Thursday, October 10, 2024

Hold Fast To Hype. 11 October 2024.

Preface.

It is fitting indeed and just, right and helpful unto salvation -- oh wait, not that kind of preface, but it is dignum et justum to say I did not write what follows this preface. It is an article by Patrick Marrin of the National Catholic Reporter, with copyright given. It is, or at least was, also published online here. I am posting the text, typos and all.  The article refers to an accompanying story, and that is also given.  The accompanying story is an address given by Godfrey Diekmann OSB in 1997.

What is all that and why should I care?  Because of its spill-over effect on us.  That is what this post is about, to make it clear what the real nature of what is spilled over is, in the words of those who formed it themselves.  Godfrey was a leading figure, both in the movements in the decades before Vatican II that led up to it, and at Vatican II itself where he was a peritus.  What's that?  "peritus" in Latin means skilled or expert, and in church usage it's a noun meaning an expert in theology appointed by the Vatican Secretary of State to attend and advise a church council.

It was my inestimable privilege to have known Godfrey, a stunning accomplishment of the human spirit and a professor and Benedictine extraordinaire, even if he was, IMHO, wrong about damn near everything.  I'm actually much more in awe of his much lesser known brother, Father Conrad, whose World Lit I class (Homer, the Greek tragedians, Virgil, Dante and Cervantes, I suppose to-day we would say Western Lit I, though Conrad also offered a wonderful class on haiku which I also took), though at 0800 on Minnesota Winter mornings, was among the singular experiences of my life.

Father Godfrey was born into eternity on 22 February 2002.  There's some real irony here.  Godfrey was a champion of "collegiality" and 22 February, in the new order to which Godfrey was such an influence, is now in the Roman Calendar the Feast of the Chair of St Peter.  I suppose it might have been fitting etc. to post this on that date.  Formerly, 18 January was the Feast of the Chair of Peter at Rome and 22 February was the Feast of the Chair of Peter at Antioch.  The novus ordo abolished the former and combined it with the latter.

Either way though, it's all about chairs, as in seats of authority.  Yet our beloved synod, ever ready to engage in Vatican II for Lutherans, in its current worship book reinvents the 18 January date as being about the confession of St Peter and ignores the 22 February date, though that is the date traditionally associated with St Peter delivering his confession!  This blog disentangles the well-intended but misguided the story of these feasts on that date, along with much else that comes from it, in the post "22 February.  The Confession of St Peter.  On Chairs, Guardians, Noble Lies and Pious Fictions Too."

So, 22 February is taken with much bigger stuff than Godfrey's dies natalis.  And actually it is even more fitting to post this on 11 October, the anniversary of the opening of Vatican II in 1962.  That was my original intent when this post was first created in 2019.  But, on 1 October 2019 I took a bad fall in the rain, with injury to the right shoulder, at first expected to heal with immobilization but examination by an orthopaedist revealed more extensive damage requiring a hemiarthroplasty, which was done 10 October 2019.  So I was a bit taken up at the time.  

So instead I posted it on 4 December.  Why then?  Well, that was in 1963 the promulgation date of Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, which is the document of Vatican II most directly affecting not just Catholics but non-Catholics as well, particularly those like ourselves (LCMS) who historically retain liturgy.  It is this document that both summed up the drift of the preceding decades of the "liturgical movement" and resulted in a wholesale change to the previous liturgy in the promulgation of what is often called the novus ordo, though that is not its actual name.  

Liturgical rites are named for the pope under whose authority they are promulgated, thus, it is the Mass of Paul VI.  He promulgated it on 3 April 1969 and it was to take effect with the beginning of the church year, the First Sunday of Advent, of that year, but, he was so unhappy with the text prepared for it that that didn't happen until a revision came out the following year, which is why one sees both 1969 and 1970 as its date.  2019 was its 50th anniversary.

Novus ordo means "new order" in Latin, which though that is not its name describes exactly what it is, a new order.  The bumbling around its initial appearance is but openers for no end of bumbling around in the decades since, which continues unabated to the present re both its Latin typical text and translations thereof.  The only thing that Magnum Principium, "The Great Principle" in Latin, Pope Francis' document of 3 September 2017, really clarifies is that bumbling around following Vatican II is now the irreversible norm of the Catholic Church.  The extent to which this bumbling around is completely antithetical to the reforms of the Lutheran Reformation is detailed in this blog's post for 25 June, the anniversary of the presentation of the Augsburg Confession.  In 2021 Francis both reversed the ruling of his predecessor allowing priests to say the former liturgy on their own authority, now it must be approved by a bishop and not celebrated in a Catholic church, and announced a two-year series of sessions culminating in who knows what in 2023.

The bumbling continues unabated, and the only thing clear is, wherever it ends up it will not allow what was there before, the very heritage we Lutherans were at pains to demonstrate we do not reject but reform.  The "Synod on Synodality" (the most ridiculous phrase in the entire history of theology) with no previously known meaning, makes it clear that the rejection of traditional faith is the norm now, and as we adopt and adapt these distinctly unLutheran things, as time goes on Lutherans are as unfamiliar with traditional Lutheran liturgy as Catholics are with traditional Catholic liturgy,  

I would not now give a ginger snap -- or, in the magnificent phrase now nearly entirely absent from usage, a popefig -- about all this except for its woeful effect on Lutherans, distancing us from our common heritage no less than it has with Catholics, all the while presenting a pastiche that looks traditional superficially but in reality is an intentional break with the very tradition it claims to renew.  There's more to tradition than wearing vestments, following a church-approved order and talking about Jesus.  Both the article and the accompanying story are expressly clear about a message I heard daily in those heady days, that this is a real and intended break yet one that is not really a break at all, but a return to and a renewal of something that had been increasingly obscured in the last millennium and a half.

Sounds a lot like an acknowledgement of what we call the Babylonian Captivity of the Church and the Reformation, doesn't it?  Yes, it does.  I refer the reader again to this blog's post for 25 June for a fuller discussion; here, I present an interview with and address by one of the architects of both the council and its new liturgy, then following that, the main points which show this to be quite something different than what we are about.  The opening address of the council on 11 October 1962, Gaudet Mater Ecclesia (Mother Church Rejoices) ought well be retrospectively re-titled Lacrimat Mater Ecclesia (Mother Church Weeps), which will be the title of our examination of Mr Marrin's article, and the "accompanying story", which follows.   

Diekmann says hold fast to hope - Vatican II figure Godfrey Diekmann

Vatican II participant appeals for restored priorities, transformed lives

Vatican II, regarded by some as one of the most revolutionary councils in church history, is now the subject of video retrospectives and historical overviews that pronounce who won, or where the pendulum has come to rest. If anyone is watching or reading, the easiest verdict is that the council is fading in both time and influence, its prophets either gone or all but silent.

With at least one notable exception.

Even at 90, Benedictine Fr. Godfrey Diekmann carries his 6-foot-3-inch frame straight and tall behind the aluminum walker he is pushing swiftly down the long monastic corridor at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minn. His face -- large, sculpted and serene -- glows above his black turtleneck.

He is a man on a final mission, made all the more urgent by a doctor's verdict last August that he could die or be incapacitated at any moment by a, host of heart troubles that have left him too fragile for any further medical remedy.

Diekmann, regarded by many as one of the giants of the American church and a key participant in the work of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), has been using his borrowed time since Benedict August to reassert that the most important goal of the Second Vatican Council was to recover for everyone full and confident access to an intimate life with God through Jesus Christ. The key to opening up the institutional church to this life was to restore an understanding of the church as the body of Christ. This single reform held revolutionary implications for every aspect of the church's governance, worship, spirituality and mission. (See accompanying story.)

The body of Christ

For Diekmann this is no worn cliche but Christianity's best-kept secret, a startling revelation conveyed in the prayer offered daily during the preparation of the wine at Mass: "By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity."

In his 63 years teaching patristics -- the rich treasury of writings from the first centuries of the church -- Diekmann has struggled to convey to his students the meaning of the patristic adage: "He became human that we might become divine."

"My main point in teaching was to make my students realize what Christianity is -- that it's not just being good with the grace of God helping us, but it means real transformation, that you are sharing the divine nature. This must be taken seriously.

"What does it mean to say that we are members of the body of Christ?" Diekmann asked. "It means that in some absolute, almost contradictory way, we are sons and daughters of God, and not just as a figure of speech. The very fact that we casually keep on talking about being adopted children of God is proof that obviously we don't have the faintest idea what this is about, because adopted, by itself, in present usage, can only mean a matter of the law.

