does not contend—and could not contend—that all progressive Catholics are on the same page as conservative Catholics about women’s ordination, contraception, marriage, and abortion. They are manifestly not in many instances. That they might agree about broad issues does not change those disagreements. (However, those disagreements cast real doubt on whether the broad areas of consensus are as they appear, even though we said we’d pass over that issue briefly.) So, Neuhaus collaborated, according to Kaveny, with people he agreed with on specific issues instead of people he agreed with on the broadest issues.

Apples and oranges. (Like we said.) And, accordingly, R.R. Reno has the better argument when he notes that a doctrinally conservative Catholic may, in fact, have more in common, especially in terms of outlook and approach, with a doctrinally conservative protestant or Jew, notwithstanding some serious differences, than he does with a progressive Catholic, who, often as not, holds Modernist and indifferentist views.

But the reason why Kaveny has to compare apples and oranges is because she won’t make the (easier) argument that the traditional social teaching of the Church is actually more consistent with some things that progressives are fond of. For example, both Leo XIII in Rerum novarum and Pius XI in Quadragesimo anno express real reservations about economic liberalism and unrestrained capitalism. And Pius XII affirmed in the strongest language—particularly in La solennità della Pentecoste, his 1941 radio address commemorating Rerum novarum, and Exsul Familia Nazarethana, his lengthy apostolic constitution on migrants—the right of individuals to migrate between countries and the positive effects of such migration. Certainly economic justice and immigration have consistently been traditional concerns of the Church and progressives in the Church tend to be more in tune with the Church’s traditional teaching on these points.

In fact, this point has come up a few times in the context of the Holy Father’s contemporary social teaching. Rorate Caeli ran a piece, almost two years ago, noting that the Holy Father was not far from the traditional social teaching of the Church. (Whether “New Catholic” would make the same argument after Laudato si’ is not clear to us.) And Pater Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., has argued that Laudato si’ contains echoes of Pius IX’s monumental Quanta cura and its annexed Syllabus errorum in the Holy Father’s devastating critique of the individualist-technocratic rot at the heart of modernity. (He later pointed out that other authors made the same connection between Laudato si’ and Syllabus, though they didn’t understand what praise they were heaping on the encyclical and may even have thought that comparisons to Syllabus were negative.) But we digress.

In other words, Kaveny could have argued that Neuhaus ought to have cooperated with socially progressive Catholics because their views (generally) are actually fairly close to what the Church has traditionally taught about income inequality, poorly restrained markets, and the social obligations of capital. (But even this argument is essentially the seamless-garment argument articulated by John Cardinal Dearden, Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, and other progressive Catholics, which has not met with uniform success. Or any success.) But she didn’t. Instead, she argued that, because conservative and progressive Catholics have some broad things in common, Neuhaus and the First Things set shouldn’t have cooperated with protestants and Jews on specific points that they have common with conservative Catholics (even if they have different reasons for having them in common).

And that sounds political.

A little more on socialism after Iowa

No sooner did we discuss whether a Catholic could support Bernie Sanders due to Sanders’s self-identification as a democratic socialist did Fr. Dwight Longenecker take up the question at Patheos. Ultimately, he argues that a Catholic could vote for a democratic socialist, but that Sanders’s standard-issue positions on abortion and marriage are serious problems for Catholic voters. (He cites a 2002 voter’s guide, which does not appear to have been updated to reflect Cardinal Ratzinger’s 2004 memorandum.) This is, of course, more or less what we said, but we still think that Sanders’s concept of socialism remains, by and large, too murky to make a clear up-or-down decision. As it stands—and notwithstanding Longenecker’s citations to Benedict XVI—it unclear to us what is distinctively socialist about Sanders’s position. Based upon some prepared remarks of his from November, it is far from clear that his concept of socialism is actually socialism as the Church has long understood it. (Cf. 3 Grenier, Thomistic Philosophy, nos. 1150–51.) But, as Paul VI noted, that does not mean that there are not connections between Sanders’s thought and more explicitly (actually?) socialist thinking, with all of its implications.

Link Roundup: Feb. 1, 2016

We have, so far, not done a sort of “link roundup,” as other blogs have, but there are several really interesting pieces, which we want to pass along to you, dear reader, without burdening you with unnecessary commentary. (Though we may well offer a little commentary later on one or two of these links.) Thus, it seems like a good moment to try our hand at a Link Roundup:

First, Msgr. Charles Pope has a very lengthy, very interesting piece on the Novus Ordo memorial acclamations and the placement of the Mysterium Fidei.

Second, Peter Kwasniewski has an interesting point to be made about excommunications and other ecclesiastical sanctions at The Josias.

Third, the Reverend Father “Sacerdos Romanus” has a very interesting comment at Rorate Caeli about ecumenism involving the great Pius XI’s great encyclical Mortalium animos.

Finally, Father John Hunwicke continues his series of pieces about the pre-Lenten Sundays with an interesting bit on Sexagesima Sunday, especially Pope St. Gregory the Great’s homily for that Sunday.

We shall, of course, endeavor to make the “Link Roundup” a regular feature here at Semiduplex.

