Sentire Cum Ecclesia

Having just had the pleasure of watching the Royal Wedding on several free-to-air channels here in Australia, I fear that we will have to resort to watching the “other big event” this weekend on the Internet.

EWTN will have coverage, starting (according to their website) at 2:30am Eastern Time (New York time?). I make that at about 4:30pm tomorrow here in Melbourne. Is that correct? Does anyone know any other internet stations that will carry the ceremony?

Well. That was, without doubt, the best wedding sermon I have ever heard. The Bishop of London is to be commended. Complete with a quotation from St Catherine of Siena “whose feast day it is”, and ending with the Maundy Thursday motet “Ubi caritas”, signifying service in love.

A fine service in every way. Beautiful music, majestic hymns, dignified language. May what has begun so promisingly, be blessed by God and brought to joyful conclusion at the great wedding feast to come.

PS. Anyone know who the two nuns were?

In the Green Guide in today’s edition of The Age (on page 6) there is a story about a new six-part series by Tony Robinson (aka “Baldrick”) called “Approaching Australia with Ignorance”. Sadly this new program, starting on Tuesday at 7:30 PM, is only available on the History Channel for people with pay TV.

Hullo? ABC? What are our taxes doing paying for our free-to-air State channel?

Anyway, I had a good laugh (and a good think) about this, from the excellent Mr Robinson:

“I don’t know what’s PC. I know now that there are an awful lot of areas where for such an upfront, honest culture, people tread very lightly.

“If I ask [Australian] people how many Aboriginal friends they have there’s always a silence of about 15 seconds before they give me an answer. The answer will be intelligent, considered, profound but, boy oh boy, are the cogs going before the answer comes out.”

I have one aboriginal friend…, at least, I think I can count her as a friend. Or perhaps she’s just an work colleague… And then there was that other bloke I knew once… But we haven’t kept in touch.

You can see what he means, can’t you?

On the eve of the Royal Wedding, there is a very intelligent debate taking place on ABC TV at the moment on Q&A. It will be well worth catching up on iView if you have missed it.

I like listening to the Aboriginal academic Marcia Langton. She talks a lot of sense. Especially when she spoke of the the “traditional” nature of the reserve powers of the Governor General and the subsequent impossibility of codifying these powers. Her background as a native Australian seems to give her an understanding of the importance of “tribal tradition” that we white fellas and sheilas don’t seem to get.

I also can understand (former NSW premier) Bob Carr’s desire for a “simple” solution to the Australian Head of State problem. He says we should simply make a single change to our constitution, namely “declare the Governor General to be Australia’s Head of State”. Sounds fine, but the problem is that this would encroach on the independance of the States, as they are governed by Parliaments appointed by Governors who are representatives of our Head of State, ie. the Queen. If the Governor General were the Head of State, the Governors of the States would be representatives of said Governor General, thus putting the State Governments UNDER the Federal Government. This would be a major change to our current political structure in Australia.

May I remind readers of SCE that there is a simple solution? Whether you call it an “elective constitutional monarchy” or an “indirectly elected life presidency” (I prefer the previous designation), I have my own proposition in the side-bar of this ‘ere blog. I think it would work. No one seems to agree, though.

As I said to my kids tonight, I am a monarchist, but not a royalist. I don’t particularly care WHICH monarchy has the job, whether they are English or Australian or Aboriginal or what, as long as we DO have a monarchical system. Even Bob Carr can see that it would be a recipe for disaster to have a directly elected president on the American model.

This Easter, I have been a Catholic for 10 years.

My last service as a Lutheran pastor was on Palm Sunday 2001, and that year I attended the Easter Vigil at Our Lady of Perpetual Succour as a self-identifying Catholic. It was some time before I was received into the Church by Confirmation (June 16, 2003), but I can say that I have been “Catholic” for 10 years.

They’ve been interesting years, but joyful ones for the most part. I have never regretted my decision, although of course I miss ordained ministry. I don’t miss all the stress that went with it (Holy Week and Triduum with three parishes was always a bit of a difficult time!), but I do miss preaching and teaching, and of course being able to determine the liturgical life of the parish to my tastes (a benefit every priest or pastor or minister has by virtue of being “pope” in his own parish). But I have learned a lot in these years about living the vocation of a lay Christian, including a bit of humility (yes, really!).

When I first raised my desire to become a Catholic, the priest to whom I confided this (who is now happily my boss) described himself as “a happy Catholic”. I think I can confidently say that this is now a description I can own for myself.

The Church is a funny old girl, but I have never regretted either my choice of motto, which I use for this blog “Sentire Cum Ecclesia”.