"We acknowledge that Christ, of course, is the tree Son of God. But we are now also tree sons and daughters of God, but by a gift -- by adoption -- and this is actually sharing the life of God. That is a staggering thing, and for many Catholics it is completely new."

For Diekmann, these "glad tidings" so exceed the claims of ordinary religion, are so stunning in their implications, even theologians fail to comprehend them. The language of Western philosophy has never been able to adequately express what the Eastern church has always celebrated through symbol, music and ritual in its liturgy, Diekmann said.

For all the controversy that swirled about Vatican II, this is what it was basically about -- to re-animate the church and its members as the body of Christ.

Diekmann believes that we cannot overstate the importance of this restored ecclesiology and must not allow it to languish. It was the soul of the 40-year pastoral liturgical movement that helped prepare the church for the Vatican Council, and it is the one image of the church that has the power, lacking in other images, to inspire us to embrace the gospel's call to become participants in the life of God.

Resistance to the council

The main source of conflict during and after Vatican II was that the ecclesiology being displaced, a highly centralized and hierarchical model based on Robert Bellarmine's image of the church as a "perfect society," was well entrenched in 1959 when Pope John XXIII surprised everyone by convening the council.

The pre-Vatican II church most older Catholics remember, enshrined by the Council of Trent in 1563 and bolstered by Vatican I in 1870, was a proud if isolated medieval cathedral/fortress at the height of its triumphalist stature. The Catholic church was the oldest, largest, wealthiest, authoritarian institutional religion on earth. For many, it was also divinely ordained, infallible and changeless.

Diekmann shares the view held by many church historians that such a structure was rooted not in the New Testament but in Emperor Constantine's decision in 313 to advance Christianity as the state religion. The church went from being a countercultural force and catalyst to being guardian of the status quo. Bishops became territorial, or diocesan, governors, a corruption of their original servant roles and a blow to collegiality, or shared authority among all bishops. "From the time of Constantine until Vatican II, you had an uninterrupted development of clericalism and centralization," Diekmann said. By unplugging this ecclesiology, the Catholic church set a bold precedent for institutional change worldwide.

The laity, the Catholic church's now nearly 1 billion adherents, had the most to gain by the council's recognition that baptism entitles every member of the church to "conscious, full and active participation" in the worship and life of the church. Every Christian shares in the risen life and redemptive activity of Christ -- priest, prophet and king -- through the use of his or her own charisms.

Diekmann recalls the speech given by Cardinal Leo Suenens during the council on the charisms flowing from baptism: "Each one by baptism has his own charism and contributes something to the church, first of all to the local church, or ecclesia, to which you belong, and then to the entire church. In God's plan you are indispensable. This is terribly important -- the importance of laity of themselves."

The idea of lay charisms was little understood at the time of Suenens' speech in the 1960s, even as the idea of the body of Christ was rejected by some in the 1920s as too dangerous, too much like the Protestant idea of the "priesthood of the faithful."

While many council reforms are coming more slowly than supporters had hoped, Diekmann the historian believes in taking the long view. What the council adopted in principle still needs to be fully implemented: "But the momentum of 1,600 years cannot be reversed in a mere generation," Diekmann cautioned. "The doctrinal foundations have been firmly placed by Vatican II, and, contrary to increasingly pessimistic evaluations, the substructures of renewal are being placed, often by trial and error if not by official initiative."

Even apparent crisis and controversy can be interpreted positively. The shortage of ordained clergy, for example, has opened the way for non-ordained men and women to serve as parish administrators and has prompted creative extensions of the sacramental work of Christ through lay leadership and outreach. Diekmann said he is joyful in the freedom of the Spirit evident in such adaptive situations. He points to early church writings as an untapped treasury of solutions and models for today's needs. The revolution will continue; there is no turning back. The full application of Vatican II's vital ecclesiology will come because it is the will of the Holy Spirit.

Astonishing series of miracles

Diekmann's confidence is rooted in his own experience at Vatican II, where he served as a member of the preparatory commission for the document on the liturgy. The council was for him and many other witnesses an astonishing series of miracles -- unforeseen events, opportune moments, dramatic interventions and come-from-behind victories that advanced the daring new ecclesiology, first in the liturgy document, then into the debate on the nature of the church itself.

One Protestant observer and close friend of Diekmann, the late Albert Outlet of Southern Methodist University, expressed amazement at the council's dramatic reversal of 1,600 years of church history: "My conviction is that never before in the entire history of Christianity has there been such an obvious intervention of the Holy Spirit as there has been here," Outlet said.

There were setbacks as well. The one Diekmann regards as doing the most damage to the intended impact of the council was the misapplied emphasis given to the phrase "the people of God" in the aftermath of the council.

An Old Testament designation, the phrase was used as the title of Chapter Two of the "Constitution on the Church," and there only to indicate that the whole church is more important than any one part, including the pope or the bishops. Unfortunately, it was later received widely as the operative image for the church, supplanting the body of Christ.

This led to de-emphasis of the most important message flowing from the council. The bold assertion of divine life through baptism, real incorporation into God's own nature, was conveyed as only a special closeness to God within the fellowship of the church. What the council had powerfully proclaimed it failed to effectively teach.

Liturgical buzzword

The idea of fellowship, or koinonia, became the buzzword of many liturgical reformers eager to replace the formal, vertical, divine worship in the old liturgy with the new, theologically horizontal and less formal celebration of a meal with the human Jesus in community. The result was a false evaluation of the transcendent and immanent dimensions of the liturgy. The former emphasis on transcendence became a one-sided stress on immanence -- we become pals with God. Both dimensions are essential. This misunderstanding created divisions within the reform effort and became a source of untold confusion and criticism in the wake of the council, and this has continued to distract and delay implementation of its deeper purposes.

For now, Diekmann is less interested in arguing than in appealing for an openness to the life that is meant to flow freely through the church to each member of the body of Christ. Any structure that blocks that life limits ministry within the church and blocks the urgent mission of the church to proclaim the gospel to the whole world.

As Diekmann anticipates his own face-to-face encounter with God, he has seized every opportunity to alert others to his concern that the gospel of divine life is not reaching the church or the larger world clearly and fully.

When Cardinal Joseph Bernardin attended graduation ceremonies at St. John's University in June of 1996, just months before his death, he asked to see Godfrey Diekmann.

"Before Mass he called for me. He said, `You know I'm sick and I'm not sure I can finish with the Mass. I don't want to just make conversation, but I asked for you so you could tell me what is closest to your heart.' And for 35 minutes I talked about being sons and daughters of God, how that is the essence of Christianity, how that is the glad tidings. He took all of that it in, he listened. Then he said, `You are perfectly correct that we haven't done enough to make that clear.'"

In recent interviews and letters to his many friends, Diekmann's long story of the miracle of the council is being distilled to a kind of mantra he seems intent on proclaiming until the time silence, claims him:

"Baptized Christian, remember of whose body you are a member."

By PATRICK MARRIN Special to the National Catholic Reporter Collegeville, Minn.

COPYRIGHT 1999 National Catholic Reporter
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group

[Here is the "accompanying story". It is also online here.]

"Christian, remember your baptism" - 1997 address from Fr Godfrey Diekmann

These remarks were delivered by Fr. Godfrey Diekmann as part of a panel discussion at St. John's School of Theology, Collegeville, Minn., on April 17, 1997. Panelists were asked to speak about the meaning and purpose of the Second Vatican Council and on the state of the reform and renewal in today's church.

Cardinal [Leo] Suenens [of Belgium] stated that Vatican Council II was a council about ecclesiology, about the nature and activities of the church. I believe most theologians would agree. So I suppose the first question that comes to mind is what is the church?

It may come as a surprise to many to discover that Vatican Council I in 1870 and Vatican Council II have given radically different answers to that question. For more than three centuries before Vatican II, the accepted answer would have been that of Robert Bellarmine: The church is a society. There are two perfect societies, that of the church and of the state. That's not a very spiritually inspiring definition, is it? It is a definition in fact which a priori excludes the very possibility of collegiality. It was only in the 1920s that a new, or rather, the biblical, Pauline and patristic understanding of the church, began to surface again in the Western church. And it became the leitmotif of the pastoral liturgical movement, namely, the church as the body of Christ.

