AN OUTSIDE VIEW

Northmoor, Oxfordshire , a photo by Sheepdog Rex on Flickr. The negotiations between SSPX and the Vatican seem to have stalled. This is not good news. As soon as the Extraordinary Form of the Mass or Latin are mentioned, people tend to take up positions. There is a view amongst many traditionalists that the Novus Ordo rite is defective. It is counter-productive to express them, especially now that the Extraordinary Form is gathering momentum. It is better to be patient, firm and sensitive. When dogmatic views are put out, priests who might otherwise be sympathetic then shy away to avoid getting embroiled. Who can blame them? So I tend to focus on the practicalities of the matter. This applies to Latin, silence in the Mass and all sorts of other things. You can put up a perfectly sound argument for altar rails on Health and Safety grounds! A priest could in theory be sued for damages if someone fell off the sanctuary and got injured! The edge of the step should be clearly marke...

I have never believed that the Euro would last beyond 2030. I thought that was a rash judgement. As it is, the odds are against it being around in its present form in five years' time. What about the latest deal? It has brought about a rally, but how long will it take for the markets to realise that it is a proposal to pour money into a series of financial black holes? And will the German parliament ratify it anyway? My prediction is that the Euro problem will be back in the headlines by the end of the "summer".

The post-Easter season has a series of chants that used to be familiar: Resurrexit and the Sequence Victimae Paschalae Laudes for Easter Sunday itself, Quasimodo for Low Sunday, Viri Galilaei on the Feast of the Ascension, Spiritus Domini and the Sequence Veni Sancte Spiritus on Pentecost Sunday, Benedictus sit on Trinity Sunday, Cibavit eos and the Sequence Lauda Sion on the Feast of Corpus Christi, and finally Nunc sciovere on the Feast of St Peter and St Paul. This year I have heard just a few of them, a situation not helped by the fact that the two Thursday feasts have been moved to the following Sunday. Frankly, I find it depressing and feel a bit short-changed. I suspect there are quite a few people around who take the same view. This has nothing much to do with the old or new forms of the Mass itself, but when it is celebrated in the vernacular, that is usually the end of the chant, and if the Mass is a sung one there are dreary Protestant hymns instead. There is...

Foederatio Internationalis Una Voce (FUIV) is an international organisation for promoting the Extraordinary Form of the Mass. It is made up of affiliated national organisations There are several types of structure. The three main ones are the federation, and two types of unitary structure, of which the English Latin Mass Society is the most notable. A federation, such as Una Voce America, where several groups or associations or chapters come together to form a national federation is the most obviously convenient one because it allows the flexibility to draw together different independent groups across the Country. Thus there is UVSan Francisco, UCOrange County, and UVSan Bernadino, as well as UVAlbany, and UVBrooklyn, all within UVAmerica. This national federation structure mirrors the structure of the FIUV itself. Our Membership Committee is encouraging even very small groups to try to incorporate the potential for a national federation into their structures at the outset because it...

To promote the Extraordinary Form Mass requires some kind of national organisation to co-ordinate activities. The English Latin Mass Society (LMS) would be a good model to follow.It is not a religious order or priestly association, though it has many members who are priests. Its main aim is to co-ordinate those activities by which lay people can assist priests in saying the Mass. The main ones are Organising training for priests, for altar servers, and for singers, in particular, Gregorian Chant, talks and courses on the liturgy and on Latin. Through local Representatives, providing encouragement and moral and material support for priests who say the Mass Keeping members and the wider public informed of where and when Masses are taking place through the publication of a diary of events. Inviting priests to lead special events such as pilgrimages, retreats, and days of recollection. Maintaing a network of like-minded Catholics, both lay and clerical, through its local Repres...

Kings College Chapel, Cambridge, July 2010 (01) , a photo by Machine Made on Flickr. British anti-Catholicism is as visceral as it ever was. An article by Eamonn Duffy has just demonstrated this nicely. Duffy, Professor of the History of Christianity at Cambridge, has been studying primary sources. They reveal a very different picture from the popular view of the pre-Reformation Catholic Church as irremediably decadent, corrupt and oppressive. Perhaps I am wrong but decadent, corrupt and oppressive organisations do not produce architectural masterpieces such as King's College Chapel, nor musical masterpieces such as the works of Byrd and Tallis. Duffy has evidently pressed a button here. The torrent of visceral anti-Catholicism released shows that the emotion has as much grip on the conservative right as on the "progressive" left, where it turns up regularly in comments on the Guardian's web site. The British founding myth is alive and kicking.