For those who want the full story of how I came to enter the Catholic Church, I refer you to my “retroblog”, Year of Grace.

That's me on the left in the front, about to have my feet washed

I said I would let you know when the photos from last Thursday night’s ceremonies at St Aloysius were available and here they are. All the pictures from this week at the Catholic Community of Blessed John Henry Newman are here.

My daughters were complaining the other day about the “long readings” during Holy Week. “We know the stories”, they said. My wife and I have been encouraging them in return to listen carefully to the readings during for “something new” that they have not realised before.

I have rather taken that advice to heart myself in the last few days.

At the Maundy Thursday service at St Aloysius, I noted that the Latin word for “clean” (in the footwashing reading from St John) is the adjective “mundus”. I noted the connection between that adjective and the Latin noun for “world” or “cosmos”, which is also “mundus”. The connection seems to be in the idea of neat and beautiful appearance. But more than that, I reflected on the cultic ideas behind the category of “clean”. In the OT, a distinction was made between the “clean” and “unclean” and between the “sacred/holy” and the “secular”. According to my Seminary OT professor, Dr Kleinig, the natural state for anything God has made is “clean and secular”. Something which is “clean and secular” could be sanctified as “sacred/holy” by consecration for use in or access to worship, ie. for contact with the divine presence. Alternatively, it could be defiled and become “unclean”, which would put it at the other end of the spectrum from “sacred/holy”. My thought was just that the word “mundus” seems to combine into one the idea of both “clean” and “secular/worldly”. It is a good state for things to be in, for anything from the “mundus” which is thus made “mundus/clean” may also enter into the sanctifying presence of God. Just a thought.

Another new thing occured to me when hearing Matthew’s account of the Resurrection at the Easter Vigil. We are told that at the appearance of the angel, the soldiers “became as dead men”. I tried picturing that. Did they have heart attacks? or did they just faint? In either case, the suprising thing is that these hardened, tough, strong Roman military types were overcome by fear of the angel, while the Jewish women who had come to the tomb were not. True, they were also affected by fear (the angel tells them “Do not be afraid”) but they don’t react with fainting or heart attacks! Was Matthew having a bit of a go at the Romans at this point? And at the same time was he highlighting the strength of the faithful women? Again, a new thought.

I am reading Adam DeVille’s “Orthodoxy and the Roman Primacy” at the moment. And a thought has occured to me.

In one very useful chapter, DeVille surveys the writings of recent Orthodox theologians on the Roman Papacy. Most seem to have no problem with the primacy as such, the problem is how it is exercised.

In that light, many of these theologians share the objection of Vsevolod Majdansky that the Bishop of Rome acts as “the unique holder of a still higher position” which enables him to “ride roughshod over the [other] bishops” of the Church (p27). The argument is that the primacy should be exercised only in concert with the agreement of all the other bishops of the Church, an agreement reached via councils or synods.

In general, that sounds well and good. Yet one of the strengths of the Roman primacy as an instrument of unity seems to me (and many Western theologians) to be the very capacity of the Pope to act with the full authority of the Church when there isn’t agreement between “all the bishops”. There appear to be times and circumstances when the Pope has to act for the good of the whole Church precisely when there is disagreement. (Apart from which, an ecumenical council can be a very unwieldy instrument in this day and age, when there are simply so many bishops throughout all the world.)

I am thinking of three instances in recent times, for instance, when the Pope has unilaterally determined issues about which there is disagreement:

1) On artificial contraception (Humanae Vitae)
2) On women’s ordination (Ordinatio Sacerdotalis)
3) On the restoration of the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite (Summorum Pontificam)

These were – and are – controversial issues in the Church, but needed to be clarified and established in the light of the Church’s dogma and sacred tradition. The Orthodox, as far as I can tell, would have no difficulty with the decisions of either (2) or (3) above – I am not sure where they stand on (1). But in all three cases, the Pope DID “ride roughshod” over the bishops (especially on (3) above).

So, here is my thought and my question: Is the primacy of the Bishop of Rome not a good thing when it grants him the independence to act in order to protect and establish the tradition of the Church?

It is predictable that, come the Easter Weekend, there will be a number of articles in the newspapers on religious matters. Interesting to read this year’s offerings in The Saturday Age (which arrived a day early yesterday).

The editorial (“Let’s not make a religion out of secularism”) starts off well, and ends well too. But it seems like it was written by two different people, because another emphasis entirely inserts itself in the middle to tow the editorial line.

