The Church of The Future

Yesterday's effusion for the nonexistent Feast of "Youth Sunday" was nowhere near as bad as it has sometimes been in recent years, not least because they had been given Newman as a theme, and because at least we stuck to the Lectionary and therefore also had several hymns for Christ the King.

It is always amusing to watch people, some of them not born until the very office of Prime Minister was held by some old hippy whose name escapes me, being put through these things by their grandparents because they are supposed to like it, on account of its being "youth". But this year, they showed signs of taking control for themselves. All to the good, say I. Our teenage prime movers yesterday came from a soundly Communion and Liberation family. Truly, the Church of the Future.

The canonisation of the post-1968 era, the heyday of pederasty, is as dangerous as the canonisation of, say, the 1950s, when the Church on this island produced scarcely more priests than She does today, having been content to import huge numbers of them from Ireland in order to create the continuing cultural expectation of the highest priests-to-people ratio in the world.

If anything even more perniciously, there are certain tendencies within some Eastern Catholic Churches. There is the widespread excision of filioque clause. There is a dangerous Christological imprecision in statements made jointly by Chaldean Catholics and by the Assyrian Church. There is the practice of "delatinisation': consider that Ukrainian Catholics must now have recourse to Lefebvrist bishops if they are to secure the ordination of priests prepared to continue Eucharistic Adoration, the Holy Rosary, and the Stations of the Cross.

And there is the increasing prevalence among the Melkites of the more-than-familiar concepts of a "bridge church" and of only the "Undivided Church" of the first millennium as normative and definitive. As orthodox Catholics have always reacted to those theories when professed by Anglo-Catholics, who are not necessarily recanting them by joining the Ordinariate, so orthodox Orthodox will react to them when professed by Melkites, who will negate their own position by caring as little as Anglo-Catholics have cared. But the Undivided Church still exists and has always existed, without interruption. The recognition of this fact was the basis of the Melkite, as of every other, unia. Is it the basis of the Ordinariate?

There is, however, nothing in the theory that the Maronites were once Monothelite. There are only two "arguments" ever advanced for it: that it was alleged by their bitterest opponents, and that the Maronites themselves believe that they have always held fast to Petrine Unity and to everything that it entails, as if their believing it about themselves meant that it must be false. In fact, Monothelitism is a recurring, baseless allegation against those who have been steadfast in Roman Orthodoxy, including the Holy See.