O What Their Joy and Their Glory Must Be

For the Eve of All Saints - the anthem by William Harris with words, of course, by Peter Abelard (O quanta qualia) translated by John Mason Neale.

"Ah, see the fair chivalry come"

"Ah, see the fair chivalry come, the companions of Christ!
White horsemen, who ride on white horses, the Knights of God!
They, for their Lord and their Lover who sacrificed all
Save the sweetness of treading where He first trod!
These, thro' the darkness of death, the dominions of night,
Swept, and they woke in white places at morning tide:
They saw with their eyes and sang for joy at the sight,
They saw with their eyes the Eyes of the Crucified.
Now, whithersoever He goeth, with Him they go:
White horsemen, who ride on white horses, Oh, fair to see!
They ride where the rivers of paradise flash and flow,
White horsemen, with Christ their Captain, for ever He!"

'Te Martyrum Candidatus,'  Lionel Johnson (1867-1902)  



Worcester Cathedral Choir · Donald Hunt · Adrian Partington

If you're at a loose end in Bristol tonight ...

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St George's, Bristol

BOX OFFICE     0845 40 24 001

Kathryn Price cello

Charles Matthews pianoforte

Debussy Sonate pour Violoncelle et Pianoforte
Chopin Nocturne in C# minor, Op Post
Schubert Sonata ‘Arpeggione’
Rachmaninov Sonata in G minor, Op 19

Kathryn Price and Charles Matthews have received widespread international critical acclaim for their long established cello and piano duo, and their double-memorised recital work together.

They return to St. George’s, Bristol, for another memorised programme, including sonatas by Debussy, Schubert and Rachmaninov.

Kathryn Price & Charles Matthews: Cello & Piano Recital

Tuesday 27 October
7.30pm

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Forward in Faith defends the seal of the Confessional

This ought not to be newsworthy, but in a Church which increasingly fails to understand a sacramental view of the world, it is a highly significant and well- argued response. 

"Forward in Faith has published its submission to the Working Party on the Seal of the Confessional, which is charged with assisting the Archbishops’ Council and the House of Bishops in considering whether to recommend amendment of the Canon that says that priests should not reveal what has been disclosed in Confession by a penitent.

Forward in Faith's submission points out that the sacraments belong to the whole Church, of which the Church of England is only part, and that the General Synod therefore does not have the authority to alter them. The obligation of non-disclosure is part of the nature of the Sacrament: it was not created by the Canon. Amending or repealing the Canon would therefore not remove it. We are confident that priests will continue to regard themselves as bound by the Seal of the Confessional, even if this canonical provision is amended or repealed.

We question whether, in any case, the necessity for such a change has been or can be made out.

Such a change would be undesirable and counterproductive. It would discourage people who have committed criminal offences from making their confession, reducing the likelihood of a priest being in a position to counsel them to report themselves to the Police. The time and energy expended in promoting such a controversial piece of legislation could be deployed more profitably in other ways.

Forward in Faith is concerned that many priests receive little or no training for the important ministry of reconciliation, which both the 1662 and Common Worship Ordinals identify as a fundamental aspect of priestly ministry. Such training should emphasize that, where a serious crime is confessed, absolution should be withheld until the penitent has reported him- or herself to the Police.

Forward in Faith understands the defence of the sacraments as part of its purpose, and we shall resist as strongly as we can any attack on the integrity of sacramental Confession.

The submission may be read here."   [gives a further link to a pdf document] 

Before going on to address the desirability of a change to the Church of England's canons, the response states: 

Is Change Necessary? 

13. Even if it were possible for the General Synod to alter the sacrament by removing the Seal, we do not believe that the necessity for such a change has been or can be made out. 

14. We share the general abhorrence of the crimes against children and vulnerable adults that have given rise to consideration of this issue, and agree that it is essential to ensure that the Church is as safe a place as possible for them and for the Church to do all that it can to promote safeguarding in wider society. But we are not aware of any evidence that amending the proviso to Canon 113 of the Canons of 1603 would have any positive effect on this. 