St. Agnes’s Second Feast

If you recited lauds according to the 1960 Breviary the day before yesterday, as we did, then you made a commemoration of St. Agnes “secundo.” You may have found it slightly perplexing, as we did. Yesterday, at New Liturgical Movement, Gregory DiPippo had a (typically) erudite explanation of this “second” feast of St. Agnes. He explains,

In liturgical books, the formal name of the feast is “Sanctae Agnetis secundo”, which literally means “(the feast) of St Agnes for the second time.” This title is found on the calendar of the Tridentine Missal and Breviary, as also seven centuries earlier in the Gregorian Sacramentary. The single Matins lesson in the Breviary of St Pius V tells us that after her death, Agnes appeared first to her parents to console them, and then to the Emperor Constantine’s daughter Constantia, who suffered from an incurable sore, while she was praying at her grave, exhorting Constantia to trust in Christ and receive baptism. Having done this and been healed, Constantia later built a basilica in the Saint’s honor.

The original purpose of the second feast, however, is not at all clear; theories abound, but evidence is lacking. In the Wurzburg lectionary, the oldest of the Roman Rite, January 21 is “natale S. Agnae de passione – the birth (into heaven) of Agnes, of her passion,”, while January 28 is simply “de natali.” One theory is that the actual day of her death was the 28th, and the 21st originally commemorated the beginning of her sufferings, starting with her trial and condemnation. However, we would then expect something similar for other prominent martyrs, particularly St Lawrence, whose passion also extended over a variety of days and events. The next oldest lectionary, Codex Murbach, doesn’t mention the second feast at all, nor does the Lectionary of Alcuin. In the Gregorian Sacramentary, the titles are simply “natale” and “natale…secundo.”

(Emphasis supplied.) He heightens this liturgical mystery by rejecting the idea that St. Agnes Second constitutes a primitive octave, which, to be honest, was our first guess upon seeing it in the book:

The most common theory, the least convincing but probably the most influential, is that the second feast represents a primitive form of octave, a theory which I find problematic on several grounds. St Agnes was the most prominent female martyr of ancient Rome, very much on a par with other great Roman martyrs like Ss Peter and Paul and St Lawrence. Pope Honorius I built her current church in the 7th century to replace an earlier one that had fallen into ruin. (It has subsequently undergone numerous restorations.) The original, however, was one of the basilicas built by the Emperor Constantine in the very early years of the Peace of the Church, along with those of the two Apostles, Lawrence, and the cathedral of Rome at the Lateran. The early manuscripts mentioned above all refer to the “octaves” of Ss Peter and Paul and St Lawrence; it seems very odd that the octave of such a prominent Saint as Agnes, and hers alone, should be called instead a “feast … for the second time.”

(Emphasis supplied.) Read the whole thing there and come to your own conclusions.

For our part, we love feasts like St. Agnes’s two, St. Cecilia’s (unfortunately impeded last year by the 24th and Last Sunday after Pentecost, Fifth Sunday of November), and St. Lawrence’s, and tomorrow’s feast of St. Martina. These saints’ feasts retain special features even into the 1960 Breviary, preserving in some way the early Roman Christians’ admiration for these saints. In other words, the special aspects of these feasts serve as a connection between believers today and their forebears in the early Roman Church. They also serve as a connection to Rome itself; that is, everyone celebrates the feasts of these distinctively Roman saints. (Or they did until fairly recently.) The Church of Rome is just that.

————

By the way, in case you’re playing along at home, here is the commemoration of St. Agnes’s second feast in the Breviary of 1960.

Et fit commemoratio S. Agnetis Virg. et Mart. secundo:

Ant. Ecce, quod concupivi, iam video: quod speravi, iam teneo: ipsi sum iuncta in cælis, quem in terris posita, tota devotione dilexi.

V. Diffusa est gratia in labiis tuis.
R. Propterea benedixit te Deus in æternum.

Oratio

Deus, qui nos annua beatæ Agnetis Virginis et Martyris tuæ solemnitate lætificas: da, quæsumus; ut, quam veneramur officio, etiam piæ conversationis sequamur exemplo. Per Dominum Nostrum…

Guarding fumes and making haste

Word has made it out that Archbishop “Tucho” Fernandez, the Holy Father’s favorite theologian (a sobriquet that must break Archbishop Bruno Forte’s heart), is the principal author of the forthcoming post-Synodal exhortation, which will be released, probably, before the end of March. Edward Pentin reports:

Well informed sources have told the Register that the document, which observers believe will probably be released on March 19 — the feast of St. Joseph and the 3rd anniversary of the Pope’s inauguration Mass — is in its third draft. They also say that the chief drafter is Archbishop Victor Manuel Fernández, rector of the the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina in Buenos Aires and one of Pope Francis’ closest advisers.

One reliably informed source, a recognized moral theologian who has seen the draft, said he was “deeply disturbed” by the text as it “calls into question the natural moral law”. A senior Vatican official said he had heard the draft was good, but that was “some time ago”. He said he expects it to be similar to the Ordinary Synod’s final report, almost all of which the synod fathers passed unanimously.

