Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

A New Recusancy?

The English composer William Byrd was a Catholic in Recusant times, when they were persecuted for their faith. The music he wrote for the underground Catholic community features in this edition of the BBC Early Music Show.

The English Reformation was a slow process on the ground, as many priests did their best to maintain the practices of Catholic worship despite the changes that were going on all round. This was largely a story of betrayal by the Catholic bishops and clergy - the faithful bishops were in a minority and only St John Fisher paid the death penalty. There was, however, no firm break until Pope Pius V excommunicated Queen Elizabeth in 1570 and then the serious persecutions began. Known as the Penal times, the persecution of English Catholics did not come to an end until the 1680s, and the last legal disabilities were not removed until the nineteenth century.

For the man in the pew, the transition time must have been a difficult one to negotiate, as it became necessary to discern the essentials. There is a contemporary resonance wt. It is widely accepted that the liturgy is a mess, though many would deny this. Some blame the Second Vatican Council and the Novus Ordo Mass, but that is an argument that is difficult to sustain. It is perfectly possible to celebrate the Novus Ordo Mass in a way that virtually identical from the Tridentine form of the Mass. All that is necessary is for the priest to face the altar Ad Orientem and to follow the liturgy in the current edition of the Graduale Romanum ie to sing the Proper and the Kyriale in Latin/Greek according to what is in the book. This is not difficult. If the will to do so is present, there is no need for liturgy committees or even for hymn books as it is perfectly possible to celebrate Mass without hymns; these will usually be of Protestant origin and carry with them a destructive Protestant spirituality. There is no requirement for the disruptive Sign of Peace.

But the will is not present. In the majority of Catholic parishes, this does not happen. There is no contemplative sense. Attendance at Mass is a penance in these circumstances. Christ is still really present, but in the context of a liturgical rubbish heap. Such a thing is, if not impossible, difficult within the tightly defined framework of Tridentine Mass. This then raises issues about the Novus Ordo Mass, not in itself, but in relation to the rules that govern it, or rather, fail to govern it. Priests could help the situation, and bishops even more so, but as a rule they do not and then become part of the problem.

Kommentarer

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

Importing people to sustain demand

I got involved in a discussion with a Youtuber called “Philosophy all along”. This was in connection with criticism of Trump’s policy of deporting illegal migrants, which he argued would be bad for the economy as it would reduce demand. This implies that there is a need to import people to sustain demand. There is no obvious reason why a population should not be able to consume everything that the same population produces. If it can not, then something else is going on. It is a basic principle that wages are the least that workers will accept to do a job. Wages are a share of the value added by workers through their wages. The remainder is distributed as economic rent, after government has taken its cut in taxes. Monopoly profit is a temporary surplus that after a delay gets absorbed into economic rent. Land values in Silicon Valley are an example of this; it's like a gold rush. The miners get little out of it. Rent and tax syphon purchasing power away from those who produce the g...

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...