The body of Christ. Too bad it was called mystical body of Christ. At that time many were put off by the  word mystical: What has that got to do with me? Perhaps at the present time the term would be welcomed.

The concept of church, or body of Christ, only gradually gained acceptance. It was a very sensitive subject. We had to be very careful in speaking of it, or printing an article about it in Orate Fratres or Worship [magazine], principally because, I suppose, of our post-Reformation nervousness about the priesthood of the laity, of the faithful. Only with Pius XII's encyclical on the mystical body in 1943 did it gain respectability. Let me quickly enumerate five of its most inspiring and revolutionary implications.

1. Every baptized Christian is an active, co-responsible member of the body having a distinctive contribution to make. This became the Magna Carta of the laity, the basis of active participation in the liturgy and the great movements of the time; the Jocists, the Family Life Movement, the Catholic Worker.

2. Collegiality: Bishops are not vicars of the pope. They, too, are vicars of Christ. The diocese is not just a geographical division of the universal church; it is the local church, united to all other churches, and in a most special way to Rome, the church of the pope. The bishop's leadership is made manifest above all in the celebration of the Eucharist.

3. The presences of Christ: Not only in the eucharistic bread and cup but "Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them." This involved a long overdue rethinking of sacraments. Sacraments are not just external signs to confer grace, that terribly mechanistic, automatic understanding of the sacraments that created rightful scandal among our Protestant friends. Sacraments are not things, they are acts. They are acts of Christ. Christ is in our midst, continuing to send the Holy Spirit for the upbuilding of the church.

4. The recovery of the resurrection of Christ as redemptive: We in the West for some 500 years at least had put almost exclusive emphasis on Christ's passion and death as effecting our redemption. How bad the situation was is clear from the fact that [F.X.] Durrwell's book on the resurrection as redemptive, published in 1960, just a few years before the council, created heated controversy. But the apostle Paul said, "Christ died for our sins and rose for our justification," that is, that we might have life, Christ's life.

No wonder Augustine could cry out, "We are sons and daughters of the resurrection, and Alleluia is our song?

5. And what is that life of Christ? It is the life of the risen Christ. It is divine life. We are sons and daughters of God, not by nature but by gift. This is the essence of the Christian glad tidings. To quote a patristic cliche, "God became human that we might become divine." Or, as St. Leo the Great tells us, "Christian, remember your dignity." And that thought, I submit, constitutes the one and only school of Christian spirituality of the biblical and patristic period. There are dozens of schools of spirituality at the present time. This is the only one that I could recognize in the writings of the early church: "Christian, remember who you are," or equivalently, "Christian, remember your baptism."

I should, by right, add a sixth point. Since Vatican II, a new situation has arisen, a rightful demand to achieve and to put into effect the equality of male and female. In this question, also, the doctrine of the body of Christ, as expressed, for example, in Galatians 3, or 1 Corinthians 12, the body of Christ concept gives us the strongest and clearest biblical warrant for urging the radical equality of men and women. You all know the famous passage: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free person, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28).

In conclusion, therefore, let me say, the topic of our discussion is the renewal of the church. Those of us who are old enough will remember what an exhilarating and enriching period of spiritual renewal were the several decades of the pre-Vatican II liturgical movement, a movement inspired by the doctrine of the body of Christ. It was a voyage of ever new discoveries. When all is said and done, Vatican II was a church-wide effort to effect spiritual and structural renewal by that same doctrine.

I submit that it is a complete misunderstanding of the council to think that the concept "people of God" was meant to replace that of the "body of Christ," as largely happened after the Vatican Council II. The chosen people of the Old Testament, the Jews, were already spoken of as the people of God. The new dispensation offers something gloriously new, the people of God have become the family of God, true sons and daughters of God.

The term "people of God" was used as the heading of Chapter Two of the document on the church chiefly to pick out, to give prominence to, one important aspect of the body of Christ, namely, that the entire body is more important than any of its members, even pope and bishop, and that applies also to the teaching of infallibility. The total body is greater than its parts.

In a word, renewal of the church according to the council demands of necessity the recovery in the popular minds and perhaps in that of theologians the biblical and patristic understanding of the church as the body of Christ. "Baptized Christian, remember of whose body you are a member."

COPYRIGHT 1999 National Catholic Reporter
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group

Lacrimat mater ecclesia.

Let's take a look at what we've just read.

1.  Constantine did not decide in 313 to advance Christianity as the state religion.  This is a reference to the Edict of Milan (Edictum Mediolanensa) of February 313.  The Edict exists in two versions.  One is that of Lactantius, a scholar who was tutor to Constantine's son Crispius, whom Constantine ordered hanged in 326 and shortly thereafter had his stepmom Fausta executed by immersion in boiling water, which was not a Roman method of execution, but was a technique of abortion, suggesting an adulterous relationship and pregnancy.  The other is that of Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea.  For one thing, the two versions are not at all the same.  For another, Lactantius' version is not in the form of an edict.  For another, far from making Christianity the state religion, it simply granted Christianity legal status, and ordered reparations made for recent persecutions.  For yet another, it wasn't even specifically about Christianity, it grants legal status to any and all religions found in the Empire!  The advancement of Christianity as the state religion did not come from Constantine but in the joint declaration of the co-emperors (Gratian, Valentinian II and Theodosius I) on 27 February 380 with the Edict of Thessalonica (Cunctos populos) defining what is and is not the Catholic Church and making it the state religion.

2.  Nowhere in our Lutheran Confessions is there anything even remotely like a concept or sense of reversing 1,600 years (well, at the time the Confessions were written it would have been about 1,100 years) of bad development, jumping over centuries to restore and renew a lost purity of New Testament and Patristic (the "fathers" of the first few centuries of church history) times.  This idea of some sort of lost ideal in the early church, whose purity is to be recovered and restored, is entirely a churchy version of an endemic Romantic fiction of C19 when the "Liturgical Movement" began, a "noble church" as the ecclesiastical expression of the "noble savage".  Noble savage, btw, is a phrase often associated with Rousseau, but, he never used it; it comes from John Dryden much earlier, in his play published in 1672 The Conquest of Grenada -- I am as free as nature first made man / Ere the base laws of servitude began / When wild in woods the noble savage ran.  "Savage" at the time did not have its common pejorative connotation now, but quite the opposite, a sense of free, unrestrained, even superior for not being held back by later imposed norms.

3.  What our Confessions do state, in complete contrast to the above, is continuity with the past, warts and all, and re the warts, removing them by the criteria of, not a model of a lost past, but whether it contradicts anything in Scripture.  Wrt to worship, our Confessions repeatedly point out that our services are NOT a new order but for the most part the ones previously in use.  Godfrey makes an anonymous reference to Pius XII's encyclical Mystici corporis Christi (Of the Mystical Body of Christ) of 29 June 1943, yet omits anything about it not concerned with the liturgical movement, resulting in an emphasis both misplaced and misunderstood.  1943 -- the insistence on the value of each human life to the Church carries over to society, in contrast to Nazi Germany's Aktion T4 programme of killing of those with mental or physical disabilities or those of races or cultures deemed inferior, or as we put it now, insufficient quality of life.  Also, while the encyclical is clear that the Church is not composed of an active clergy dispensing the sacraments and a passive laity receiving them, it is also clear that this life happens within the visible structure established for it by Christ, namely, the Pope as head and the bishops in communion with him.

4.  This in turn led to one of the great bumblings-around since the council.  The encyclical says the mystical body of Christ is the Catholic Church.  "Is", or in Latin, est.  Lumen gentium, "Light of the nations" in Latin, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church as it is called, in its eighth paragraph says instead that the Church subsists in (Latin, subsistit in) the Catholic Church.  Many critics of Vatican II have seen this as the Catholic Church backing off from its former self-understanding.  For decades now the Catholic Church has put forth explanations how these two different statements are the same.  Guess what, they are the same, and guess further what, that is not good news though it sounds like it.  Subsistit in simply means that the church of Christ is only fully found within the visible structure of the Catholic Church, though elements of the Catholic Church sufficient for salvation can and are found outside its visible structure.  IOW, we Lutherans and others are saved by those elements of the Catholic Church which can exist outside the visible Catholic Church and which we do not deny, such as Baptism.

