clair010

Isis had, as one of her Names, polyonumos (there ought to be a special term for words which help to validate themselves), and it occurs to me that manynamed appears to be true also of our blessed Lady, the Theotokos ... and I'm not just thinking of the Akathist Hymn or the Litany of Loretto. I recall, a few decades ago, we put a statue of our Lady up in Lancing College Chapel. Somehow or other,

... is rumoured to have turned nasty when someone complained about the manipulation of the Synod. The complainant wondered how participants without much Italian could be deemed to have assented to texts which they had only heard hurriedly recited ... in Italian. B is said to have threatened that he would run the next Synod in Latin. (Interesting that he is so convinced that he will still be alive

In the chaos of the 1960s, one notable casualty was the Church's system of the censorship of books. This disappearance was, I think, inevitable; in that febrile and aggressive atmosphere, it is inconceivable that the process of waiting for a diocesan Censor Librorum to read a book and make his comments, then for him to negotiate with an author about his/her ambiguities, and to agree a text ...

"I am afraid that the tyrant majority is still aiming at enlarging the province of infallibility."

There is a delicious, delightful, glorious anomaly revealed by Cardinal Gracias, Archbishop of Bombay, who was one of the Synod's drafters (report in Crux). He has revealed that the stuff in the Synod's final document about 'synodality' and 'discernment' did not represent the thinking and deliberations of the Synod Fathers, but was bunged in by a couple of PF-appointed secretaries. Synodality,

The Estates Commissioner whose responsibility it is to look after the Cathedrals of the Church of England, a Dr Eve Poole, has explained that people like to go to Anglican Cathedrals because they "are drawn to their ephemeral music and liturgy". I think I have read somewhere that mayflies share this extremely brief life-span. I very much wish that the Novus Ordo liturgical culture found in the

Realitywise, there are people who look at a blog, some blogs, often the same blogs, regularly every day. Own up ... well, I do it myself. It occurs to me that a similar experience can be had by dipping daily into the letters of a diligent and acute letter-writer. Of course, it is not the same as reading a blog, because, obviously and obviously, Blessed John Henry Newman is not writing for the

 ... should I have perceived that PF has devised another of those beautiful Irregular Verbs: I use strong and violent language just as Jesus and the prophets did, because I am at least a prophet; You are as bad as a murderer because you use strong language, especially against me; He/She/It ....?

... I have just read ... Holy Coprophilia!!! ... that PF has condemned those who insult others!!!! More eloquent pens than mine had better conclude this post.

I dropped into the Quod for a quick lunch ... I find a starter and a pud (with tapwater) set me up nicely for an afternoon; they don't give me that terribly heavy feeling in the legs which I suffer after a main course and a glass of wine. It was full of youthful Americans (this was the second week of term). I knew they were Americans, even before I tuned into their idiolect, because of their

Yes! The canonisations have been completed!! What superb examples to the least of the Faithful these modern post-Conciliar Roman Pontiffs are, every single man-jack of them!!! Thank goodness we no longer have to bother with the Piuses, the Leos, the Benedicts, and all that unholy crowd with their Rigid Magisterium! However can they have dared to be pre-Conciliar? There can, surely, be few greater

Well, I went to the Queen's College Conference and was rather underwhelmed! There was one outstanding lecture: a real tour de force by John Caldwell on the Psalter. He made clear that the Masoretic traditions are entitled to no assumed priority over those of Greek or Latin Christianity, particularly with regard to the numeration of the Psalms. (There sometimes appears to be a rather shamefaced

In 1933, when the centenary of the Catholic Revival in the Church of England was being celebrated, a Dr N P Williams edited a volume entitled Northern Catholicism ..., in which he himself contributed a preface on 'Northern Catholicism'. Dom Gregory Dix wrote a review of this piece in the Nashdom Abbey periodical Laudate (which has long been out of print). Dix, without much evidence, regarded

Mindful, as we presbyters dutifully are, of the approach in a week's time of the Feast of Christ the King, I looked out the Form of Consecration ordered by the dear old Sacred Congregation of Rites (28 April 1926) to be made on that Day. I discovered a curiosity. On the Internet I found an English translation one paragraph longer than the Latin form printed in the current (editio quarta 1999)

