Ad Multos Annos

I have been at the Ordination and then at the First Mass of my dear friend, Fr Michael Patey, a glittering ornament of this blogroll. Friends old and new, splendid grazing and watering, superb liturgy, and a most reassuring encounter with the men of the Venerable English College in Rome, who were out in force for their erstwhile Senior Student.

Charmingly, he, a Maths graduate and sometime Maths teacher, still defers to me as a theologian. But I hold a dozen-year-old 2:1 in Theology from an historically Anglican secular university. Whereas he holds a newly conferred Roman STL. Specifically, it gladdens my Dominican heart to report, from the Angelicum. He must have forgotten more Theology than I have ever known. Yet somehow he cannot quite see it.

Today's seminarians are totally orthodox and possessed of deeply sound liturgical sense, as of course anyone now seeking to be ordained is bound to be. Who else would still be interested? Around half, possibly slightly more, are converts; Fr Michael and I became Catholics at the same time, and his father, a former Anglican clergyman, is also a priest, leading us to wonder quite how many of these legitimate father and son combinations there can have been in the Latin Church over the last thousand years. Very, very few.

For good or ill, but undeniably as a fact, there is a definite and pronounced middle-classness, even upper-middle-classness. If there is much in the way of what Americans call "white ethnic" background, then it is now Polish. But, for now, there is not very much even of that. (It was also notable that the Cathedral Choir at Northampton, in blue cassocks and full English surplices, was almost entirely black. Surplices for choirs and cottas for servers strike me as very much the way to go in these Islands.)

The age profile is generally younger than one might expect, with one man at Rome who is only just 20. In general, though, application is now via university, so that it is quite normal to be in formation for the diocese in which one's university was located, rather than one's parental home. These days, university circles are where even cradle Catholics encounter Catholic orthodoxy, whence spring vocations. They did not and do not encounter it at school.

The notorious unwholesomeness also seems to have become a thing of the past. Tagged on to Michael and his College mates on Friday evening at the pub next door to where they and I were staying, it occurred to me that the staff probably thought that we were a stag night, albeit a fairly restrained one. Luckily, they did not try anything accordingly. Michael was indeed acquiring a mother-in-law, of sorts, on Saturday. And not one of whom it pays to get on the wrong side. Least of all on Her Birthday.

Tu es sacerdos in æternum secundum ordinem Melchisedech.