15. We hope that the Working Group will report on the question of whether there is any evidence that in any specific case breach of the Seal of the Confessional by a priest would have made any difference to the safety of any specific child or vulnerable adult. We are not aware of any. Without such evidence, we suggest, there is no justification for even considering a change that would purport to remove the duty of non-disclosure or seek to impose a duty of disclosure. It would simply be an emotional gesture. 

16. Those of us who have significant experience of hearing confessions are doubtful as to the frequency with which offences against children and vulnerable adults are confessed. We believe this to be very rare indeed.

Read it all, and the footnotes. 
There are already some interesting responses on the 'Thinking Anglicans' website [here]

-

Easily wounded sensibilities: thought crime and the defence of free speech

It would seem that the more 'inclusive' and 'diverse' our society becomes, by some strange ironic twist, the less respect we have for true diversity of opinion. 
We seem to want to be protected above all costs from views which may, just possibly, offend us - a fashion unfortunately followed slavishly and sheepishly by certain sections of contemporary Anglicanism. However, unless this trend is opposed and rolled back, it will almost certainly prove the end of those values of rational debate, free speech and assembly we have held most dear for many generations. 
That academic institutions should be in the vanguard of this kind of utter irresponsibility, and tacitly encourage their students to wrap themselves in a cosy blanket of like-mindedness, has been one of the most worrying and indefensible developments of all. If you are too feeble minded to run the risk of being confronted by opinions which may offend you or upset your accepted view of the world, then don't go to university at all. Find something to do with your time which doesn't involve that most upsetting of all activities, being encouraged to think.

But is the tide at long last beginning to turn? Roger Scruton, given a platform on BBC Radio 4, argues that the law on freedom of speech ought to protect those who express heretical views and not be used to shut down debate by means of invented 'phobias.'
"... Free speech is not the cause of the tensions that are growing around us, but the only possible solution to them..." 
Listen to it all here 

And petition mania, the student union at Cardiff University and the Germaine Greer affair -  a report from Wales Online [here]: we know the world has gone completely mad when Germaine Greer (of all people) is accused of being a reactionary...
“We should be as free to doubt the womanhood of Caitlyn Jenner as we are to doubt the divinity of Jesus." Brendan O'Neill at The Spectator [here] 

"...She has also mocked the whole idea of transphobia. ‘I didn’t know there was such a thing [as transphobia]. Arachnaphobia, yes. Transphobia, no.’ I love that. Because here Greer is using ‘phobia’ in the proper way — not to pathologise moral viewpoints, as the PC do when they brand criticism of gay marriage as ‘homophobia’ or ridicule of Islam as ‘Islamophobia’, but rather to describe an irrational fear, in this case of spiders. The branding of all sorts of moral and religious views as ‘phobias’ is one of the ugliest, most Orwellian trends of our age, so good on Greer for ripping the Mick out of it (that’s hibernophobia, I know)...."

At least it seems [here] that the university authorities at Cardiff are not prepared to bow to censorship and have a higher view of freedom of expression and academic freedom generally than some of those they are trying, in vain, it seems, to teach ... let's hope this is not an isolated example.

Anton Bruckner: Locus Iste

"... And then, in addition to all of this, there is that undeniable quality of spiritual fervor—almost mystical at times—which makes the best of his symphonies seem like more than mere music. Perhaps none of this would have surprised me if I had become acquainted earlier with his sacred music—those austerely polyphonic and luminously lovely motets and masses—but, as it was, I was chastened by the discovery..."

The Orthodox theologian, David Bentley Hart, writing in First Things in 2009 [link here]

Bruckner's 'Locus Iste,' sung by The Sixteen, directed by Harry Christophers

'Locus iste a Deo factus est,
inaestimabile sacramentum,
irreprehensibilis est.'

