Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• The Patriarch of Constantinople is to visit Rome. From Fr Hunwicke.


• Rome’s five conditions to re-regularise the SSPX. More. It’s not about Latin but religious liberty and ecumenism which are really no problem. Like Arturo I don’t like the crazies but we agree the Catholic faith is more than the person of the Pope. Yet the terms aren’t bad.


• Fr Hunwicke on Henry Chadwick.


• Talking to Derek and friends about Coggin’s essay (parts II and III).



Follow the procession to the larger church


• ‘Well, chaps, we had a good run.’ Of course the mainstream media paint this in common-knowledge terms as a case of mean-spirited clerics who hate women not ‘the larger church trumps all’ (as I was taught) and ‘even the Pope can’t change certain things’. Damian Thompson is realistic:
  

  The [Roman] Catholic Bishops of England and Wales, who distrust Anglican traditionalists, are quite capable of throwing a spanner in the works.
  
  It’s shaming to have to admit that the bishops of my own Church are the chief obstacle to a significant move of Anglo-Catholic clergy and lay people into full communion with the Holy See — but that’s the way it was last time, in the early 1990s, and it’s still the case today.
  
  Fortunately, Pope Benedict XVI is more open...

  How that plays out in the US. And why.
  
  If you filter out the anti-Western attitudes and go old-school on contraception then Orthodoxy works.


• ‘Anglo-Catholic Congresses’: Sir John Betjeman writing in 1966 remembered the 1920s. A long time ago in England I met someone who was there.
  

  We, who remember, look back to the blossoming May-time
  On ghosts of servers and thurifers after Mass...
  ...
  The new diocesan’s not as ‘sound’ as we’d hoped,
  And Kensit threatens and has Sam Gurney poped?
  
  Yet, under the Travers baroque, in a limewashed whiteness,
  The fiddle-back vestments a-glitter with morning rays,
  Our Lady’s image, in multiple-candled brightness,
  The bells and banners — those were the waking days
  When Faith was taught and fanned to a golden blaze.

• Gafcon, Lambeth and all that: The Evos are up to... something or other. More on the Bishop of Rochester.


• The Episcopalians agree: the Bennison brothers are not nice guys.