5.  If Godfrey et hoc genus omne want to lament the phrase "people of God" overshadowing "body of Christ" they need look no further than right here, not at est and subsistit in.  Mystici corporis and Lumen gentium do not use the same nouns for what is supposedly the same in the verbs.  Mystici corporis says the body of Christ is the Catholic Church.  Lumen gentium says the Church, not "the body of Christ", subsists in the Catholic Church.  Oh, but church and body of Christ are the same thing, one might say.  Indeed they are, but look at why that is.  The Church is what it is because of each member's baptism into the life of God, says Lumen gentium in chapter two, which thus forms them into not the Old Testament people of God but a new people of God.  IOW, the body of Christ and the people of God are equivalent terms for one thing created by one source, baptism.  If they are not equivalent terms, two nouns for the same thing, then est and subsistit in cannot be equivalent verbs, two verbs for the same thing.  The documents themselves bear that out.

6.  This bumbling is the fons et origo by which Pius XII's encyclicals, not just Mystici corporis, are stood on their heads.  Mediator Dei (Mediator of God, 20 November 1947) both champions the sacraments and liturgy as mediating the life of God to the members of the Church, and warns against the effects of trying to encourage this participation by applying to liturgy the Romantic fiction discussed above, thinking one has recovered some lost past purity, an effort he calls liturgical archaeologism.  Yet it is just this liturgical archaeologism that is the modus operandi celebrated above of the novus ordo.  Lex orandi lex credendi, the law of praying is the law of believing, says the maxim derived from Prosper Aquitanus, a student of Augustine.  The original goes ut legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi, that the law of praying establish the law of believing, which in Catholic hands is sometimes used to establish doctrine on liturgy, yet, this is contradicted both by the principle of sola scriptura, by Scripture alone, that doctrine is determined, and by Pius XII himself in Mediator Dei, saying that the proper distinction between faith and liturgy (so to speak!) is expressed by lex credendi legem statuat supplicandi, the law of belief establishes the law of prayer.

Point being, as you pray so shall you believe, and as you believe so shall you pray.  It works both ways.  If you pray in a manner devised out of a liturgical archaeologism, a Romantic fantasy of having jumped over a millennium and one half of loss of purity, so shall you believe about the faith, the church, the works.  And, if you have faith that includes such a Romantic fantasy, so shall you change the liturgy, the church, the works.  The latter is how the novus ordo and all the rest came to be, first in the Catholic Church and then in other churches or parts thereof who adopt and adapt it.  The former is the ongoing effect once the latter has become the norm.  And the greatest irony here of all is that this is entirely inconsistent with and false to the much vaunted idea of a body, which does not stay the same but grows, the same organism in later stages as in earlier ones, the same person at seven as at seventy, who at seventy does not jump back to seven but moves forward in organic continuity, and as the body of Christ has the guarantee that even the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. 

In the case of the mystical body of Christ this organic growth is both promised and guaranteed by Jesus (lo, I am with you always etc.) through the Holy Spirit.  Which is why there was, and is, a Babylonian Captivity but not a Babylonian Extinction, why real liturgical reform proceeds within the organic continuity of the Body of Christ, the Church, as our Confessions state, normed by what is inconsistent with Scripture not with a Romantic C19 fantasy about a distant past.

It's bad enough that for Catholics Vatican II makes normative exactly what Pius XII in Mystici corporis, Mediator Dei and for that matter Humani generis showed to be dangers to and dissent from Catholicism, and presents a contemporary pastiche that looks traditional, being made up of this and that from here and there, something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue (literally, in the case of Advent), but actually is anything but traditional and dismisses three-fourths of the elapsed development of the body of Christ the Church.  But that is their problem.

Our problem is when we follow suit and likewise, without meaning to or even recognising it, we incorporate this intended break with the Church's organic development in which our Confessions so proudly demonstrate we stand, by adopting and adapting the novus ordo pastiche model of a lex orandi that is quite at odds with our confessed lex credendi, thus no less than the cowo crowd trying to infuse Lutheran content into a concept of worship not meant to contain it. 

In this way is our lex credendi subtly altered and compromised.  Novus ordo?  Bogus ordo.  Sacrosanctum concilium?  Sacrorectal concilium.  Better that we stand with our Lutheran principles of reform, within the organic development of the church, the body of Christ, preserving the usual ceremonies, for the most part similar to the ones previously in use, and for the sake of good order in the church retaining the traditional lectionary. 

Monday, September 30, 2024

St Jerome. 30 September 2024.

Now here's a hell of a guy.

Let's start where I started, long ago in a galaxy far far away -- by which I mean, the preconciliar Roman Catholic Church.  There's been lots of councils to be pre- to, here and now it means the last one, pre-Vatican II.

The Jerome Of My Younger Days.

Here's what I recall from those days. We used an official Bible in Latin, and our English versions were made from the Latin, and that Latin Bible was the Latin translation of St Jerome, often called the Vulgate. Vulgate?  What's that, looks like vulgar, something dirty in it?  No, the name comes from the Latin word for ordinary people, vulgus, since the translation was into the language of ordinary people there and then, Latin. Protestants didn't use the Vulgate. They had the King James Bible, translated from Hebrew and Greek, not translated from a translation into Latin, therefore, they claimed, more accurate.

Not so, we were told, or at least I remember being told. St Jerome, for one thing, was a saint, a term not at least as yet applicable to modern Biblical scholars. And, he was much closer in time to the Biblical, particularly the New Testament, authors, which meant his understanding of the languages was more immediate and not from scholarly studies centuries later. And also, he worked from better sources than we have, including texts that no longer exist. Therefore, in using Jerome's Latin Bible, we are using a source altogether more trustworthy than the much later sources and scholarship of the Protestant Bible translations.

The Historical Jerome versus The Jerome Of Faith.

What's ironic is, while famous in our day for translating the Bible into the dominant language of the people of his place and time, in his own day Jerome was highly controversial not for translating but for the text from which he translated.  He used the Hebrew text of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, but the Jewish translation into Greek called the Septuagint was considered the normative and inspired text for centuries, going back to the Greek-speaking early church.  The New Testament quotes the Old Testament from the Greek, and its longer canon (list of books) was the basis for the Old Testament canon.

We still have echoes of that controversy now, the so-called Apocrypha.  The Septuagint has books and parts of books in it that the Hebrew Bible doesn't.  Bibles of Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox origin retain the use of the Septuagint as the basis of their Old Testament, Bibles of Protestant origin use the Hebrew Canon.  Nobody put anything in or took anything out, they just use different but related sources.  The Septuagint was accepted by the proverbial "early church" and Jerome was going against the grain to favour the Hebrew canon and text rather than the Greek.

Even so, the books in dispute were not rejected altogether, but placed in between an OT of the 39 books of the Hebrew Bible and the 27 of the NT, and given the name Apocrypha, from the Latin aprocryphus which transliterated the Greek apokruphos, which means obscure or hidden.  In this context, obscure was not about being "lost books" or anything, it was about their canonicity and use for doctrine.  Those who accept their canonicity call them deuterocanonical, from the Greek for second canon, meaning added later to the canon.  But in neither case, not Jerome, not Luther, not the King James Version, were they discarded altogether and not published, as has been the innovation in recent times of non-Catholic Bibles.

Another enduring echo of that controversy is that while the Hebrew Bible is arranged in three distinct parts, namely Law, Prophets and Writings, the Septuagint is not, and though many Bibles now use the Hebrew Bible as the OT, the book order has the Prophets and Writings mixed to-gether as in the Septuagint rather than retaining the three-part division of the Hebrew Bible.

Actually though, Jerome was controversial for a hell of a lot more than that and was run out of Rome!  Holy crap, people jumped all over Jimmy Swaggart for getting caught with a prostitute, but that ain't nuttin compared to Jerome's story. Here it is.

Jerome was born a pagan in a town called Stridon, which was in the Roman territory called Dalmatia.   The town no longer exists because the Goths trashed it in 379, and no-body knows exactly where it was, except that it was in Dalmatia, which was more or less modern Croatia and Bosnia and Slovenia.  As a young man he went to Rome to pursue classical education, and by his own account pursue the various extra-curricular activities often found in student life then as now. Somewhere along the line he converted to Christianity and was baptised.

After some years in Rome he set out for France, well, Gaul then, and ended up in Trier, which is about the most magnificent and enchanting place it has been my good fortune to visit, ever, anywhere. But I digress.  Here in this most wonderful place he seems to have taken up theology. Then about 373 or so he sets out for what is now called the Middle East, particularly Antioch, in what is now Turkey and one of the oldest centres of Christianity. It was there that he came to give up secular learning altogether and focus on the Bible, learning Hebrew from Jewish Christians, and, apparently seized with remorse for his past behaviour, got into all sorts of ascetic penitential practices. Always a danger -- the Good News just isn't good enough or news enough, gotta have works!