'Restoring the Anglican Mind'

For those already familiar with his 2008 book of the same name, Canon Arthur Middleton's address, sent in July in to Fort Worth for the International Catholic Congress of Anglicans, may prove to be of interest in the light of subsequent developments in the Church of England and elsewhere.  

It can be read in full here, but a few excerpts and a video link follow: 

"...The process that has promoted women in the apostolic ministry is a management exercise determined by politically correct ideology and not theological principle and it reduces Holy Order to a functionalism, alters God's plan for Holy Order and ignores our paramount duty to the universal Church. In England the appointment of a Reconciler is part of the management method which according to the ACAS style of settling Trade Union disputes, is to reconcile differing views. But this issue is not about human relations. It is about deeply held theological convictions that are diametrically opposed to the politically correct ideology. There can be no reconciliation.
The vote signifies that the Church of England and where this has happened in elsewhere in other provinces of the Anglican Communion, Anglicanism is not being true to her Anglican mind. She has rejected the Judaeo-Christian Tradition, the historic episcopate, and in other matters of fundamental doctrine and morals this can happen again. She has ignored her own Formularies expressed in Canon A5 of the English Church, the BCP and the Ordinal where Apostolic Order is therein enshrined. She has ignored her membership of the universal Church and has been in a process of creeping schism from it for years. The ecumenical achievements of the past century, including ARCIC, have been destroyed for there has been a total disregard for Christian unity and an unwillingness to take seriously the warnings of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. So what is the point of the Archbishop of Canterbury's words to his ecumenical partners stressing the fact that we need each other and the importance of unity, after an action that has placed an insuperable obstacle in the way of full Communion. Actions speak louder than words...." 

"... It has always been the Anglican claim that in faith and order the Anglican Communion is continuous in identity with the Primitive Church. It is no new Church. Today's contest is between modern liberal ecclesiology and the Anglican mind in a time when the majority of people in the Church and the nation have been brainwashed by the secular mind, which they use to displace the claims of the Anglican mind. It is the presuppositions of this secular mind and its politically correct ideology that is determining the Faith and Order of the Anglican Communion that must be displaced. This is not a matter of politics but a matter of faith and theology. Like the divines of the seventeenth century the way forward is by pursuing the Anglican way back to prescriptive sources by upholding Canon A5 which states that the doctrine of the Anglicanism is grounded in the Holy Scripture and in such teachings of the ancient Fathers and Councils of the Church as are agreeable to the said Scriptures. In particular such doctrine is to be found in the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer and the Ordinal...." 

"...The Catholic appeal to authority is partly to the past. It looks back to Holy Scripture, to the doctrinal statements in which the Church has drawn out the meaning of Holy Scripture and which have been accepted as Creeds, to the conciliar decisions which have been authoritatively imposed as binding on the whole Church, to the common teaching of representative divines. The Catholic may not reject anything to which he believes that the Church as a whole is really committed, anything which the whole Church has made part of its permanent life. It may often be a difficult task to determine exactly how far the authority of the Church has gone, whether the decision of an accepted oecumenical council has been so completely a matter of principle that it may not be altered or has been so entirely a detail of only temporary importance that it may well be changed, whether, for instance, any utterance is to be ranked with the affirmation of our Lord's deity at the Council of Nicaea or with the prohibition of kneeling during Eastertide by the same council, whether the concurrent teaching of divines through a long period of time indicates an actual acceptance of the teaching by the Church itself. But, whenever it can be determined that there has been a decision to which the Church as a whole is permanently committed, the acceptance of that decision is obligatory..." 

"... But, besides the appeal to the past, there is also an appeal to the future. The Catholic of necessity looks back to the past; for in the past is the tradition which sustains his belief. But of necessity also he looks forward to the future, to the re-united Church which is to be, and he sees that the past will find its full significance in the development which yet has to come. For the Church's life is greater than that of any one century, or of any particular series of centuries; it is for all time.."

