Saturday, February 19, 2011

Keep calm!

As Michael Winner might have said; 'Keep calm- it's only a commercial!' For readers outside the UK take my word for it. You're blessed not to have to have put up with that advertising campaign. Nevertheless there's a bit of a scuffle going on in that gold fish bowl called Traddieland. Apparently it's been brewing for a while but, having a bit of an ostrich approach to most things, I seem to have missed it until it began to blow, perhaps out of all proportion, in the last week. Even the usual suspects in the blogosphere seem to be polarised by it. A petition is doing the rounds. Actually it's a pretty interesting indicator on the blogs represented on the British Blogs List as to which ones are quite firmly pro Summorum Pontificum and which are not.

Anyhow back to the point. Three things; (1) The Roman Curia operates within itself in a manner that is rather 'secular' to minds outside its own circle.  There are factions who play each other off  using strategies drawn more from Machievelli's The Prince than the Fathers of the Church. I suspect at the moment we are the onlookers to a stage in a process that in former times we would have had no knowledge. Somebody must have given a minor official a laptop with a broadband connection for Christmas. (2) There is an 'industry' which maintains itself with this type of reporting and prognosticating. It is in its interests to maintain the interest in such events and its 'tat for tat' approach can be wearisome. Unfortunately for most of us this has the same effect as a lot of the secular media. It causes undue angst. (3) Whilst we need now to be vigilant we really need to wait for the document, should it ever appear, and then make a judgment as to the next course of action. I can't actually see it making any difference immediately to me.

Of course the whole business, I suspect, is just symptomatic of something else as is so often the case with the fripperies of  'curias' whether they be diocesan, national or international. I can't imagine any official effectively hanging himself out to dry over Summorum Pontificum. I can imagine, however, many who would risk doing  so to ensure that any further reconciliation with SSPX would not happen during this papacy.

Now where was my bucket of sand?

5 comments:

  1. 40 Days for Life is back. 9th March-17th April, London. We have a website, blog, twitter, and facebook. Please consider joining us if you are ever in London. We'd like it if you could add us to your blogroll, or even write a brief post sometime. Many thanks, 40DFL team.

    http://www.40daysforlife.com/london/

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  2. Could you explain what is going on, today is the first day I got wind of this, whatever this is.

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  3. btw, my wife simply loves your blog name.

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  4. Various sources are reporting that a document has been prepared which will limit some aspects of the use of the traditional liturgical books particularly the rite of ordination and the use of the rites of some of the older Religious orders.

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  5. If the Vatican must restrict diocesan ordination to the ordinary form rite only, it's worth it to keep the SSPX out of the Church.

    The SSPX is not the way forward for the traditional Church. Sure, the inclusion of the SSPX will boost numbers. This boost will come at the steep price of moral credibility. Some SSPX clergy have voiced very strong anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic hatreds. Is every single SSPX clergyman bigoted? Certainly not. Yet the SSPX's opposition to Dignitatis Humanae (and by extension Nostra Aetate) has often rested on a rank anti-Semitism that the institutional Church has taken great pains to atone for in recent years.

    Human justice trumps the desire to broaden the traditional community at any cost. We traditional Catholics can live the traditional life justly without a hate group cloaked as a religious order.

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