The Ladies' Ear Tickler Enters the Story.

But in 382 he goes back to Rome again, this time as assistant to Pope Damasus I. Now there's another hell of a guy. Man, papal elections just ain't what they used to be.  Once upon a time, they were a matter of the clergy and people of the area choosing a bishop, or overseer, with overseers from nearby areas confirming it. But by this time we have Constantine, and Christianity attaining respectable state-recognised status, and now the Emperor confirmed newly elected bishops. That's helpful, sorta, because sometimes more than one guy claimed to be elected, sometimes in more than one election!

So when Pope Liberius, whom the Emperor Constantine had thrown out of Rome, died on 24 September 366, one faction supported Ursinus, the previous pope's deacon, while another, which had previously supported a rival pope, Felix II, supported Damasus. The patrician class, the old noble families of Rome, supported Damasus, but the plebian class, the regular folks, and the deacons supported Ursinus. Each was elected, in separate elections. Some real "apostolic succession" there, oh yeah.

It gets worse. There was outright rioting between supporters of the two, each side killing the other, so bad that the prefects of the city had to be called on to restore order. Damasus got formally recognised, and then his supporters commenced a slaughter of 137 of Unsinus' supporters, right in a church. Damasus was accused of murder, and hauled up on charges before a later prefect, but, being the favourite of the wealthy class, they bought the support of the Emperor and got Damasus off. He was known as Auriscalpius Matronarum, the ladies' ear scratcher.

Damasus was "pope" from 366 until he died on 11 December 384. During which time, we have to remember to really get what was going on here, the Emperors East and West made the church as headed by Damasus in Rome, and Peter in Antioch, the official state church and the one recognised as "catholic", in the Edict of Thessalonica on 27 February 380, the birthday of the Catholic Church, as distinct from the catholic church. It was during Damasus' papacy that the Emperor Gratian, one of the signatories to the Edict of Thessalonica, refused the traditional title of pontifex maximus, the chief priest of traditional Roman religion, and the title then became associated with the bishop of Rome as the chief priest of the new Roman state religion. In sum, this is the era of the beginning of the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (Babylon of course being a figure for Rome).

Back to the Historical Jerome.

So in 382, when Damasus calls Jerome back to Rome to help him shape things up, what was being shaped up was the two-year-old Catholic Church, the new official state religion, which by Imperial edict was the only church entitled to the description "catholic"  (whole, complete, entire, universal), or even the name "church".  All others were defined as truly demented and insane, heretics and, since God's gonna kick their butt, deserving of such punishment as the Empire should choose to inflict.

What, am I up to my usual Catholic bashing?  No, it's what the text says -- Hanc legem sequentes Christianorum catholicorum nomen iubemus amplecti, reliquos vero dementes vesanosque iudicantes haeretici dogmatis infamiam sustinere 'nec conciliabula eorum ecclesiarum nomen accipere', divina primum vindicta post etiam motus nostri quem ex caelesti arbitro sumpserimus ultione plectendos.  The Western Roman Empire at this time was starting to fall apart and was just decades away from totally falling apart, so a lot of this had to do with trying to prevent that.

Jerome was no slouch at matronly ear tickling himself, and once back in Rome soon had a little group of wealthy patrician widows around him, whose money supported him, a Paula in particular. And he had this ascetic works-righteousness thing going, into which he got them all. Nothing like having lots of someone else's money to support you if you want a monastic ascetic life. Hell yes.

In fact, the daughter of Paula, a lively young woman named Blaesilla, after just four months of having to live this way, died of it! Yeah, died. On top of which Jerome tells Paula not to mourn her daughter. This got the Romans really upset, there was an inquiry into just what was really going on between Jerome and Paula, and then Damasus dies, and with that support gone, Jerome is forced out of Rome.

So where's he go? Where else, the Eastern Empire, where they really get into all this monkery and fasting and stuff. Paula and her money follow. The whole sham of a works-based sparse life funded by patrician wealthy-class money. There's some real apostolic stuff for you. Lemme tell ya, if somebody wants to convince you of their mistaking the physiological effects of self induced glucose denial for some sort of spiritual state of attainment, you'd be better off running right to the nearest McDonald's and ordering a double quarter pounder, which, if memory serves, is combo 4 on the menu.

Personally I like our Nebraska favourite Runza better, which also makes a helluva burger, and it's Wolgadeutsch too, but being a regional chain may not be available where you are.  But I digress.  Happens.  Part of the fun of reading this blog.  Back to the story.

This sort of stuff is not self-denial, it's life denial. Utterly pathological. It is no curb whatever to excess and greed, but is rather an equally odious extreme reaction to it, both extremes equally devoid of the Gospel altogether. It comes rather from an empire about to collapse under both the tension within, its classic past and Christian present and efforts to reconcile them with huge civil unrest in its wake, and threats from without, in the West. Which was bad enough, but in the East it did not collapse for another thousand years or so, and continued unabated, which is equally bad. The opposite of greed and excess is not this pathological repression, but Judas H Priest, just eat a normal balanced diet and go about a life of use to God and your fellow Man, stay in your parish where you find everything that made the saints saints, the Word, the Word preached, the Sacrament, and your fellow Christians.

The Word of the Lord Endures Forever -- Despite the "Church".

Well, it would also be about a thousand years or so until THAT message got out, something called the Lutheran Reformation, by a fellow survivor of the remnants of all this nonsense, guy named Martin Luther. Sorry if this stuff isn't in the sanitised reductive biographical sketches that turn up in treasuries of prayer and stuff like that, but them's the facts. It's a disgusting pagan mess, massacres, murders, politics, scandals and all, and from the time of Jerome's life on, was the official religion of the state, held to be right from the Apostles, which remained in the East, and remained in the West after it reconstituted itself as the Holy Roman Empire, and remains to this day in the former state churches that survive these empires.

This is the world of Augustine, Jerome, Damasus, etc -- the Western Roman Empire, which contains Rome, once the centre of the whole thing, in utter turmoil between its classic philosophy, art, culture and religion and the new religion, in attendant civil turmoil, and under assault from Germanic forces outside it. The sack of Rome came in 410, 24 August to be exact, by Alaric, King of the Visigoths. The efforts to synthesise Rome's past and present failed utterly to preserve Rome. But it created a state religion which survived the death of the state that created it, and became the one remaining link upon which the new state would be built, the Holy Roman Empire.  It survives to this day: in the West as the Roman Catholic Church as well as other once-Catholic state churches, some of them with the word Lutheran in them, most having now severed or softened the once-mandatory connexion to their modern states, and in the East as the various Eastern Orthodox churches.

And all of it based entirely on the characteristics of that age, not in the least on the Gospel, as a dying empire tried to redefine itself for survival -- hence "true" churches, "apostolic succession", "bishops" who were as well state officials and political powers, and all the other nonsense by which the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches try to justify themselves and their pagan accretions which would hold the catholic church in captivity until the Lutheran Reformation.  The need for such a reformation was so strong amid all this horse dung and bullroar that once it happened later "reforms" blew right past the Lutheran Reformation to an opposite but equally bad extreme, which to-day but not originally travels under the name Protestant or, in the US, Evangelical.

So we have a pope supported by the wealthy Roman class in their twilight who kills his opponents and becomes by edict of the Emperor the true recipient of the true faith, and a holy man whose "I'd better inflict all this on myself" asceticism is funded by more wealthy Roman class money, which kills the daughter of his main supporter and disgusts even the Romans.

So what do we do then, forget about all this as an unholy mess we can ignore and just get back to the Bible, the "New Testament" church? No. And hell no. Judas H Priest, the New Testament church did not have the New Testament as we have it, so how ya gonna do that? You ain't.

Because here's the thing, the Babylonian Captivity was just that, a captivity, not an extinction. The catholic church survived and continues to survive even the invention of the Catholic Church by the Roman Empire. And why is that? Because of the truth expressed in the motto of the Lutheran Reformation, which motto is simply Scripture itself, from both the New and Old Testament, specifically I Peter 1:25 which itself quotes Isaias 40:8.

VDMA. Verbum Domini manet in aeternum. The Word of the Lord endures forever. It cannot be overcome, and on its central truth about Jesus Christ is built the church against which the gates of hell itself cannot prevail, let alone the Roman Empire. It can survive power mongers like Damasus and pathological lunatics like Augustine and Jerome.