This is a YouTube video of Bishop Keith Ackerman at the Fort Worth Congress - he begins to read the address at 19 minutes 55 seconds :

Back to the future ...?

In all kinds of ways - theologically, politically, culturally - we seem to be intent on reliving the worst of our relatively recent (and in one case distant) past, the lessons of which we are extremely reluctant to learn.

We'll draw a veil over the ongoing vicissitudes of the British Labour Party, now in the hands of the quasi-Trotskyist hard left  from the 1970s and 1980s. One would need to be heavily into substance abuse to have dreamt this one up. 
But the less responsible and electable the opposition, the less responsible and socially inclusive the policies of the government ...

And Canada's electorate reverts to hereditary Trudeauism...  involving a retreat from international responsibility, more restrictions on free speech and the legalisation of marijuana. As the commentator below has said, 'That's what Canada needs, more stoners ..."
Comment here from Mark Steyn

That self-confessed admirer of iconoclasm, Canon Giles Fraser, wants the rural Church to emulate the glory days of the Beeching Axe (for non British readers, the wholesale destruction of the railway network in the 1960s)
Some interesting responses here

"Fraser's weakness is not solely because of the pragmatic consequences of closing churches in rural areas.  The weakness is much more significant than this. It is profoundly theological.  Like iconoclasts across the centuries, his argument betrays a discomfort with matter, a desire to separate the 'spiritual heart' of faith from our flesh and blood, material reality.  Which, as Nicaea II asserted, is to deny the fulness of the Incarnation.Closing churches echoes a culture which "has lost all sense of ... place", for whom the sacramentality of place and the material is (at best) difficult to envisage.  Maintaining church buildings, by contrast, is a proclamation of sacramentality, of encounter in this place in its very physicality - whether inner city, suburb or village. As Inge reminds us, to say that this building has sacramental significance and meaning is to affirm the significance and meaning of all places, of all that is material:The existence of such holy places should facilitate a sacramental perception and serve as a reminder that all time and place belong to God in Christ - the part is set aside on behalf of, rather than instead of, the whole.And it is this which is lost when iconoclasts have their way.  In destroying icons, disfiguring statues or closing churches, they deny the sacramentality not just of the part, but of the whole." 

It's not for me to comment, but, depending upon whom one reads,  the Vatican's  current Synod on the family is proving a difficult test for the unity of the Latin Church, some of whose bishops are  seemingly, in the pontificate of Pope Francis, trying to revisit the 'spirit of Vatican II' [here]

 Europe seems to want to return to a much earlier epoch, before even both the Spanish Reconquista and Charles Martel. Can the continent's civic and cultural values survive in the age of globalisation and mass migration? 

"...What is Europe? It is Greece not Persia; Rome not Carthage; Christendom not the caliphate. These distinctions are fundamental. To say that Europe is a civilization apart is not to say it is better or worse. It is merely to say: This is us and that is you. Nor is it to say that Europe ought to be a closed civilization. It merely needs to be one that doesn’t dissolve on contact with the strangers it takes into its midst...."  [here] 

I can't help thinking that if the Devil were to appear in a contemporary vision, he would don the guise of an aging baby-boomer, wearing blue jeans, sporting a CND badge, clutching his copy of the collected works of Gramsci and smoking a joint ... and, of course, late for his well- paid job at the BBC, or one of our older universities. 

'Vintage' is all the rage these days, even among the fallen angels... 

