I have not died. Yet. I'm too lazy to update this thing. For now, please come to see us for the
by Fr John Hunwicke, SSC
at Pusey House
On May 13, 1917 .… Yes, if I were Jeremy Paxman and that were a Starter Question, you would all by now laudably have pressed your buzzers. But I wonder how many of you recall the first words which the Lady ‘brighter than the sun’ said to those three Portuguese peasant children, ninety years ago this year. They were ‘Do not be afraid’. ‘Afraid’ is what frail humans so often feel when confronted by evidences of divine power; the Lord himself said on His Easter Morning: me phobeisthe. But I like to indulge myself an idiosyncratic fantasy that Our Lady, when she appeared on that stony, arid field at Cova da Iria - although I imagine she spoke to Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta in some Portuguese dialect - was really addressing England; Protestant England with its underlying anti-Catholic bigotry (‘scratch an Englishman...’) even when it is overlaid by the broader anti-Christian secularism of our own age. (When the 1928 Prayer Book came before Parliament, someone asked an atheist MP why he was so keen to vote against it, and he explained ‘But I am a Protestant atheist’.) And such English, I put it to you, are scared, dead scared, scared out of their wits, by the great Mother of God, Mary most holy. Have you noticed that there's a certain sort of churchperson who twitches rhythmically at the very phrase 'Mother of God’. If you explain that Jesus is God and so his mother Mary is the Mother of God, they give you that sort of sideways look that implies they know you're playing some sort of Jesuitical trick on them, but they can't quite spot the catch. Well, of course, there is a catch; it is that they don't live with a real faith that Jesus is God. As Newman once analysed it, liberal protestants demote our Lord Jesus Christ into the slot reserved for Mary (I am butchering Newman's elegant periods into journalese so I will call it Top Creature Slot) and then they're puzzled when we Catholics situate Mary there. 'Romanism is not idolatry unless Arianism is orthodoxy’, he observed.
So what - if they can't completely avoid talking about Mary - do liberal protestants call her? 'The mother of Jesus’; 'the Virgin’; and - get this - `the Madonna’. As if it's safer to refer to her in Italian than to use the Prayer Book phrase 'Our Lady’. So let's keep her, they feel, in an Art History context - the Madonna... Weird, really, isn't it: you wouldn't, probably, refer to Fr Jonathan as ‘the Il Principale’ or to our beloved Prime Minister as ‘the Il Duce’. Or perhaps she will be called 'the bee vee’, as if it sanitises and makes her safe to turn her into an English acronym.
In a sermon I preached forty years ago, at the Mattins of Christmass Day in the year of my diaconate, I said that the Incarnation meant that God was in the belly of a Palestinian peasant girl who is Queen of Heaven. Critics fell into three categories: those who disliked my phrase because of its physicality and because it placed the origins of our faith among foreigners (surely Mary must have been a middle-class Englishwoman and if not a member of the WI then at least of the Young Wives); those who didn't like the phrase Queen of Heaven; and those who disliked both.
'The Immaculate Conception’. It's a lovely rolling phrase, isn't it (we classicists would analyse its rhythm as the trispondaicus). And it's a phrase, too, that can scare people silly. Is it sometimes the physicality – again, of conception - that disturbs them; conception, a process that occurs a little way south of the tummy button? Not the sort of thing the fastidious want to have dragged in front of their noses. C S Lewis points out that the devils too are fastidious in their horror at the flesh: Screwtape refers to a human as 'this animal, this thing begotten in a bed’. Or perhaps people are scared of the word 'Immaculate’; perhaps it suggests foreign religion - little old Irish women clutching their rosaries or Spanish ladies in black making their nine successive First Saturday communions in honour of the Immaculate Heart (a devotion which Cardinal Ratzinger with gentle irony once called 'surprising for people from the Anglo-Saxon and German cultural worlds’). But 'immaculate’ is a completely biblical concept in its Hebrew and Greek equivalents: it means spotless; and only what is without blemish is truly for God (for example, a spotless sacrificial lamb). Because Mary is to be wholly for God, is to give God his body, to give God his endowment of genes, give God the food of her breast: so Mary by God's gift is to be the Immaculate, the one without blemish, the one in whom the Divine likeness has never been marred.
It is because Mary alone in the roots of her being is unmarked by sin that Mary alone is truly and wholly free. In our hearts, too, we should make her free and 'fear not’; she is never to be locked up in the tourist industry as a statue of doubtful taste carried in processions by foreign peasants for the English to photograph from within their coaches; Mary is not to be locked up by the Heritage business in a Merry England; she is not to be the Madonna of the Art Historians imprisoned in coffee table books.