The names of the Bishops in each of the synodical groups is to be witheld "to show forth the spirit of the Synod, which is a spirit of communion". The duty of bishops when they are gathered together in councils or synods is, above all, to bear open witness to the Deposit of Faith which, handed openly down through the Apostles, they and their respective churches have each received, so as to teach

I gather that, this coming Saturday, October 20, there is a free Conference in the Queen's College about the Sarum rite, and particularly the Lady Mass. Coffee 10.15; Opening 10.50. 3-4.30: a performance of the Lady Mass (including Nicholas Ludford's Saturday Lady Mass). The publicity does not make clear whether this is an actual Eucharistic celebration; nor, if it is, what the status of the '

The admirable Lord Bishop of the diocese in which I am domiciled (although, of course, I am incardinated in the Ordinariate) has asked his priests and people to observe October 23 as a day of Reparation for the babies killed since the Abortion Act was passed in this country on that day in the year 1967. He asks clergy to use the Votive (NO) for the Progress of Peoples and to wear the purple

Westminster Abbey is, essentially, the Sacring Place of English Kings and - since the invention of the 'United Kingdom' - of the monarchs of that protean political institution. It is rendered suitable for the former purpose by the presence of the shrine of S Edward the Confessor ... whose joyful festival we kept last Saturday. There was, at the beginning of the modern era, an attempt to make the

Apparently critical remarks have been made about home-schooling by some participants in the Synod. I spent most of my adult life working in a college which was part of a corporation of colleges devoted to providing a middle-class education in the Catholic Tradition as this was understood within the Church of England. It was known as the Woodard Corporation, and contained about thirty colleges.

Presumably, before 1962 the Birmingham Supplement of the Breviary had the Nocturn 2 lections for S Frideswide on October 19. I'd be grateful if ...

Saint Paul VI, pray that the smoke of Satan which entered the Church may, by your intercession, be driven back. Pray that the the whole Church may hear with docile obedience the moral teachings which, handed down by your predecessors, you handed down to our generations. Pray especially for your successor Pope Francis, that, with the help of the Holy Spirit, he may devoutly, powerfully, and

... has finally had his resignation accepted. Many a blameless cleric would be delighted to receive as extravagant a send-off as PF has given Wuerl. What do we all have to do to earn ... My own unease concerning Wuerl began with a story I heard the veracity of which I cannot guarantee. So, if I've got this wrong, apologies to the clerics concerned; apologies to my readers for misleading them. I

Over the last few days, I have shown how Dr T G Jalland, my erudite predecessor as pp of S Thomas's By The Railway Station in Oxford, was one of those Anglo-Catholics in the middle of the twentieth century who transformed for thoughtful Anglicans the question of the Papacy; he used the prestigious Bampton Lectures here in Oxford to open up the subject of 'Rome' to a great and much-needed

Discerning people nowadays, surely, have Friends; Close Friends; and Lake Garda Friends. These  last they look forward to meeting annually at the Gardone Riviera Conference. It was one of these, dear Alex Sepkus, who, I think three years ago, introduced me to the 'Chinese' story-teller Kai Lung. Ernest Bramah's stories seem to have appealed in the 1930s particularly to those who, in Dorothy

As we contemplate the impending canonisation of Blessed Montini, my undisciplined mind has started to meander among some of the more recondite goodies which the mox-Sanctus is responsible for having introduced into the Liturgy ... Since I am a classicist, certain lines in S Ambrose's Hymn about S Agnes, brought into the Liturgia Horarum by Dom Lentini's coetus, drifted into my memory ... lines

I continue this little "Jalland" series, which I hope well-disposed readers have enjoyed, by giving you a sketch of what Church Life was like at S Thomas's in Oxford, and in thousands of Anglo-Catholic Churches throughout England, in the 1930s. As I hope discerning readers have spotted, I am not doing this out of mere nostalgia. I think, living as we now are in peace and communuon with the See of