The Word of the Lord Endures Forever -- Despite Translators.

Particularly Jerome.  Even though it's the work of a nut case whose nuttiness was fatal and whose supposed self-denial was based on the wealth of others, Jerome's new Latin translation did do two major things.  1) It established a better text of the Bible in the most widely understood language of its time, which remained key in the availability of the Bible for centuries to come, as Latin became the language of learning.  2) It introduced to a thoroughly Gentilised Christianity, who had the barest of understanding of the Jewish faith that Christianity fulfills, and who had instead replaced such an understanding with reworkings in Christian dress of their own classic philosophy, a more Jewish understanding of the texts, admired to this day by Jews.  Not to mention the Hebrew itself.

Not only that, but Jerome set in motion a tradition of selections from Scripture for reading at the preaching part of the Divine Service which would continue for about 1,500 years, and still continues as what we now call the "historic" lectionary. And why is it "historic"?  Because it's, well, old, you know, historic?  Hell no. Because there's another one now, a product in the 1960s of part of the church still in Babylonian Captivity from its last council, Babylon II, er, Vatican II, and widely adapted by wannabes.

The Western Roman Empire, under its new Germanic leaders, managed after a few hundred years known as the Dark Ages to more or less reconstitute itself as the Holy Roman Empire, and the old state church of the old Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, was right there to take its place in the reconstituted Roman Empire. Some consider the HRE to have begun with the coronation -- by the "pope" of course -- of Charlemagne, Karl der Grosse, in 800, as Emperor of the Romans, and some consider it to have begun with the coronation -- by the "pope" of course -- of Otto on 2 February 962. But in any case it lasted for about another 1,000 years, and formally ended on 6 August 1806 at the hands of Napoleon.  The deposed last HRE, Francis II, however continued as Francis I, Emperor of Austria. That makes Francis (Franz actually) the only Doppelkaiser in history.  Huh?   Kaiser, that's a Germanisation of guess what, Caesar. Doppel is double.

But by about 100 years after that, the underpinnings of the Roman Catholic Church seemed even to many within it as wearing a bit thin, the Roman Empire being long gone and now the Holy Roman Empire being long gone too, and movements began in various circles, some Scriptural, some doctrinal, some liturgical, to re-express this whole deal in terms not so connected to things long gone.  So they set about coming up with something more attuned to the existentialism and phenomenology then all the rage.

A small example of that, but symptomatic of the large examples, is the Exultet prayer in the Easter Vigil liturgy.  It ends with a prayer for the Holy Roman Emperor, which although that part had not been said since the last HRE, Franz II mentioned above, quit in 1806, it was not removed from the Exultet until 1955 as part of Pope Pius XII's massive revision of the Holy Week liturgy.

The Word of the Lord Endures Forever -- Despite "the Church".  Again. 

So once again, just as in the time of Jerome, Augustine, Damasus, et al, we have an entity trying to preserve itself by merging its past with its present and future of a different origin. But this time, that past was itself exactly the product of what was once the different origin the last time around. IOW, both that church's Empires, Roman and Holy Roman, were gone and now their church had to go it alone in another emerging new world, and once again it sought to reinvent itself as a synthesis, hybrid, reconciliation, something like that, of the two. This culminated at Vatican II, when the old Imperial church reinvented itself for a new post-Imperial age.

Problem is, as we saw, the old Imperial church was just that, the old Imperial church, not the catholic church or the church of Jesus Christ, so one of the two elements being synthesised into the new synthesis was itself a previous synthesis of Christianity and the old empire. The proponents of this movement thought Christianity, the catholic church, the church of Jesus Christ, to be re-emerging after centuries of being obscured, jumping over centuries to before Constantine, but in fact it was being yet further obscured; the Babylonian Captivity in which they were still captive deepened, only re-expressed in terms of the new Babylon that no longer had it as its church, or had a church at all, so it seemed new.

We shall see in our post for 11 October, from an address by one of its architects and champions, this overriding essential idea of a reversal of corrupting influences since Constantine.  It sounds good, very good.  Almost sounds like us talking about the Babylonian Captivity!  It isn't.  Why?  For one thing, all its points were made, prior to the council and with no need for a council to be called, by Pope Pius XII, particularly in his encyclicals Mystici corporis Christi (The Mystical Body of Christ, 29 June 1943), Mediator Dei (Mediator of God, on liturgical reform, 20 November 1947) and Humani generis (Of the human race, 12 August 1950).

While RC apologists love to proclaim Vatican II as in harmony with these and bringing them to fruition, this is false.  As if that were not clear enough in the documents themselves, in which the things against which Pius warned as threats to and dissension from Catholicism became normative Catholicism, it is quite clear in the many theologians censured in the wake of these encyclicals (de Lubac, Congar et al.) who became the movers and shakers at Vatican II.

For another, the notion that before Constantine there was some sort of pure unified church from which we deviated and to which we can return is nothing more than a Romantic fiction akin to Rousseau's "noble savage".  This pure early church was in fact a bleeding mess, as is evident from St Paul's epistles through the Patristics (the "fathers"; theologians from roughly 100 to 450 or to 787, the year of the Second Council of Nicaea, the last council recognized by both the Eastern and Western Church).  One sees an amazing spectrum of widely divergent ideas of who Christ is and what Christianity is, which only appears pure and unified through the self-selective lens they think they are discarding of the very Trinitarian Christianity toward whose triumph over the others Constantine contributed.

For yet another, a body grows.  It is not the same at 70 years as it is at 7 years or 7 months, and if it has gotten off course in its later years, correction from that does not consist in returning to what it was in earlier years.  A 70 year old does not become a 7 year old again, discarding everything.  As regards the contributions of Jerome, a reform based on this is simply nothing more than the "exaggerated and senseless antiquarianism", which has since come to be called "liturgical archaeology", against which Pius XII warned (Mediator Dei 64) as he encouraged lay participation. 

In this way it only superficially resembled, with such things as vernacular languages and free standing altars, the real reformation of the church, which had happened nearly five centuries before!  They think they addressed what we did in the Babylonian Captivity but missed entirely the nature of what we did.  And so the Whore of Babylon thoroughly remodelled the brothel, with a new order of liturgy (yeah, literally, a novus ordo) complete with new calendar of observances and new lectionary of readings, replacing the one that had grown for centuries.

Now that's not surprising, that's what you do when you're the Whore of Babylon, and the Babylon that formed you and kept you as its whore is gone and there is a new Babylon.

But these "reforms" came about on an entirely different basis than the reforms of the Lutheran Reformation, which did not run from the march of history nor wish to discard or disparage it, for all its warts and blemishes, did not seek to reverse or jump back over centuries of development, as if the Holy Ghost took a nap for some 1,600 years, did not engage in liturgical archaeology, but instead accepted it and moved on, not reinventing anything but consciously maintaining continuity, as the Augsburg Confession takes great pains to point out, discarding only that which contradicted Scripture but otherwise retaining the ceremonies and readings previously in use.

The difference between, and essential incompatibility between, Lutheran liturgical reform and Catholic liturgical reform is more fully treated in our post for 25 June on the presentation of the Augsburg Confession.

What is surprising now is that the churches of the Reformation generally, and even those of the Lutheran Reformation, jumped on board with this Roman insanity, took the novus ordo and revised and reworked their own versions of it! So now we have an "historic" lectionary right alongside a Vatican II For Lutherans Lutheranised version of this novus ordo.  We even lead the Whore herself in this regard, because we didn't have to wait a generation or so for a Roman Imperial official with only the church of the former state left -- a "pope", in case you were wondering -- to say it's OK with a motu proprio! And then his immediate successor reverses it.  Utter madness.

Conclusion.

So on this feast of St Jerome, let us remember that, you know what, he really was closer to the authors and sources of the Bible than our vaunted modern scholars working removed by centuries, and really did, nut case and all, contribute to the church, which even he and his contemporaries and times and subsequent times could put in captivity but not extinction, a thing of great value in the Vulgate Bible and the tradition of the historic lectionary.