If Mary is the Mother of God Incarnate, she is our Mother too, because we are in Christ, limbs of his body by our baptismal incorporation. Mary comes to us tonight, and what would a mother bring us her children except food; food for her children in exilio; food packed for our journey. Mary comes to this place and to this moment of time; Mary comes, bright with all the beauties known by men and angels; Mary comes to set upon our lips the blessed fruit of her womb Jesus.
Fr John Hunwicke is Priest-in-Charge of St Thomas the Martyr, Oxford, and Honorary Senior Research Fellow of Pusey House
Since this topic is again a bit of a talking-point, I will (again) quote
some words of Cardinal Ratzinger, which seem to me the most remarkable
observation made on Papal powers - by someone who subsequently became Pope - for
well over a thousand years.
"After the Second Vatican Council, the impression arose that the pope
really could do anything ... especially if he were acting on the mandate of an
ecumenical council ... In fact, the First Vatican Council had in no way defined
the pope as an absolute monarch. On the contrary, it presented him as the
guarantor of obedience to the revealed Word. The pope's authority is bound to
the Tradition of Faith ... Even the pope can only be a humble servant of its
lawful development and abiding integrity and identity ... The authority of the
pope is not unlimited; it is at the service of Sacred Tradition."
Since this is how Benedict XVI sees papal power, how can any
catholic-minded person have any objection to it?
Please read this explanation of the term Anglicanism by Fr John Hunwicke, SSC.
Anglicanism is a nonsense religion, a dim, pathetic, ridiculous superstition, developed within the last 150 or so years. It relates to what is doctrinally distinctive about those in communion with the See of Canterbury. Sometimes it is expressed in terms of a via media: some sort of Middle Way between the excesses, on the one side, of Protestantism, on the other side, of Popery.
Sometimes it appears in the form of an idea called the Branch Theory, in which Christ's Church is composed of three Branches: the Roman; the Greek; and the Anglican. No explanation is ever thought necessary as to why the 'Monophysite' Syrian Orthodox Christians who meet in S Thomas's are not a 'branch', or why the Methodists, or the Swedish Lutherans, or the Moravians, are excluded. Little consideration is ever given to the possibility that the Great Latin Church of the West might be deemed a Via media between those Western ecclesial bodies, including the Anglicans, who were exposed to the 'Reformation' with its radical denials of Tradition and of Sacramentality, and the Orthodox.Sometimes this 'Anglicanism' is constructed by looking at the Prayer Book and the Articles. Sometimes, by examining carefully the writings of those divines, Caroline or Tractarian, who attempted to modify the damage done to the Provinces of Canterbury and York by the 'Reformation'. In each case, the unspoken assumption is that Anglicanism started with the breach from Rome. You have the bizarre situation in which Anglicans cheerfully claim to be the ancient Catholic Church of this land, yet if you asked any of them "Who founded the Church of England?", 95% would reply "Henry VIII". (I regarded it as a triumph of my 6-year ministry in Devon that, after I put that question onto a pub-quiz, my parishioners were a little uncertain whether the answer on Father's answer-sheet would be S Gregory or S Augustine.) The legal position in English law of the Church of England is that she was founded in 596; yet pretty well anybody would tell you that she started with the breach from Rome.
Funnily enough, there is a distinctive doctrine of the poast-Reformation Church of England, yes, just one; or rather, there was until comparatively recent times: the doctrine of Royal Supremacy. In a raw and murderous form under Henry VII, this meant that the Monarch could change the doctrine of the Church upon a moment's whimsy or confiscate the chalice in each parish church if he found himself strapped for cash. In the more gracious period of the Stuarts, when the C of E, instead of resenting the tyranny of the Tudors, rather welcomed the patronage and protection of a kindlier dynasty, this transformed itself into the dogma of Passive Resistance: that even a bad monarch ought to be resisted by nothing more violent than passive non-collaboration. This is what distinguished Anglicans from both Protestant and Popish dissent. Neither Catholics, nor Evangelicals, nor Liberals, make this the basis of their understanding of 'Anglicanism' nowadays.The sooner that 'Anglicanism' is shovelled into the trash-can of History, the better.
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WHITSUNDAY
May 31, 2009
10:00 a.m. Procession and High Mass
Mass of the Quiet Hour - George Oldroyd
Come Holy Ghost - Thomas Attwood
4:30 p.m. Solemn Evensong and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament
Followed by the Parish Picnic to which all are welcome
Magnificat and Nunc dimittis in D Major - Herbert Brewer
Come Holy Ghost, The Maker - Cedric Thorpe-Davie
Preces & Responses - Heathcote Statham
Grace and Saint Peter's Church
707 Park Avenue
Baltimore, Maryland 21201