Let’s look at the start:

THERE was a time when those who prophesied the death of religion portrayed what would follow that demise as a blissful era of tolerance, freedom and respect for the dignity of all. When the world had cast off its superstitions, so the argument went, the greatest cause of hatred and dissension would be removed. It has not happened. In part this is because, despite all the confident predictions, the death of faith is not in sight – not even in the avowedly secular West, and certainly not in other parts of the world. But it is also because the predictions themselves have taken on a particularly strident and belligerent tone. Religion of any kind, but especially the monotheistic faiths that were formative influences on Western civilisation, is routinely characterised by campaigning secularists as not merely false but as the root of all evil, too. Adherents of those faiths are spoken of at best with condescension and ridicule, and sometimes with outright hostility. Ironically, there is often an evangelical fervour in this anti-religiosity, which, by denying all intellectual and moral legitimacy to that which it opposes, has acquired some of the worst traits of the faith of past eras.

This lurid secular evangelism was evident in some of the presentations at last year’s Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne. More disturbingly, it can also be heard in some of the contributions to the continuing debate about religious education in Victoria’s government schools.

There isn’t a word there that I disagree with. When, against this background, the current “debate about religious eduction in Victoria’s government schools” is then raised, I found myself thinking: “Am I about to read a retraction, or perhaps (more within the realms of possibility) an softening of the “strident and belligerent tone” that this paper has taken in the past on this issue?”

Not a hope. For immediately the editorial changes “voice”, and adopts the very “strident and belligerent tone” of which the first paragraph complained:

This newspaper agrees that the present system must be scrapped: it is not the role of a secular education system in a pluralist democracy to proselytise for any particular faith, or to facilitate proselytising by others. Yet that is effectively what now happens. It is partly a consequence of the Education Department’s bizarre reading of the Education Act, which construes ”may provide special religious instruction” to mean ”must provide …”, and partly because pupils are not required to opt in to such instruction but rather are permitted to opt out. But mostly it is because the chief provider of special religious instruction, Access Ministries, regards its task as the imparting of faith, and in order to do so relies on teaching of untrained volunteers who consciously set out to proselytise.

It really is beyond belief that the two paragraphs were written by the same author. The editorial continues with the now familiar refrain that we should scrap Special Religious Education in favour of

a religious education curriculum whose content is not restricted to the teachings of any particular religion, and which would be taught by trained teachers whose aim would not be to make converts.

Again, the old “either/or” proposition, with strong emphasis on the “or” at the expense of the “either”.

Surely it is not too difficult to understand that the one need not require the exclusion of the other, and that a truly open and tolerant “secularism” would allow both? Even an eight year old child would understand this.

In fact, on the very next page of the same newspaper, an eight year old child shows that she does understand it. “Nicola Iser, Age 8” provides the “Saturday Reflection” (not available online), in which she says:

“I want to learn about all religions in the world – where, why and what does it all mean? And I want to lean a bit ech week like I do with my Christian education classes at school. I don’t want less CE, I want mor RE – all the religions with classes each week right up to year twelve.”

See? Nicola gets it. Why can’t The Age? It seems that the editors at the age are like Fr Bob Maguire, to whom Peter Craven refers in his op-ed piece
Believers or not, we should keep alive the story of Easter:

It was interesting to see Father Bob Maguire say the other day that he was all for broad comparative religious education because he thought it would militate against the kind of sectarianism that can lead to religious hatreds.

I wonder. Often it’s the immersion in one religious tradition that leads to an apprehension of another.

Precisely. Learning a religious tradition deeply enables you to have a standpoint from which to understand or appreciate other religious traditions – both in the way they are similar and the way in which they contrast.

But then, when the Editorial reaches it’s final paragraph, it seems as if the keyboard has been handed back to the author who wrote the opening paragraph, and we get the following:

Abolition of the public holidays associated with the principal Christian festivals of Easter and Christmas does not seem to be on anyone’s agenda, however secular they may be or whatever faith they hold. So while Victorians are enjoying this Easter long weekend, it is worth taking time to reflect on the fact that the secular state arose from the agitation of those who were trying to establish freedom of religion, not to ensure freedom from religion. Not only would it not have occurred to them that religion should be banished from public discourse, they would have regarded such a notion as a new form of tyranny. As indeed it would be. Whatever the future of religion may be in this secular nation, even those who adhere to no faith should acknowledge how much of their own world view derives from the faith of earlier centuries. The notion that all human beings are equal in rights and dignity now seems inherently secular, but it first gained currency in a world in which the vast majority believed that all people were created in the image of God. That belief gave the idea of human dignity a political impetus it has not lost, for believers and unbelievers alike. We should not let our children grow up in ignorance of how the world came by that idea.

That paragraph could have been written by Pope Benedict himself. Again, I haven’t got any argument with it at all. If only whatever the first author wrote in between the first and the last paragraphs had been saved from the circular file and allowed to stand without the editor-in-chief butting in with his ten cent’s worth in the middle.

