The Continuity of Tradition

God bless our Holy Father Benedict XVI!!



As a final post for the week here is the Mass celebrated for the Feast of Christ the King and presentation of the cardinalitial ring to the new Cardinals. At the end of the Liturgical year the most absurd aspect of the "new liturgies" at St Peters has been corrected with the restoration of the six candles with Altar Cross in the middle of the Altar, and the restoration of the use of the Cardinal deacons.

AND note the similarities with the following pic of Pius XII celebrating at the same Altar.

- a living demonstration of the hermeneutic of continuity.

Queer Sights in Foreign Churches.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Pope Gregory's Street

To get to San Giovanni e Paulo, I walked up the Caelian Hill via an ancient Street called the Clivus Scauri. This was the street in which Pope Gregory the Great grew up in. His parents owned their town house here, which Gregory and his mother eventually turned into a monastery. The peacefullness of what looks like a country road in the middle of Rome, is probably very different to what would have been a very busy street in the 6th century AD.

One imagines that Gregory would have walked from this street towards the river past the Circus Maximus and into the Forum Borarium, where he saw the Saxon children being sold in the slave market and said non Angleli sed angeli! and got the idea of a mission to the island of Britannia. So really one could say that the English church started here.

A Case of Mistaken Identity

Talk to any liberal Catholic about Rome and you will find that they will often go into raptures about the Basilica of Santa Sabina, home to the Dominican order. What is often cited is the simple early Christian architecture inside, and indeed that is true as seen by the pic that i took one early Monday morning in October.

As you can see, unusually for a basilica of this age (constructed in the mid 5th cent), it does not have a ciborium over the Altar. When the changes were made in the 1960s I am sure that this was used as an example of the early Christianity that we were to aspire, particularly by the benedictine liturgists over the road in the San Anselmo college.

Although people might think that this is a beautifully preserved early Christian basilica, this is not so.

Pope Honorius III (1216-27) gave the church and part of his palace to St Dominic for his new order. At that time it was a parish church and so St Dominic in his wisdom put a dividing wall in the nave, with the parish to use the end near the front door, and reserving the sanctuary end for his community. In addition a cloister was added, and it was in this cloister that St Thomas Aquinas wrote part of the Summa Theologica.

In 1312 Henry of Luxembourg sequestered the property and threw the Dominicans out (Obviously he wanted it for the fine views - in Imperial times this was the equivalent of Hamilton, Bellevue Hill or Toorak in Australia). In renaissance times it was was further used as a Papal palace, and St Pius V retreated here during Carnivale time to avoid the noise and revelry, and to avoid seeing the licentious behaviour in the City below.

Domenico Fontana, architect to Pope Sixtus V, did an extreme makeover, to modernise it to the style of the time (late mannerism - early baroque). It probably looked something like San Giovanni e Paulo which I visited later in the morning (there was a wedding going on at the time)

In 1882 Santa Sabina was confiscated by the Italian Government, and opened as a museum. It was at this time that the archaeologist Professor Muñoz, restored it to its present state, using the best information available. Eventually the Church purchased it off Benito Mussolini (who would only sell at market price).

So the Vatican II generation saw this as an ideal template for the new liturgy, without taking into account that, like all older churches in Rome it had a very tortuous history, and what they are seeing is not an authentic early Christian Basilica but a reconstructed one based on a number of archaelogical assumptions.

Santa Sabina stands as an achitectural testament to the fascinating history of our church, but also as a metaphor for the archeological reconstruction of the liturgy that happened in the 1960s, based upon a number of assumptions which were later found to be incorrect.

The most startling aspect of the sanctuary of Santa Sabina is that the Altar is more of a rectangular shape and that the ciborium is missing. Modern freestanding Altars often look bare because they are totally devoid of architectural superstructures, which sets it off as the place; the mystical "tent" where God meets man.

Personally being more passionate about Baroque, I liked San Giovanno e Paulo. Here it is from outside, in the carpark, where you can see its original 11th century front facade, although the superstructure behind it is much older (ignore the 19th century dome to the right). Interestingly the front porch was commissioned by Pope Adrian IV, the only English Pope.

The Fourth Way

Recently Marian Valley's Prior gave me loan of one of his philosophy books from seminary days to read. It's called "Christian Philosophy" by Joseph M de Torre. Needless to say it is a solid book.

