The Tablet "disses" Fr Tim

It is very easy for a small group of parishioners to make life pretty unpleasant for a priest. The nicer a priest is the more it hurts. It hurts other parishioners as well. I remember once an old parish priest said to me, "10% love you, 10% hate you, and the other 80% don't care much, so long as you are there when they need you."

The Tablet has just done the dirt on my friend Fr Tim at Blackfen, who I think is one of the most hard working priests in the country. From the Tablet article there seem to be 12 people who object to him celebrating Mass in the Traditional Form. These have been engaging in that most traditional of Catholic sports: priest baiting. Now Fr Tim has not one, or two, or even three Sunday Masses but FOUR of which the late morning one is Traditional Form, a quarter of his people actually attend this Mass, and if it is like our Friday evening TLM it is full of convinced and devout young men and women and steadily growing.

Being the Tablet, the article is grudging and petty, this small group of parishioners complain about money spent on the Traditional Rite on vestments etc., well if it is like here those who come to the Traditional are actually very generous about things like that. The article just hints at financial impropriety, in its nasty Tabletist way, and fails to mention repairs redecoration, heating, installation of new equipment etc which Fr Tim has done recently. It complains about people being asked to keep a prayerful silence in the Church, the woman from the Tasblet says this stops people interacting, yet she fails to mention the large narthex, the hall and the parish "pub" where people can and are encouraged to chatter to their hearts content. Thank heavens Fr Tim has a good bishop: Pat Lynch, who supports his clergy.

Though I am sure that Tablet readers will hold their hands up in horror, intelligent readers will see this is a put up job.

There is a sad conservatism in many of the Tablet's writers that wants to keep the Church ossified in the 1980s, they have to remember that was almost thirty years ago!

Increasingly younger lay people and priests are not going to be satisfied with the models of parish life and liturgy of their parents generation, I think Fr Tim is bravely experimenting with something new, something Benedictine at Blackfen.

Brown visits Pope

Gordon Brown dropped into see the Holy Father today, inviting him again to visit Britain.
I haven't yet seen a Vatican press release.

He wrote an article L'Osservatore Romanum saying
"From Rio to Rome, and from London to Lagos, we are confronted by one of the greatest economic challenges of our generation."
The global crisis is having an impact on the poorest people in Africa, Asia and elsewhere, the prime minister writes.
"It means hunger for millions more people, less education, and fewer health services"
"I know that the Catholic Church and His Holiness share these worries," Mr Brown continues.

"It is our common duty to ensure that the needs of the poorest countries are not regarded as an after thought, added as a moral obligation or out of a sense of guilt."
Mr Brown praises the Pope for having been one of the first subscribers to his International Finance Facility Bonds - a fund set up three years ago to provide immunisation for millions of children in the developing world.
"This is tangible proof of the common commitment of the Holy See and the United Kingdom in favour of international development.
"Thanks to this bond more than $1.6bn (£1.1bn) has been subscribed, and 500 million children will have been vaccinated between 2006 and 2011," Mr Brown concluded.

Pope on Frequent Confession

Pope lectures Pelosi

The pro-abortionist Nancy Pelosi met the Pope, not, I understand, in private audience but at the end of today's General Audience in St Peter's Square, but I can't find any photographs:

Vatican Press Office:
Following the General Audience the Holy Father briefly greeted Mrs Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, together with her entourage.His Holiness took the opportunity to speak of the requirements of the natural moral law and the Church’s consistent teaching on the dignity of human life from conception to natural death which enjoin all Catholics, and especially legislators, jurists and those responsible for the common good of society, to work in cooperation with all men and women of good will in creating a just system of laws capable of protecting human life at all stages of its development.

and Mrs Pelosi's take

WASHINGTON, Feb. 18 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued the following statement today following a meeting at the Vatican with his Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI:
"It is with great joy that my husband, Paul, and I met with his Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI today.
"In our conversation, I had the opportunity to praise the Church's leadership in fighting poverty, hunger, and global warming, as well as the Holy Father's dedication to religious freedom and his upcoming trip and message to Israel.
"I was proud to show his Holiness a photograph of my family's Papal visit in the 1950s, as well as a recent picture of our children and grandchildren."

Pelosi's ordinary, Archbishop Niederhauer of San Francisco, has repeated invited her discuss her views with him reatedly she has failed to avail herself of his invitation.

The Battle 2: Can God be trusted?

The battle, or maybe it is a war, is ultimately about whether we can know God and trust what he has revealed. Most of the teaching of the Second Vatican Council was issued in the form of a Decree, solemn teaching meant to inform the Church and individuals. Four documents were issued as were issued as "Dogmatic Constitutions", these were intended not just to teach but to form Catholic theology, to identify what was de fide, of the faith.

