Sunday, Monday, Happy Days

The Happytudes are bearable now that we shall soon never hear them again. And ladies and gentlemen, that was the Synod. For another year, its satirically entitled summary report will be going out the ends of the Earth, but some of us have been here before. 25 years ago, and smugly assuming that their views were the consensus, members of the WASP elite on at least three continents invoked their nth generation club rights to demand that their church change to suit their specifications. They are still screeching abuse at the insolent colonial darkies who were having none of it.

Such Baby Boomers were then in their pomp rather than in their early dotage, and Western Europe, North America and the Antipodes had yet to feel the full effects of mass immigration from outside each other. In the coming months, their sociologically indistinguishable Catholic contemporaries from the same regions and from the whitest parts of Latin America, including Argentina, are going to have the same experience, but they will have it from a far weaker position at home no less than abroad. Meanwhile, the Western world is crying out for fidelity to the Magisterium, and is increasingly discovering it, only to be confronted instead with a "cultural Catholicism" that has little culture and no Catholicism.

But this Pope is already 86, and the Synod impudently defied the white, female, upper-middle-class Baby Boomers, accustomed to their own way without question, by not pulling the appointed rabbit out of the mitre. It turns out not to be the case that "women can be lawyers, therefore they can be priests", and to be irrelevant that "none of the Apostles was Italian or Irish, either". No, Saint Mary Magdalene was not an Apostle. No, women were not priests in the catacombs. No, there never was a Pope Joan. No, women never were ordained to the Diaconate; deaconesses were something else. No, your reading of Galatians 3:28 is preposterous. And no, the fantasies of Dr John Wijngaards belong in something by Dan Brown. All in all, no.

Tellingly, no one any longer says that, "There would be more priests." That totally non-theological argument has been disproved by the experience of the still or historically State Protestant bodies of Northern Europe, which at least theoretically retain the concept of ministry to the whole παροικία. Here in England, as elsewhere, several parishes routinely share a woman where they used to have a man each.

By the way, Anglicans who said that the ordination of women would lead to same-sex marriage were either screamed down or laughed out back in the day, including by Catholic supporters of women's ordination. But today, the two come as a package deal, and everyone recognises their pairing to be self-evident. Anyone who uses the term "LGBT" does not even know what a woman is, anyway. Again, though, that is just part of the deal these days. That preposterous reading of Galatians 3:28, indeed.

The Catholic Church is awash with vocations where She is characterised by accurate catechesis and by edifying liturgy, and proponents of such are even managing to slip through in Western Europe, North America and the Antipodes, as the only ordinations in those regions in the last 30 years, since before a few of those who were now being ordained were born. Those who firmly control the process in the West are aghast at the "conservatism" of younger priests, some of whom are now well into middle age.

But what else could they possibly have expected? They have defined themselves by their rejection of Humanae Vitae, and thus by having a birth rate far below replacement level, as well as by their ambivalence, at best, about the whole notion of conversion, and their very strong hostility to almost everyone who ever did convert. It is possible that they may have liked different converts, and that they still would, but my mind cannot boggle that far.

Thus have they defined themselves by being outbred by the people who did adhere to Humanae Vitae, as is manifest in every parish in the West while not being an issue in what are therefore the world's Catholic heartlands, and by taking no part in the steady stream of converts who are highly disproportionately likely to seek ordination, often but not always after having ministered elsewhere, to the point that there are dioceses in this country that would collapse without them.

Yes, some of them are married. The Church has always had married priests, with a certain number at every point in Her history; it is a pastoral decision how many there should be, and what they should be doing. The Church has never ordained women, because She cannot; the matter is not disciplinary, but doctrinal. Married or celibate, if priests in England are not yet more likely to be converts than to have done all 13 years of Catholic school, then that will very soon be the case.

And what of the ones who have put in those years? For all the curriculum time devoted to RE, Catholic schools have not taught doctrine in the lifetimes of more than half the population, people who have wanted to know it have always had to teach themselves, and that is now far easier to do. With their weekends and their holidays still sacrosanct, schools have taken to finishing in the early afternoon. Just as anyone with an Internet connection has plenty of time to read non-liberal political thought, non-liberal social and cultural commentary, and non-liberal economics, so he also has plenty of time to read non-liberal theology, and anyone who would now wish to become a priest will have done so, probably to some extent across that full range.

In between the colouring in of infantile pictures to ram home trite little moral messages to 16-year-olds who were otherwise doing quadratic equations and Shakespeare, someone can bang on to her heart's content. As in any other lesson, the boys know what to write, on the rare occasion that they were expected to write anything, while keeping their heads down and while getting their education elsewhere. The first spark of any vocation to the Priesthood would now be its unique opportunity ever to outrank any woman or even schoolgirl.

Of course, in this and comparable countries, the Church can be rather disappointing in practice, leading to heroic status among the clergy for any layman who stands up to the coven because he can. Follow that latter link for a hint as to how the coven's imagined triumph in these parts was about to come crashing down, and consider the startling words of one H&N INSIDER, in a comment on Pat Buckley's closely moderated blog: "I can assure readers that Bishop Buckley’s blog along with his cooperation with two other individuals, one episcopal and one lay, played a significant role in Byrne”s departure from H&N Bishop Buckley has more information than he published here."

"One episcopal and one lay." Then as now, other than the Diocesan, there was only one bishop in Hexham and Newcastle. The one who put the late Canon McCoy in charge of the Youth Pilgrimage to Lourdes for 10 years despite now claiming to have known that he was a "safeguarding risk", meaning, if anything, an orthodox Catholic who on that basis maintained intergenerational male intellectual and spiritual contacts beyond the coven's control. Oratorians also do that. The coven would have hounded Saint John Henry Newman at least from this See, if not to his death. If they had ever heard of him.

The insistence that Jesus never established the Hierarchical Church, while making a nonsense of any interest in who could or could not be ordained, is a useful reminder that no one can hold a Catholic ecclesiology and Eucharistic theology while advocating the ordination of women. That is clear from an examination of those proponents' published work. And being accustomed to Catholic ecclesiology and Eucharistic theology as the guarantor of Chalcedonian Christology, then they have departed from that, too.

Yet the Chalcedonian Definition is the Holy Spirit's definitive answer to the Incarnate Word's perennially normative question, "Who do you say that I am?" It is the only logically sustainable interpretation of Saint Peter's immediate reply to that question. And we all know what Jesus, in turn, said in immediate reply to that. Christological orthodoxy cannot be separated from fidelity to the Petrine Office, and it is precisely in its incompatibility with dialectical materialism that it has implications far more radical than anything that Marxism could ever formulate, much less deliver. 

Wittingly or otherwise, that is what liberal capitalists truly fear, and never more so than when they begin to grasp towards the realisation that thus equipped intellectually and spiritually, it would the principal victims of deindustrialisation and of war, ludicrous though that combination is in itself, who would be the vanguard for economic equality and for international peace. Very largely with such followings, movements in that vein have arisen in the West in recent years, and they have been viciously suppressed, nowhere more so than in Britain. But none of those, in itself, has been built on the Rock.