The unique characteristic of this book that most stood out to me was its presentation of Aquinas' "fourth way" for arguing for the existence of God. It is quite simply and without qualification the best presentation of this particular argument I have ever read and something I have been searching for quite some time.

After reading it one can see what a complete travesty Richard Dawkins makes of it in his book "The God Delusion" covered in some earlier posts. Unfortunately for a person without much training in philosophy Dawkins argument can leave one stumped. It's the kind of objection where you know he's messed things up and that it's just "weird" as they say, but to try to explicate exactly why his objection is wrong can leave one tongue tied especially with the amount of ignorance around (I've tried it on people). Unfortunately this is the only source I have read (it was published in 1980) which anticipates and obliterates Dawkin's specific objection. That includes Thomas Aquinas who more or less assumes that his reader is cognizant of the relevant distinctions.

For those not familiar with the argument, the fourth way is taken from the gradation of perfections in beings, of truth beauty and goodness and argues that this implies a maximally good, beautiful etc being which we call God.

Dawkin's juvenile counterpunch is that if Thomas' logic holds good then because there are beings in the world with degrees of smelliness there must a preeminently peerless stinker. Essentially it is an attempt to make a mockery of the argument.

Where the argument goes wrong, and what the book "Christian Philosophy" does so well to point out is that there are two types of perfection of being. The first is called "predicamental perfections" the other "transcendental perfections". The argument is based upon the latter while Dawkin's example (assuming that smelliness can be called a perfection) is of the former type. Hence Dawkin's whole argument falls due to an equivocal use of terms in the premise (he is not using perfection in the sense meant by the argument). Of course I will now explain why the distinction is important and why it works for (or is only applicable to) one set of perfections and not the other type. But what one can know is that the argument has not been answered (or even interacted with) in the "God Delusion" as its author has found a straw man version of it to shoot down.

But perhaps we can have some sympathy for Dawkin's weak attempt. The first line that de Torre writes is "This is the most difficult of the five [ways]."

Here I will present a slightly simplified version of what de Torre says that will hopefully flesh it out.

So firstly there are predicamental perfections. What is a predicamental perfection? It is a perfection of the essence of something which is founded on what's called the "formal act" (form is is what determines the essence to be what it is). So it is a perfection of essence as essence not a perfection of essence as being. So in the example de Torre gives it is the perfection "of dogs as dogs not as this actually existing dog (with the act of being), but of dog as an essence, in the abstract." He then covers what perfections such an essence has. He says formal perfections such as, and he lists, "materiality, substantiality, life, sensitivity. All of these are are perfections of the dog as essence "without considering the act of being."

He then comes to a crucial question that people are probably asking "Do these perfections have a 'more' and a 'less.' Yes. But do they imply a subsistent maximum? Can a maximum, say, of sensitive life exist by itself. No, sensitive life exists in the dog, but not by itself. In predicamental perfections there is no subsistent maximum. Their maximum would only be in the field of ideas: we can conceive a maximum life and a maximum of dogness, but that is just a pure idea, which does not imply actuality of being." (de Torre p 141).

So why are transcendental or pure perfections different? Because says de Torre they are "founded directly on the act of being, and therefore to be found only in actually existing substances, not in ideas, or abstractions or essences."

To follow the argument further one must understand the interrelationship of goodness beauty and truth. A being is more perfect as a being the more actual it is and the more something is the better it is, the truer it is and the more beautiful it is. The are all different sides of the same coin.

Now beings have these perfections in varying degrees. They have these perfections by participation. And these perfections do imply a subsistent maximum.

They participate in these perfections and so must have them from another. Why can't they have these perfections by themselves? Because if they did then they would have to have them in their fullness because being as such implies no limitation. They must have a cause for those perfections which is those perfections in their fullness. Or as de Torre puts it "being itself, unity itself, truth itself, goodness itself, and cause of all these perfections as well as of the predicamental perfections, in all participated beings."

And this what we call God.

Rememberance Day

I was going to publish a particular note about the latest Liturgy Lines in the Catholic Leader but since the Warden at Cooees from the Cloister has done this so eloquently I will desist.