It is widely known that the young Father Joseph Ratzinger was one of the major authors behind the Dogmatic Constitution on the Word of God, Dei Verbum. In it modern biblical science is examined such as text and form criticism, the examination whether a document is meant to be a story, a myth or an historic truth, it examines the authorship of scripture by God and man, and the relationship between Scripture and Tradition. It sought to answer Modernism and Literalist Fundamentalism.

Modernism: basically said that scripture was a purely human invention, which means it is powerless, and God does not touch humanity.

Literalist Fundamentalist: would have scripture dictated by God directly into the ear of its human author, which is simply nonsensical, it denies a Catholic understanding of Grace and human co-operation with it.

Practically every word the Pope has uttered or written since his election as Pope has been on God's revelation to Man. His emphasis on the Hermeneutic of Continuity says that God has been present in his Church for two thousand years and can be indeed be trusted, we have not been left orphans. His book Jesus of Nazareth is continually stressing that the Gospels can be trusted, which is so important when most theologians and most scripture scholars follow the Protestant line of the unreliability of scripture. His Wednesday catechesis on the Fathers and St Paul stress the continuity of the Church from Christ to the present day, and God's continued guidance. The Synod on the Word of God, which was a bit lack-lustre, but more importantly the eventual release of his response to it, is crucial to this Papacy and I am sure will emphasise God speaking to his people.

I really do believe that we are entering a period in the history of the Church which touches on issues as important as the Christological controversies of the first millenium. It is about the very nature of God himself. The Pope alone, and those who gather with him, stands for the continuation of the Catholic faith: God speaking directly through Tradition and Scripture, God touching directly the lives of the faithful through the sacraments, Man being saved by coming into contact with God in his Church.

The Pope's almost manic ecumenical work with the Orthodox, his inter-religious dialogue, his reconciliation of Traditionalist groups, of talks with groups of "Catholic" Anglicans are all about strengthening the position of those who believe God is "knowable".

The battle, the war, is about whether we can know and trust God.

The Battle: 1

My kind friend Fr John Zuhlsdorf has the comment of a priest on his blog:

From a priest reader:
Everyone is insisting that the SSPX accept Vatican II.
Can we insist that everybody accept Trent?

He also has a fascinating article by Kevin Neylan which cuts to the quick of what is becoming pretty obviously, to me at least, a continuing controversy within the Church, a battle between the left and mainstream Catholicism, between rupture and continuity, between moral relativism and morality certainty.

Ultimately which Neylan doesn't actually mention, it is a battle between whether Revelation can be trusted or not!

Do read the whole article, but here is the conclusion:

As Pope Benedict stated in his brilliant, but widely misunderstood and controversial, Regensburg Address in 2006:

“Theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline… but precisely… as inquiry into the rationality of faith. Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid… A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.”

Therefore, religious dialogue must not be pursued with some naïve belief that all religions are more or less equal in their reasonableness or their potential to stultify. Nothing could be more misguided, not to mention subversive of the fruits of real dialogue. However, our self-imposed divorce between faith and reason, and the blind embrace of pluralism, are two sides of the same coin. Both have the effect of sapping society of the very framework that allows virtue to flourish, that allows modernity’s material goods to be put to their best uses.
Insofar as the Second Vatican Council encourages the Church to engage other faiths in meaningful dialogue and to adapt to a world dominated by modern political institutions, it was right and proper to do so. However, Pope Benedict is equally correct to rein in the post-Conciliar excesses by trying to shore up a traditional moral and philosophical framework: in short, to preserve the marriage between Judaic religion, Greek thought, and European heritage, which allowed the Church and civilization to flourish for nearly two millennia. Few tasks can be considered more important, either for the future of the Roman Catholic Church or the future prosperity of modern civilization.

Fr Z suggests that we should start offering up our acts of mortification for the Pope's intentions, please do so.

What do you do with Pergolesi

What do you do with Pergolesi on Good Friday evening? Some singers have offered to come and sing his Stabat Mater together with a small group of strings. I don't want a concert in the Church, on that day of all days. One possibility is using it for the Stations of the Cross but then there will be an awful lot of standing about as the Church isn't very large, and I don't really want to interrupt the music.

There is rite of veneration of the Relic of the True Cross, which close resembles Benediction. I asked about it last year but all anyone could come up with was the simple Rite in the 1959(?) Pocket Ritual. The more Solemn Rite has the Relic brought in under a red canopy, incense is used and there are proper prayers. I am sure the monks of Heiligenkreuz had a video on YouTube of parts the Rite but I can't find it, I want the text.

I thought the Stabat Mater would be useful during a period of adoration.

CAN ANYONE HELP?