Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• Roman Breviary or Liturgy of the Hours? Fr Hunwicke: Pius X... presaged the liturgical attitudes of Bugnini and Co; Urban VIII with his classicisation of the texts of the hymns being the first villain. As I have often said in previous posts, the impetus for this approach to liturgy was the invention of printing, which made it possible for any liturgical innovator, whether Cranmer or Pope Urban, to impose radical novelties, his own Good Ideas, overnight. Now that’s hardcore trad.
• Ecumenism, parts I and II. The membership shows all the symptoms of aging and contraction. I wonder if the reason is that it represents the culture of the ‘old ecumenism’; of convergence and putting divisions behind us, when in so many ecclesial contexts people are preoccupied with the new divisions which transcend ‘denomination’: Gender; Ordination of Women; the relationship between Worship and the secular culture ... Yes but I say the differences over sex and the sexes are only symptoms of the big Catholic/Protestant divide (the thing that on top of the Bible, the creeds, the councils, the episcopate and the Mass makes a church Catholic). Ecumenical theology begins in the first millennium with the Western Church setting itself free from the ‘common sense’ position that since the Spirit is the possession of the Church, the Sacraments cannot exist outside it. Here Fr H gets into ecumenism as a fighting word of online Orthodox I don’t read (that is most online Orthodox*). Friend of the blog BJA can explain that Cyprianism in Orthodoxy is like Feeneyism in Roman Catholicism not only in content, style and pathology of its followers but in that these views are allowed in a spectrum of opinion and are not doctrine. He can also explain that there is St Basil’s more moderate view. An Orthodox bishop can always decide to receive another Christian by baptism but ISTM that fanatical Athonite monks contradicting an Orthodox bishop by baptising and chrismating somebody already in their church goes against Orthodoxy’s own teachings. Of course just like trying juridically to pin down sacramental grace to the church can go too far, so can ‘validity’ arguments, from the little vagante circus of clergy wannabes to the fact that not only Anglicans and Swedish Lutherans but mainline American Lutherans now claim holy orders, as well as the indifferentism (essentially saying Jesus didn’t found a church, fashionable among liberal Protestants including among the RCs) the hardliners rightly reject.
• Fr Neuhaus: the other side of the story. I know, de mortuis nil nisi bonum, but Rod Dreher tells the truth here. Covering up crimes and working for the Protestant and neocon right don’t serve the church. (Those who do the first and go bankrupt deserve it.) I believe in an infallible church but am no clericalist. The priest who gave Fr N the last sacraments, Fr George Rutler, once described this distinction in the Catholic faith: we are sacerdotalists/sacramentalists not clericalists (which is a kind of caricature of the church both its opponents and some well-meaning Catholics fall into).

Labels: Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy, history, the Catholic faith