The only thing I can say is that this is a regurgitation of another article written in February 2000. Read this:

In Australia, this way of looking at liturgical celebrations began to emerge during the Second World War. Amongst the many things that the Second World War taught us about liturgy, it made us look at liturgical laws a little differently. At this time we were trying to celebrate good liturgy by following the rules. But in extraordinary circumstances like the battlefront, it was not always possible to follow all the rubrics. There was no sanctuary, no altar, no candles, no vestments. Yet the experience of worship in the eucharist was often more powerful and therefore more fruitful than many a "correct" parish liturgy.

In this sense, Australia was well prepared for the liturgical reform of the 1960s. Although we appear to have had little contact with the Liturgical Movement and the liturgical scholarship of Belgium, France and Germany, we have had long experience of adapting the Roman liturgy to the extraordinary conditions of the Australian setting – since the days when our pioneer priests travelled overland on pastoral visitation, celebrating the Mass with what they could carry in a saddle bag. Even today, remote rural churches do not have the facilities of every European or city parish church as presumed by the liturgical books.

The full reference is here.

The whole tone of the article is bizarre. It says that because we were faced with the pioneering days and two world wars we have the ability to make liturgies creative. Not only that, liturgy on the Kokoda trail and Gallipoli seems to form a lesson for liturgy today; no rubrics, no vestments, no churches. The horrors of the World Wars apparently prepared us for Vatican II,as they liberated us from rubrics! This is simply not true. The photographs show the Usus Antiquor celebrated with such reverence and dignity in the most appalling conditions, that is so incredibly moving. Why is it that even with the Classical Mass being celebrated in the mud on a makeshift Altar consisting of basically a plank, that it still has this inspiring beauty? These photographs have a timeless quality that this is the Mass of the Ages, celebrated in particular contexts of world history. And whats more that these Masses were celebrated in a style that EH detests, and yet she says that they were powerful and fruitful.

Frankly the woman has no idea on what she really wants, and she wasnt there. In fact she is insulting the priests who celebrated according to the rubrics in these condtions.

Btw. A story that comes down through our family comes from an ancestor who served at the Altar in one of the field Masses on the Somme in the winter of 1917-18. It was so cold during Mass that the wine and water froze in the cruets. I remind our servers of this when they complain on a winter Sunday morning in Brisbane!

Thats all for tonight. Soon my computer will be back to normal, and pictures will return. St Isidore, Patron of the internet, Pray for us!!

What is right with this picture??

Yes it has actually happened! It was only a 3 weeks ago that I posted "What is wrong with this picture?" in which I wondered how the new Papal Master of Ceremonies Mgr Guido Marini (not to be confused with the Vatican II dinosaur Piero) would fix Altar arrangements. Well after a couple of weeks in the job here is the result.

Lewisham and Sydney trip

Whilst in Sydney I did have the pleasure of attending the Fssp Chapel of Lewisham. Their Liturgy is simply awesome, but they don't deserve all the credit, from what I'm told by all my reibale sources is that Fr Naugten the wonderful Franciscan started such an Liturgical delight there. Above is a photo of the side altar to St Michael, it is here were I prayed and obtained the graces I needed to overcome certain vices, Thank you St Michael!
Ah one of the Young Fssp Seminarians, looking cool with my sunnies. I bet he can't wait for the day that he is finally tonsured.
I also had the delight to consume many a great food whilst staying in Sydney. The best I'd say was this desert here, so good I just had to take a photo of it.
Here is a photo of some of us, we had a very good lunch along with an interesting discussion.
To rap this post up I'll leave with a photo that I'm quite proud of that I took. A nice scenic train station. I'd like to apologies about my lack of posts, but School has been getting a bit demanding with study, assignments and exams, Pray that I may get good results. Be sure to expect some more after I'm finished the year.

Pontifcal backstage

As all would have know, I traveled down to Sydney for the pontifical High mass said by the Cardinal. It was an awesome experience to serve for such a historic event. I was but a humble torch bearer, but still I got one of the best seats in the house, I got to sit (for most of the Mass) directly in front of the Cathedra !Here are the few photos I personally took of the servers before Mass.
Here everyone is going thought the trouble of finding an alb that fits them, along with an amice and cinture.

A few of the servers relax having found their vestments well before hand.

Here Is a nice shot of the sacristy walk way to the church

Here we have the Cross that was used as the metropolitan cross

Be sure to stay tuned for more posts from the trip.