Syria: bishops and politicians

Sometimes it is rather difficult to tell bishops and politicians apart.
The letter written by eighty-four of the bishops of the Church of England [here], leaked, we are told, out of pent-up frustration with a lack of response from the British Government, has one significant flaw in that its major premise - that Britain should take in fifty thousand Syrian refugees - seems not to be supported by the Christian Churches in Syria [here]
One might think that bishops would be more vocally concerned with the lamentable lack of concern shown by the governments of the West towards the suffering of the region's Christian minorities, a policy which has descended into farce, were it not so tragic, with the support from the U.S and Britain for 'moderate Islamists' in Syria, some of whom are affiliated to .... yes, Al-Qaeda. Presumably, a 'moderate Islamist group' will forgo the barbaric pleasure of burning down churches and beheading our brothers and sisters in the faith for the lesser and more constitutional thrill of closing down places of Christian worship and imprisoning 'infidels' on trumped up charges of 'blasphemy.'
But the bishops, although laudably voicing a concern for compassion and hospitality, have in their very curiously-worded letter,  given the clear impression of being concerned more with the plight of economic migrants than the re-establishment of peace and security and the support of brutally persecuted ancient Christian communities in the countries our governments have naively done so much to destabilise. In this regard they are, unsurprisingly to many of us, merely displaying their liberal-left secular attitudes. To use the phrase 'moral grandstanding' would be unkind, but not wholly inaccurate - we have a wholly appropriate college of bishops for the age of social media.

And how do we best deal with the undoubtedly unrepresentative but nevertheless growing threat of home-grown Islamic extremism? The Government's latest proposals are examined [here] by Douglas Murray, who has serious concerns about their possible effect: once again we are betrayed by our prevailing culture's genuflection to the disturbed and inverted values of triumphant social marxism. 

"... But the second thing that hasn’t worked in Britain in recent years is that government hasn’t managed to do those things that government should do. Not least in failing to use laws that already exist. For instance it is a crime to belong to a proscribed organisation. But this law has only been used on a couple of occasions, and it is demonstrably the case that there are people wandering around our streets who are well-known members of very-much banned organisations. Likewise it seems clear to me that while you may not imprison everybody who preaches against the state, there is no clear reason why we as a nation should pay people benefits to preach against the state. Most of the prominent hate preachers in recent years have been living off benefits and have not, to the best of my knowledge, been told that if they don’t get a job then the benefits will stop. If government wonders what really pisses people off – this is a very good encapsulation. 

This should be the simplest and most obvious idea imaginable: don’t give money to people who want to destroy you. But the government hasn’t succeeded in dealing with such people, and it isn’t clear that this new strategy will get them any closer. If some crazed Islamist preacher still gets all his expenses and bills paid for by the state then it’s a bit rich for the government to lecture people about who they should or should not have to speak in their events spaces. 

This is obviously an area of some difficultly which is why successive governments have struggled about in it. But it is a disturbing thing that when a problem arises it is so often free speech which is leant on rather than anything else. Why should the existence of crazy preachers treading just within the law cause the bar to be lowered on what constitutes illegal speech, or speech which attracts the attention of government? Particularly when we as a society are so obviously failing to meet such people with the laws which are already in place and the standards any sane society would try to apply. If the government wants decent laws to tackle the Islamists they could do far worse than revisiting and reviving our treason and sedition laws. These are laws which most states have had at some point, are tools which any state should have at its disposal if they want to survive and are obviously the area around which many of the people who are of concern to the government are moving. But instead it is speech and expression which is being leant upon. 

I predict that these disruption orders will have several effects. The first is the risk that they will trample over precisely the liberties our society needs to be most rigorously defending, scoring an own goal our society could do without. The second is that they will almost certainly end up restricting the speech of people not yet considered..."

'A Mickey Mouse atrocity' - free speech .... anyone?

For anyone who is at all concerned at the threat to freedom of speech and expression in the societies which gave birth to them, here are two speeches given at "The Danish Muhammad Cartoon Crisis In Retrospect" Conference, hosted by The Danish Free Press Society, Trykkefrihedsselskabet, in September. The first is given by Douglas Murray, the second by Mark Steyn. They are accessible and entertaining enough to be worth hearing in full, especially by those who believe, as many now seem to accept,  that - in the context of freedom of speech -  it is possible to be 'a little bit pregnant.'...  as it were.