[…]

Earlier this week, Vatican analyst Andrea Gagliarducci reported that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has studied the draft and sent a long note with several doctrinal remarks, rumored to be 40 pages in length.

A senior Vatican source told the Register last week that the CDF has offered “all kinds of observations” on other documents as well during this pontificate, “but none of them are ever taken.” The dicastery, like much of the Roman Curia, is largely left out of such processes and is considered to be “isolated”, according to sources.

(Emphasis supplied and hyperlink omitted.) We note that the controversial paragraphs regarding the Germanicus group’s forum internum proposal (the great compromise between Cardinal Müller and Cardinal Kasper, brokered, allegedly, by Cardinal Marx) did not pass unanimously. Not even close. In fact, but for the Holy Father’s personal appointments to the Synod, they probably would not have passed at all.

The only not-disturbing thing we see is that Archbishop Fernández, who has long been a close adviser and collaborator with the Holy Father, also is supposed to have drafted Laudato si’, which, in the main, is a wonderful document. Not perfect. But still very good. That said, we expect the bigamists to be lined up at Easter Vigil this year, exhortation in hand, demanding to approach the Precious Body and Blood of Our Lord. There has been too much grief over the Kasperite proposal not to go through with some form of it. To have this much trouble and say “oh, well, you fellows are right, I guess” would be almost unthinkable. (Though not impossible: Our Lady and St. Joseph may yet intervene.)

But, for the sake of those men and women who will take a papal pronouncement as a guarantee, we hope that the Holy Father and Tucho guess right.

 

More on the Holy Father’s speech to the Rota

At the Catholic Herald, Ed Condon has a very good appreciation of the Holy Father’s address to the Rota, which he  described as “remarkable for its continuity with the previous addresses of St John Paul II and Benedict XVI. If we were to insist on using political terms for a theological and legal address, it would be easy to characterise it as strikingly conservative.” Read the whole thing there.

For our part, we were very surprised by the Holy Father’s speech—we don’t know if that came through in our initial comments on it—largely because it seemed like another papal address to the Rota. Francis has tried, perhaps consciously, to provide a different tone to his public pronouncements. He seems to avoid the philosophical style of John Paul and the careful theological lectures of Benedict in favor of a broader, perhaps impressionistic, tone. And, of course, the context for any discussion of Mitis iudex and marriage questions needn’t be restated, except to say that Francis had to know that observers of the Church would be looking very closely at this address to see if it contains any clues for the Big Decision. With all that going on, we wonder if it is significant that he has delivered an address so in line with John Paul and Benedict’s thinking.

We also note that the handful of citations in the speech are also apparently sort of conservative: Pius XI’s Casti connubii, Pius XII’s 1940 speech to the Rota, some stuff by Paul VI (including a pastoral letter written when he was archbishop of Milan), some John Paul II, and St. Augustine on the bona matrimonii. If someone other than the Holy Father gave a speech sprinkled with Pius XI, Pius XII, Paul VI, and John Paul II, they’d be called a conservative (or worse).

Septuagesima

Father John Hunwicke has a nice piece on Septuagesima, in which he notes,

I incline to believe that S Gregory has left us his own explanation of his liturgical creation, Septuagesima, in the passage from his writings of which the old Breviary gives us a portion in the Third Nocturn (Hom 19 in Evang.; the full text of which is handily available in PL 76 coll 1153sqq.). Speaking, according to the manuscripts, in the basilica of S Lawrence one Septuagesima morning, he explains the different times of the day referred to in the Sunday’s EF Gospel (the parable of the Husbandman hiring labourers for his vineyard): “The morning of the world was from Adam to Noah; the third hour, Noah to Abraham; Sixth, Abraham to Moses; Ninth, Moses to the Lord’s Advent; eleventh, from the Lord’s Advent to the end of the world”.

(Emphasis supplied and hyperlink added.) Read the whole thing there.

One of our very, very few objections to the liturgical reforms of Bl. Paul VI (up there with the four-week psalter) is how smoothly everything seems to hum along, particularly in Tempus Per Annum. We just saw it, in fact. Christmas ends with the Baptism of Our Lord, and then you skate along in Tempus Per Annum until Feria IV Cinerum, and then Lent (and Eastertide and Pentecost). Then, after Pentecost, you’re right back where you left off on Fat Tuesday, skating along until Christ the King and Advent.

The nice thing, then, about Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima, preserved as they are in the Forma Extraordinaria, is the sense that they create that things might not be so well-oiled as they look in the Forma Ordinaria. The penitential progress toward Easter may not be so squared off, glass smooth, and air conditioned as all that. You’ve got to have your head right to appreciate what is going on. And the Gesimas help with that. As Father Hunwicke notes, “During Lent, of which Septuagesima is the preamble, we repent of the Fall and the mark which it has left on each successive age of human history and on each one of us.” We get the range of the Fall and its destructive effects during the Gesimas, so we can better repent during Lent, and so we can better prepare ourselves for the sorrow of Holy Week and the unrestrained joy of Easter.