And let us remember that the Reformation has already happened and not at all on the basis that fuelled Babylon II, er, Vatican II.  We continue as the catholic church where the Word is rightly proclaimed and the Sacraments rightly administered, no new faith, no new doctrine, no new anything, and sure as hell no new orders of worship based on the scholarship emerging from the dissolution, not just politically but in every way, of the Holy Roman Empire, in which Roman effort there is no "hermeneutic of continuity" whatever but a pathetic old whore trying to still work the streets.  With us it is rather the organic continuity of the catholic church normed by its very own book, the Bible, rejecting only what contradicts it.

Sunday, September 29, 2024

St Michael's Day / Michaelmas / Michaelistag 29 September 2024.

This was a pretty big day for centuries.  So why was that and why don't we hear much about it now?  That's what this post is about, and in finding out we'll see lots of ways the feast has impacted modern life.  

It's not completely lost.  It's still contained in our LCMS calendar. Phillip Melanchthon even wrote a poem for the day which became a hymn, "Lord God, To Thee We Give All Praise", which is "Dicimus grates tibi summe rerum" in his Latin original --  yes, Latin.  We still have that too.  It's hymn 254 in The Lutheran Hymnal, or, I suppose it won't hurt to say, 522 in LSB.

Here's why the big deal.  

Michael in the Bible.

Michael is one of the angels, and is mentioned by name in three books of the Bible, Daniel, Jude and Revelation aka the Apocalypse. His name means in Hebrew "Who is like God?"

In Daniel, Gabriel, another leading angel, tells Daniel that Michael is his helper in defending the Jews, wrt Daniel's prayer that the Jews be able to return to Jerusalem (Daniel 10).  That return (and much else) is covered earlier this month in the post Temples, Taxes, Vespasian and Now.  Later in the Book of Daniel (chapter 12) Michael is identified as he who stands up for "the sons of thy people", the Jews, who will do so in the final battle at the end of time. This is the only time Michael is mentioned by name in the Hebrew Bible.

It is not the only time he appears, depending on to whom you listen. Some say he is the "captain of the host of the Lord" in the Book of Josue, or Joshua, 5:13-15, but some say this cannot be since he accepted worship and only God can do that. So then some say the figure was actually a disguised appearance of God himself, and then some others say (like my historical-critical Scripture profs in college) that that is what "angels" are anyway, not separate beings but muted references to God himself, out of piety so Man can withstand the interaction.

Rabbinic tradition variously credits him with being the angel 1) who rescued Abraham from Nimrod's furnace, 2) who protected Sarah from being defiled as Abraham's sister as Abraham tried to protect her by calling his sister and not wife, 3) who told Sarah she would have a son, 4) who brought the ram provided by God for Abraham to substitute for that son Isaac in sacrifice, 5) who was the angel who wrestled with Jacob, 6) who was the angel who spoke to Moses in the burning bush and later taught Moses the Law, on and on, also including references in writings not in the Hebrew Bible such as protecting Adam and Eve after the Fall and teaching him how to farm.

This role of protector and defender was passed on to the early Christian church, among so much else in Judaism, and not just in these stories, he is mentioned twice in the New Testament.

In the Letter of Jude, verse 9, he argues with Satan over Moses' body, also a Jewish theme, keeping Moses' body hidden so reverence would be directed to God and not misplaced hero worship, something which crept into that church anyway as saint veneration and relics. In the Book of Revelation, or The Apocalypse, chapter 12, Michael is given a similar role in the last battle at the end of time as he had in the revolt of the angels in heaven at the beginning, as military leader of the forces of good.

Michael in Later Stories.

There are many other legends of Michael's intervention on behalf of Christians in history, of which we will mention two as particularly noteworthy. He is said to have worked with the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, and a celebration on 8 November became the main feast of St Michael in the Eastern Church. Also he is said to have appeared over the mausoleum of Emperor Hadrian in Rome to answer the prayers of Pope St Gregory the Great in 950 that a plague in Rome stop, after which the mausoleum, destroyed by the Visigoths and Goths but rebuilt as a papal fort and residence, was called Castel Sant'Angelo, Church of the Holy Angel, the angel being Michael, and is still there to-day with a HUGE statue of St Michael on top of it.

It was later connected by a fortified covered passage, the Passeto di Borgo, to St Peter's Basilica by Pope Nicholas II (pope from 25 November 1277 to 22 August 1280), to provide an escape route for the popes, which turned out handy for Pope Clement VII.

Now there's a story!  Clement had allied with French forces to offset the power of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, he to whom the Augsburg Confession was presented, and Charles' army had defeated them in Italy. However, there was no money to pay the soldiers, and it is never ever a good idea to mess with military payroll then, now, or ever. In this case, the troops figured well hell, there's all these riches in Rome, let's go there and take them if we're not going to get paid, which is exactly what they did, about wiping out the Swiss Guards on 5/6 May 1527, the "Sack of Rome". Clement made it out to Castel Sant'Angelo but became a prisoner there and eventually surrendered on 6 June.

Neither the HRE Charles nor Martin Luther approved of this, but it did have the practical effect of curbing papal power over the Holy Roman Empire, with a lot of money and land changing hands. Luther saw Christ's providence in this, or at least a great irony, saying that the Emperor who persecuted the Lutheran Reformation for the Pope ends up himself having to destroy the Pope. Might just be something to that. To commemorate the fight put up by the Swiss Guards, new ones have their swearing-in on 6 May to this day.

The Passeto and Castel sant'Angelo still exist, the latter now as an Italian national museum.  Not surprisingly, so much intrigue having played out in it historically, it is the headquarters of the "Illuminati" in the fictional "Angels and Demons", a recent movie by Dan Brown of da Vinci Code fame.

St Michael has thus become the patron of guardians of various kinds, from policemen to the sick. Western church writings speak of his feast from at least the 6th century, and other observances based on other appearances and legends arose elsewhere. But 29 September as the Feast of St Michael is among the oldest observances in the Western calendar.

The Feast of St Michael the Archangel, and All Angels.

Why is that? Not to mention, how is that? For feast days, the custom in the church is to take the date of a saint's death, that being the day he was born to eternity as it were, as his feast day, or if that is unknown, the date of something else he did or is associated with him. Now Michael being an angel and all, didn't die, so it can't be his date of death, so what is that something else?

Here's what. The feast isn't actually the Feast of St Michael, but the Feast of the Dedication of the Basilica of St Michael. The Leonine Sacramentary, from the Sixth Century (the 500s) gives a Feast of the Birth of the Basilica of the Angel on the way to Salaria.  The Gelesian Sacramentary, from the Seventh Century, gives a Feast of St Michael the Archangel, but both of these were on 30 September. Then in the Eighth Century, the Gregorian Sacramentary gives a Feast of the Dedication of the Basilica of St Michael the Archangel, but puts it on 29 September, which is when they had a vigil for the dedication.

That's just as well -- gonna need 30 September for the Feast of St Jerome, who died on that day in 420. So we have a feast on 29 September of the dedication of a church to St Michael, howdya like that? Two things about that. For one thing, "church", didn't it say basilica, what the hell is a basilica? A basilica originally was not a church at all, but a meeting place for merchants and mercantile justice, but as they were pretty nice big buildings, they got taken over as churches, with the state Catholic Church and all, and later such churches were called basilica from the get-go.

For another, the specific basilica whose dedication established the feast on 29 September hasn't existed for over a thousand years! One thing's for sure though. 29 September sure in the hell ain't what Vatican II made of it in the novus ordo, where it's now the Feast of Michael, Gabriel and Rafael.  Utter revisionist bullroar. 29 September has been about Michael, and the whole company of angels by extension, since it started, and even if the basilica disappeared a thousand years ago, why in the hell a thousand years later does the Whore of Babylon mess with it?

Because that's what the Whore of Babylon does, mess with things. Gabriel has his own feast day, which is 24 March, and in the Eastern church his day is 8 November in the Julian Calendar, which is 21 November in the Gregorian Calendar, and he has two other days as well (26 March and 13 July if you wanna know, the first for his role in the Annunciation and the other for all his other stuff). Rafael has his own feast day too, which is 24 October.

It's interesting the both these feasts were only put in the General Roman Calendar in 1921, however, in the sanctoral calendars at lexorandi.org, the 1731 Lutheran Almanac, on the 200th Anniversary of the Presentation of the Augsburg Confession, has Gabe's but not Rafe's, and "The Calendar", which I believe is Loehe's, has Rafe's but not Gabe's.  My "Manual of Prayers", ordered prepared by the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore with Imprimatur 17 May 1889 by James Cardinal Gibbons no less (it was my dad's, I'm old but not that old), has Rafe on 24 October and Gabe but on 18 March, so 1921 didn't start anything but standardised it for Rome.