(As a footnote, one other piece worth reading in The Saturday Age this weekend is Barney Zwartz’s well considered reflection on whether the spate of natural disasters we have been experiencing are a reason to give up on God: “The meaning of suffering”)

Last night, I attended a kind of liturgy which has (in all probability) not been conducted in Australia for forty years: a “solemn pontifical mass” for Maundy Thursday at St Aloysius’ Church in North Caulfield, the home of the Catholic Community of Blessed John Henry Newman, aka the Latin Mass or Extraordinary Form community here in Melbourne.

The celebrant was Bishop Basil Meeking, the 81 year old retired bishop of Christchurch in NZ (yes, the place where the dreadful earthquake took place recently). Interestingly, I discovered this morning on the net that he was once the under-secretary for the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity in the Roman Curia. He was here for World Youth Day as the ecclesiastical patron for Juventutem, the society for young people with an attachment to the EF. Someone else might be able to tell me more about why he retired the See of Christchurch early (appointed by JPII in 1987, resigned in 1995 considerably before his retirement date (which should have been 2004). In any case, I understand he spends much of his time these days travelling the world supporting EF communities such as our local community at Caulfield. (Nb. He participated in our local Chrism mass here on Tuesday as a guest of our Archbishop).

Any way, back to the mass. Pictures are not yet available on their website (when they are, I will post them). I had been planning to go to the Good Friday ceremonies at St Aloysius this year, but I learned from Joshua’s blog that he was flying over and that the mass last night would be a Solemn Pontifical Mass, and so I changed my plans and decided to meet him there.

I arrived quite early, as I wanted to get used to the place and familiarise myself with the order for the night and spend a bit of time in prayer. I took a pew half way back in the church so that I could “sit back” and observe the natives. But I was approached by the sacristan who asked me if I would like to be one of the “twelve men” to have their feet washed. I was very happy to accept, and so was shifted up “to a higher place” in the front pew. I was thankful, however, that when Josh arrived, he too was invited to be among the chosen viri, so he was able to sit with me and guide me through the mass (and answer all my dumb questions like: why do they genuflect to the altar when the sacrament isn’t there?; and: why has the bishop changed mitres a couple of times during the mass?).

The music was provided by a a small schola singing gregorian and polyphonic settings and a minimal use of the organ. No hymns, except those in the liturgy such as Pange Lingua.

I can’t really describe the mass very well to give a clear impression of my experience. I had had some experience of the EF, having once or twice attended a low mass in Adelaide. I had also, in my seminary days, a habit of attending the liturgy at St Mary Magdaline’s in Adelaide, which was the Anglo-Catholic parish, and St Peter’ Eastern Hill here in Melbourne. But nothing quite this scale, and never before had I been to a Pontifical mass, ie a mass with a bishop, celebrated in this style. What it most reminded me of was the various big Eastern liturgies I have been too. Eastern liturgy can seem very foreign to people brought up on post-Vatican II worship, but after last night’s experience, I could see that there was a much closer relationship in terms of liturgical “mindset” between the solemn Extraordinary form and the Eastern liturgy. It is worth remembering that the Eastern Church never developed anything akin to the Western “low mass” and that probably many Catholics in Australia prior to Vatican II only rarely if ever experienced a Solemn liturgy, let alone a Solemn Pontifical liturgy. So what I was experiencing last night was something truly extraordinary, even by Extraordinary Form standards.

Nevertheless, it did occur to me that such a liturgy as I experienced last night really isn’t possible unless the people who are conducting it believe with all their hearts in the serious significance of what they are doing. This isn’t people playing games, as is sometimes snidely said. It requires a deep attention to detail, but also a belief that the detail matters. Matters for whom? you might ask. Well, obviously not “matters to God” such that if a mistake in following the incredibly convoluted rubrics were made he would have them for toast in hell tomorrow. And obviously not “matters to the people” in the sense that I would have known if they had made a mistake. But “matters” in the sense that, for a master stonemason, a little bit of stone decoration high up on the roof of a cathedral where no one will ever see it except the birds “matters” even though no-one will ever see it. I think some of my orthodox Jewish friends understand this “matters” in a way that we don’t. We confuse it with “legalism” or “rigidity”, and that’s wrong. It is a sense that this is important, and doing it right is a way of saying that it is important.

That’s about as close as I can get to describing the experience and my impression of it as a whole. All in all, if this is the kind of thing that the Holy Father meant when he suggested that the revival of the Extraordinary Form may have an effect on how we celebrate the Ordinary Form, I am all for it.