Every seminary to be made to teach the Extraordinary Form? All right, so long as they teach it well. In any case, this sounds like the claim, made prior to the easing of restrictions on the Old Rite, that every parish was going to be made to offer it. What if they just hadn't? And what if seminaries just didn't teach it?
The Old Rite will always have a place in the life of the Church. But it has gone from most parishes. And based on what it was like in most parishes, those who love it and are concerned for it would not want it to have to be put on everywhere every day or every week, because it mostly would not be, as it mostly was not, put on very well. The people doing it at the moment are the people who really do care deeply about it. May that ever remain the case. But they surely cannot possibly imagine that it was like that at parochial level every Sunday, or even every day, before the Council. Sooner the Ordinary Form celebrated well than the Extraordinary Form celebrated badly.
Pointing out facts like these puts me in the bad books of certain traditionalists. But a number of emails and unpublishable comments have made it clear that they know who their real enemy is. They bitterly, bitterly resent the monopolisation of media coverage of the traditional Catholic position by a neoliberal neoconservative with an objectively disordered manner of life, who has merely identified a niche or a USP rather than being motivated by any particular conviction. They blame him for the total lack of any platform in this country for the traditional Catholic critiques of capitalism, of nuclear weapons, of the 1980s, of the Useful Idiots on the American Evangelical Right, of the American imperium, of the Zionist war against the indigenous Christians of the Holy Land and of the wider Middle East, and so on. Compared with that, they do not find me to be quite so bad.
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He knows nothing about theology and he has turned the Herald into a gay lifestyle magazine. The Latin Mass subculture in London has that side to it and he thinks that that is all there is to the Old Rite. The Herald would be fine if Luke were allowed to get on with it without him. As it is, it is exactly as you describe. The real issues cannot be discussed but the market has been cornered. Stuart Reid's survival on the back page is little short of miraculous and the only reason I or anybody else I know still reads the thing. They must know that which is why it is no longer online, in that case nobody would buy the paper.
ReplyDeleteI have said it before and I shall say it again, you should sue him. All right, so you were unpaid. But he still defamed you by acting on a the defamatory claim that you were not a tutor at Durham, a perfectly simple thing to check. He could open the door to a hail of gunfire from an Iraqi Chaldean or a Palestinian Melkite, but what good would that do you? He owes you. He owes you big.
ReplyDeleteWipe the dust from your feet. Concentrate on getting three or four heavyweight books out in the next two or three years. When the Herald fails to review them because of him, we can set the wheels in motion against him. You would not need to do a thing, it would be our pleasure.
ReplyDeleteI suppose you are right about the EF. My heart says you are wrong, but my head knows you are right.
And I thought that I was having a bad Lent...
ReplyDeleteho! Ho! HO!
ReplyDeleteDavid I have just started reading you blog & commented about the ECHR & Crucifixes in Italian schools. I gather that the individual being discussed in harsh terms here is Damian Thompson, editor of the Catholic Herald & the blogs section of the Daily Telegraph.
I have seen a a mention of Mr. Thompson's "objectively disordered" ways. I have no idea whether this is true but I can say that this is not the first time I have encountered the suggestion. There is a chap called Mondabour who makes this allegation & also a blog about "Mabel" online. Again I have no idea whether these allegations have any truth in them whatsoever & can only report what I have come across with a google search having first encountered the suggestion of "Objectively disordered" inclinations on the very comment pages of Mr. Thompson's "Holy Smoke" blog . I shall be keeping an eye out for any further developments.
The Mail has a great piece today exposing the sale of Papal knighthoods by Thompson's "friend", the egregious Blair courtier Fr Michael Seed. Seed is currently suspended from the Franciscans for an ordination anniversary party featuring dancing boys dressed as nuns. This wretched nexus is coming crashing down. When it does, there will be a space to fill with real Catholic orthodoxy. Yours will be a key voice. You will probably claim to have nothing to do with the mounting troubles of these people, to be 300 miles away and not in the best of health, and so on and so forth. But some of us have known you a long, long time, David Lindsay.
ReplyDelete