To its credit, among the many things to its credit, The Lutheran Hymnal -- you know, THE Lutheran Hymnal -- doesn't jack around with any of that, but simply retains The Feast of St Michael and All Angels, and to its credit, Lutheran Service Book, while it does often follow the novus ordo model of jacking around with stuff, doesn't jack around with this one. And given that the dedication thing has kind of lost its significance, the basilica being dedicated being gone a millennium now, it's still worth mentioning since originally that is why 29 September.

And yes, it's kind of like an All Angels Day too. Which is just fine. St Michael being the commander of the angelic forces, like any good commander, he doesn't forget his men.

Michaelmas the Quarter Day.

We ain't done! Michaelmas has all sorts of stuff attached to it. For one thing, Michaelmas is also one of the four Quarter Days in Mother England: Lady Day 25 March, Midsummer Day 24 June, Michaelmas 29 September, Christmas 25 December.

What the hell is a Quarter Day? These are four days roughly equivalent to the two equinoxes and two solstices, when business and legal dealings need to be settled -- rents and bills are due (the rent thing is still often followed in England), judges had to visit outlying areas to make sure no matters go on unresolved, servants and labourers are hired so employment isn't up in the air, stuff like that. This is big stuff, coming from the Magna Carta itself of 1215, when the barons secured against the king, John at the time, the principle that no-one's right to justice will be sold, denied, or delayed.

Ever gone to a job fair resume in hand to meet prospective employers? You're right in the tradition of Michaelmas! At harvest's end, on the day after Michaelmas labourers would assemble in the towns for just that purpose with a sign of the work they do in their hands to get employment for the next year. Such events came to be called Mop Fairs, from those seeking employment as maids showing up with a broom in hand, like a resume to show the prospective employer what work they could do.

Pay your taxes due in April? You're right in the tradition of the Quarter Days! Lady Day was the first day of the calendar year until the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1752, and when taxes were due. The English tax year still starts on "Old" Lady Day, 6 April.  "Old"?  Read on; there's an "old" Michaelmas too.

Btw, the lady in Lady Day is Jesus' mother Mary, and the day is more widely known as the Feast of the Annunciation, commemorating the announcement by Gabriel to Mary that if she consented she would bear Jesus, nine months before his birth 25 December. And re calendars, Julian refers to Julius Caesar who set the old calendar, and Gregorian refers to Pope St Gregory who modified it into what we use to-day.

"Old" Michaelmas and New Calendars. 

In England, the modified more accurate Gregorian calendar was adopted in 1752, and on 3 September in the old Julian Calendar the date became 14 September in the new Gregorian calendar. Many were confused by this, thinking they had lost 11 days of their lives, leading to protests in the streets. Michaelmas was the first big deal to happen after the change, leading some to say that since we lost 11 days, Michaelmas is really 10 October in the new calendar, which is then "Old" Michaelmas Day.

A lot of the resistance to the Gregorian calendar came from it being done by a pope. It was actually the work of Aloysius Lilius.  Whozat?  An Italian mathematician and astronomer who did the essential work of correcting the drift of the Julian calendar.  The year in the Julian calendar is 11 minutes shorter than a year actually is, so over the centuries the date of the March equinox isn't on the March equinox, for example, which throws off when Easter is along with everything else.  Christmas in July indeed!  The church needed to fix this.

Lilius' work, with some tweaking by Christopher Clavius, a German Jesuit mathematician, was proposed to the papal commission in charge of calendar reform in 1575.  Gregory made it official on 24 February 1582 in the papal bull "inter gravissimas". It's named as is the custom in many places from its first couple of words, which here mean "among the most serious", and changing to the new calendar was taken in many Protestant countries as a deference to papal power.

More musty stuff from me that can be left in the must?  Yeah well it's why we have the calendar in world-wide use now.  And also, in computer science there is the Lilian Date, named after Lilius, which is used to calculate the number of days between any two dates since the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar on 15 October 1582.  The Lilian Date was invented at IBM by Bruce G. Ohms in 1986 and is used in the date conversion routines in IBM's LE (language environment) software.

And Clavius is quite a guy, twice over.  He started out thoroughly in the thinking of his time, the geocentric model of the universe, along with the theological addendum that since the Bible presents the universe in those terms, if it isn't in those terms then what can you believe the Bible about anyway and the faith falls apart (the issue another post here in September takes up).  Nonetheless, he saw there are problems with the Ptolemaic model though he opposed Copernicus.  Galileo respected him for that, and the two met in 1611 going over the observations now (then) possible with a telescope, and guess what, he changed his mind, and, didn't lose his faith.

Also, in logic, there is Clavius' Law, lex clavia in Latin, aka consequentia mirabilis, the admirable consequence.  So what's that?  It establishes that a proposition is true if its negation (opposite) is inconsistent.  There's two aspects to this.  If a statement is inconsistent then its opposite must be true, so, if a statement is inferred from its opposite being inconsistent that's the consequentia mirabilis, and if a statement itself is inconsistent then the inferred opposite will be true is the lex clavis.  Huh, gimme an example, never heard of it!

OK, heard of Descartes' famous cogito ergo sum (that's pronounced KO-jee-to btw), I think therefore I am?  There you go.  You might think the thinking is all messed up but there's no denying there was thinking itself, therefore a thinker.  Actually Aristotle said this long ago, in the Nicomachean Ethics (1170a25) and in the Protrepticus, which survives in fragments.  (Judas H, what's a protrepticus?  A protrepsis is a rhetorical exhortation to get you to think or live differently than you are, another word for which is paraenesis, though sometimes paraenesis is used to mean exhortation to continue thinking or living the way you are.)

Or how about this.  Someone says, there are no truth statements.  But for that to be true there must be truth statements.

Here's the consequentia mirabilis (lex clavia, Clavius' Law) in formal notation:
 is equivalent to .

Michaelmas, Curfews, Goose Dinners and Sheriffs.

We still ain't done!  For centuries, it was a holy day of obligation -- you gotta go to Mass. As the Germans were Christianised, St Michael took the place of Wotan, and you will find St Michael chapels in the mountains, previously sacred to Wotan, there to this day.  

Michaelmas was also the start of winter curfew, which lasts until Shrove Tuesday, with bells being rung at 2100 hours (that's 9pm) to signal the curfew, which is literally lights out, "curfew" meaning "cover the fire", put out the household fires and lamps.

Michaelmas is also called Goose Day, because goose is eaten for the meal, coming from the practice of those who couldn't pay their rent or bills on the Quarter Day offering a goose instead to the landlord. There's an old rhyme -- He who eats goose on Michaelmas Day, shan't money lack his debts to pay.

It also started the new term, Michaelmas term, at Oxford and Cambridge. Still does!

It is also the day when peasants on manors elected their new reeve. What the hell is a reeve? A serf elected by the other serfs to manage the land for the landowner nobleman, the lord. A reeve of an entire shire was a shire-reeve. What the hell is a shire? That's what counties were called in Mother England before the Norman Conquest, county being the name of the land controlled by a count in continental Europe where the damn Normans came from. Bunch of old stuff lost in history? Got a sheriff in your county? It's exactly why the chief law enforcement officer of your county is called a sheriff, a contraction over time of shire reeve, and why your county isn't called a shire.

Now.

So there's stuff from this all around our modern life. And now, maybe, one more. Back to the legends about St Michael, one of them is, when he kicked Satan out of heaven, which was on 29 September story goes, Satan fell to earth and landed in a bunch of blackberry thorns, which totally ticked him off so he cursed the fruit of the bush, stomped on them, breathed fire on them, spat on them and just generally went nuts. This curse renews every Michaelmas Day, so, what ever you do, DO NOT pick or eat blackberries after Michaelmas!

Which in our digital age opens a whole new question -- if you have a Blackberry phone, can you use it after Michaelmas Day?

Aren't saint's days just a riot? A little bit of something real -- there really is a St Michael the Archangel and he really is the military commander of God's forces, stands ready with all the faithful angels to help and protect you, and will function as such on the End Time -- and a whole lot of legend, leading to some pretty amazing history, both of which have left common elements large and small on life to-day.

Happy Michaelmas! And have some goose, but before 2100. And touch up that resume, if you're looking for a job. Been there and it's tough. Put your trust in God, in this and in all things; I mean who is like God, just like Michael's name means.  And, you got people -- and angels.