Why is the Catholic Bible different from the Protestant Bible? The New Testament canon of the Catholic Bible and the Protestant Bible are the same with 27 Books. The difference is in the Old Testament. Around 100 BC in Alexandria, the Greek Emperor, Ptolemy II, commissioned 71 Jewish leaders to translate the Jewish scripture into Greek. The book translated book is called the Septuagint. During the first century, the Septuagint was widely used in the Roman world. It was the translation used during the life of Jesus. The Septuagint is the Old Testament and scripture that Jesus refers to in the Gospels. It continued to be the Bible used after the resurrection and the Old Testament Bible of Christianity. After the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, the Jewish leaders came together and declared its official canon of scripture at the Council of Jamnia in 90 AD, eliminating seven books from the Septuagint. The books removed were Tobit, Judith, 1 Maccabees, 2 M...

Muslims often object to the notion of the Trinity, under the misconception that it is Pantheist. Pantheism and belief in the Trinity are two entirely different things. Look it up. They stand in opposition to each other. Pantheism was widespread in Europe before Christianity. People believed in sacred groves, hills, streams, animals. The Christian missionaries were at pains to point out that Catholicism was a belief in ONE GOD with three persons. The missionaries were so determined to stamp out the earlier pantheistic cults that they often built shrines, churches and chapels on the earlier sites, typically dedicated to Our Lady or St Anne. But as I said earlier, it is not an idea that is easily expressed in words, which is why the Catholic church teaches its doctrines through the sacred liturgy - a unique symbol system presented as what can be regarded as a small-scale theatrical tableau. The Freemasons operate in the same way. If you wanted to know what the Masonic belief syste...

The supposed difficulty of understanding the Trinity is only a difficulty if one attempts to present the explanation in words alone. But words are only one of many symbol systems. The story of the arts, science and technology is a story of the elaboration of signs and symbol systems. There is mathematics, algebra, musical notation, physics and chemistry diagrames, architectural and engineering drawings, maps and charts in all their diversity - the list is endless. It would, for instance, be impossible to navigate safely without a good charts, which show in a concise way what can never be put into words. The Trinity is of this nature. To describe it in words is very difficult. Libraries have been written on the subject and it has been constantly disputed. However, the liturgy of the Christian (Orthodox/Catholic) church presents the philosophy of the Trinity clearly and concisely in a way that billions of people over the past two millenia have comprehended even if they could not write ...

How can you logically defend such a belief, the trinity, against pantheism? How can you for instance say that "There must also be God the Holy Spirit...There must also be God incarnate"? How do you define the word "must"? And why would God give us reason and logic but at the same time contradict it by giving a theory about himself that few people can actually explain, and even then it is based on belief and not on human logic? If God were not a Trinity he could not be all-powerful, since he could not act in the realms of the spirit and of the physical world. The latter is necessary also if he is to be actively merciful. That God is a Trinity follows logically from the proposition that God is all-powerful, which is also a logical proposition since a God that was not all-powerful would not be God, nor could he act mercifully in the physical world. For the latter, it is necessary for Him to become Incarnate, first in the person of Jesus Christ and now in the Sacram...

First you say that God is All-Powerful, and then you say he do not manage to become something "that is against his nature". This is contradictory to your belief and reason. First, Jesus (peace be upon him) was a dependent, limited and finite being. God is an independent, unlimited and infinite being. How can something be both dependent and independent, limited and unlimited, finite and infinite at the same time? That's like saying a square circle or a straight turn. It's contradictory and do not exist as such. If God does not go against His nature and attributes and become something like the devil, then how come this is supposedly true for the statement that He become a man - a creature contradictory His nature and attributes? This is exactly what Muslims are saying. God do not go against His attributes and nature, and this must be applied to ALL attributes. You cannot say that God become something finite but at the same time claim that God is infinite, for the ...

I have been involved in a discussion with a Muslim who has quoted the Inquisition as an example of Catholic misbehaviour. I had to remind him to check his sources. It should not be forgotten that the origin of most of what was and is said about the Inquisition is the Protestant polemic " Foxe's Book of Martyrs ", published in England in 1563 under the title Acts and Monuments. This was not, to say the least, a neutral account but was part of the ongoing attack on Catholicism which had been in progress in England since the 1520s. That attack was primarily a land grab by the aristocracy and had very little to do with religion. The church in England had for long held land for its support, on the basis that it was the church that provided what are now regarded as the functions of a welfare state. This was not a situation that was acceptable to the aristocracy, which had succeeded in ridding itself of the obligations that went with the land allocations followin...

A friend of mine suggested that I watch a video, the main point of which was to demonstrate that the state was a leech on the body of the productive economy and that taxes should be cut to a bare minimum and the state cut down to size accordingly. It argued that public sector workers do not create wealth.It is a widespread view. Frankly, the video is not worth wasting the ten minutes it takes to watch it because the view it presents is a familiar part of the contemporary discourse. The Taxpayers' Alliance has been saying much the same thing, stridently. It ignores that fact that without a stable civil society, no wealth could be created. Thus public sector workers are part of the wealth creation process. The state provides the infrastructure and security without which no wealth is created. Even the lollipop ladies mean people can got to work instead of having to take their children all the way to to school. The ferry in the picture runs day and night throughout the year, free to...

Most of the advocates of the Tridentine or Extraordinary Form (EF) Mass tend to focus on theological and aesthetic aspects. But what receives little attention is the simple practicality of the older form. Most churches have acoustics sound systems that are bad to indifferent. It can be difficult to hear what is being said in any language, including one's own. Most of the more widely spoken languages have dialects which further impair understanding and are also associated with the prejudices that people have about those from other places. This raises issues which have no place within the Catholic church. The standard of reading by lay readers is generally poor. Clear, reasonably slow reading is exceptional. Priests tend to be reasonably good readers but only in their own language. If they are celebrating in another language, then too can be difficult to understand. Congregations can come from many different countries. The music is liable to be unfamiliar, precluding visitors f...

Deptford High Street South Acton awaiting redevelopment 1971 People have been discussing the BBC programme "Destruction by design", which talks about the fate of old working class Deptford at the hands of Lewisham Council's redevelopment machine. I worked for Lewisham Council from 1978 but the damage had been done by then. I am not able to view the programme but I assume the surviving street was Albury Street. This was exceptional as the houses dated from 1710 and of the highest quality. I came in halfway through the redevelopment performance when I began training as a planner in 1965. Planners were taught to do the sort of thing that was described in the programme - design destructive redevelopment schemes with relief roads. It was a standard examination project for membership of the Town Planning Institute. In 1964 I went to day release planning courses at Brixton and Hammersmith Schools of Building, now part of South Bank and Thames Universities. The...

Chiltern Railways puts refurbished Mk III coaches into service That is more like it. And now there is a need for a further fleet of compatible vehicles and the electric and diesel locomotives to haul them. The Irish mark 3 fleet should help a little and then there is a need for a new build. What should they be like? The 23 metre length of the mark 3 stock was based on the assumption that the 2.74 external width of the mark 1 stock was acceptable. This was achieved by tapering the vehicle ends and recessing the door handles. It was not built to the full width of the loading gauge, unlike the sliding-door derivatives of the mark 3 stock such as the class 150 DMU which are 20 metres long and a nominal 2.82 metres wide, the absolute maximum permissible. These latter vehicles are regarded as the only go-anywhere type on the system. So perhaps a slightly shorter and wider vehicle would be possible, enabling it to go anywhere whilst at the same time helping to accommodate the present obesity ...

This icon by Andrei Rublev was painted in the fifteen century. It depicts the three angels who came to visit Abraham at the Oak of Mamre. But it is also taken to be a representation of the Trinity. All the figures wear blue robes, but the figure on the left is clad in a concealing robe, representing God the Father who is hidden from sight, that in the centre is also clad in brown with a gold strip, representing earthly things and kingship, whilst that on the right is also clad in green, which in the Orthodox tradition corresponds to the Holy Spirit. This has a bearing on a discussion I had last week with a Dominican. We started by talking about ecumenism and that went on to the notorious "Filioque clause" which was supposedly the cause of the split between the Western Latin Rite Catholic Church and the Orthodox churches which owe their allegiance to Constantinople or Moscow. Who is right? Does it matter anyway? I have always pictured the Trinity as a dynamic movement bet...