The Vatican and SSPX - scholarship seeking resolution

The always scholarly and informed website Rorate Cæli has two new articles which are both important contributions to the debate about the proposed episcopal consecrations for SSPX.

The first looks at the modern, post 1870, understanding of Papal authority. In doing so it draws upon a range of historical material. I was particularly interested to see the writings of Augustinus Triumphus (1243-1328) cited. I recall reading Michael Wilks book about his very advanced theories of Papal power in Oriel library during one Long Vacation. That his ideas can be seen underlying contemporary concerns is, to put it mildly, interesting.

The article can be read at "The Performative Contradiction of the Society of St. Pius X" - Guest Article by Vigilius

The second article is by Bishop Athanasius Schneider and sets out to examine the fundamental issues in respect of the reception of the ideas of the avowedly “non-dogmatic” Second Vatican Council. The bishop makes a series of excellent points with clarity and coherence. He displays a wide and generous understanding of the history of the Church. He is clearly anxious to see a peaceful resolution of this matter in the interests of the whole Church. That must be commendable.

Bishop Schneider’s article can be read at "TRUTH: The Core Question Regarding the SSPX" - by Bishop Athanasius Schneider 

More reflections on the Vatican and SSPX

 

Corpus Christi, with its emphasis on the liturgical Presence of the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord seems a not inappropriate day on which to reflect further on the tension between the Vatican and the SSPX over the intention of the Society to consecrate four new bishops without Papal mandate on July 1st.

I wrote about this issue last month in a post which can be seen at The Vatican vs SSPX  

It is a subject about which I continue to pray.

Since then a number of online features have caught my eye and I think them worth sharing.

 

For those not aux fait with the background there is a suitably neutral account from ReadyToHarvest about the conflict going back to the years immediately after Vatican II ended and which can be seen at Will SSPX Schism? What's Going On?

Shortly after my post I came across links to an open letter to the Pipe from Bishop Athanasius Schneider which the faithful could also sign expressing the hope that the Holy See would approve of the consecrations to avoid further rupture. This can be accessed at Bishop Schneider backs urgent appeal asking Pope Leo XIV to support SSPX consecrations

I signed the letter.

Subsequently I came upon a lengthy article on Substack which was a commentary on the letter. It is by a monk of Le Barroux and has some important references to history and canon law in respect of Papal powers. It can be read at We Do Not Save the Faith Against the Pope

 

The very well-informed website The Pillar had further thoughts on what might happen on July 2nd if neither side backs down - and there is nothing so far to suggest either will. That article, written by a leading member of a team who are well versed in canon law, can be found 

at Excommunication communication: What if the SSPX does a schism?

I have never attended an SSPX Mass other than watching a handful online during Covid. A friend, who does have contact with members of SSPX, opined that whereas in 1988 excommunication or the threat of it was a sobering thing today, as a legacy of the actions of Pope Francis, it is seen as no threat and enhances the resolve of the Society.

It would be difficult for either side to step back. For SSPX it would be a negation if so much, if not indeed all rhey have professed. For the Vatican, which clearly includes in the College of Cardinals very considerable disparity on the liturgy, the most obvious point of difference, and for the Pope, only a year into his pontificate, to give way in the point would be severely disabling.

 

That is to look at the clash in political terms. During the lead up to last year’s conclave several commentators but not perhaps enough - lamented the way in which the life of the Church was being presented in terms of secular, entrenched, adversarial,party politics. Maybe we must pray that this matter is not just resolved in charity but in a Christian charity that is worthy of the Body of Christ. 

Corpus Christi

Today is the Solemnity of Corpus Christi.

As a feast and day of devotion it is one of the high points in the Catholic calendar and in the Church year.

  

Image: Catholic Diocese of Little Rock

 

The Worship of the Lamb

The Ghent altarpiece 

Jan and Hubert van Eyck

Mid-1420s  - 1432

The feast originated two centuries earlier in the same region

Image: Catholic Diocese of Little Rock

Corpus Christi originated as a liturgical celebration in what is now Belgium and was officially established by Pope Urban IV on August 11 1264 in the bull Transiturus. However the Pope died a few weeks later on October 2, and for all that he had commissioned St Thomas Aquinas to compose the propers, the new feast languished. Only a few places observed it. It was not until 1317 when Pope John XXII published a compilation of new papal decrees assembled by his predecessor Pope Clement V in the Clementines that the celebration became widely known and made part of regular liturgical observance. The fact that this was the first feast mandated by the Papacy may have meant that its novelty meant that many thought it only applied in Rome. 

One the 1317 text reached its audience the new feast became not only widely observed but also very popular. So in England the day was marked with processions, religious con fraternities or guilds of the great and the good, as well as more humble members, and the staging of Mystery Plays by the trade guilds.  

Corpus Christi is a quintessentially later medieval feast, a living link to the piety of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries created in the solid foundation of that of the thirteenth century.

Alas, in England the events of the mid-sixteenth century swept that all away, despaired some attempts to continue or revive the plays in the Elizabethan era.

One of the longest established Corpus Christi processions is in the historic city of Toledo, the ecclesiastical capital of Spain. Here one can see, and if you are fortunate enough to be there, no doubt sense the religious milieu not just of late medieval Castile but of late medieval Christendom. Church, city and State combine to celebrate, with the astonishing early sixteenth century shrine for the monstrance being borne through the streets.

That is how religious worship should be confident, devout, traditional.

There is an online introduction to the celebration, linked to promoting visits to this great artistic and cultural centre, at Corpus Christi (Toledo, Spain) 2026

    

The beginning of the Procession 

Image: pillarcatholic.com

 

The Corpus Christi procession in Toledo

 

Image: Corpus Christi on X

There is a quite detailed history of the origins and development of the feast available on Wikipedia at Feast_of_Corpus_Christi

I wish a solemn, holy and joyful feast of Corpus Christi to all my readers

New England

The phrase New England today refers to the rural areas in particular of the north eastern USA, and evokes to most people images of neat white-painted clapboard or mellow brick houses gathered around a church tower or town hall with similar construction. 

To those wishing to show off their knowledge of Elizabethan exploration it might lead to a temptation to talk about Sir Francis Drake’s claim to what is now northern California and Oregon at Drakes Bay in 1579 as New Albion ( Nova Albion ) - partly because the coastline reminded him of the White Cliffs of Dover.

What it has been unlikely to do with other than a very few specialists is make anyone think of the Crimea … and I do not mean the events of 1854-6. Why, I can almost hear readers saying out loud, should the name New England be accorded to the Crimea?

I too would have said that, but was very interested and intrigued to read an article on the Medieval Realms site on Substack

The article can be read at New England

This can, indeed should, be supplemented by three Wikipedia articles: 

New_England_(medieval) which also outlines the story of ‘New England’ on the Black Sea, 

Siward_Barn about the apparent leader of this English enterprise 

J%C3%A1tvar%C3%B0ar_Saga about the narrative source for the story

In addition the Greek Reporter website had an article a short while ago which gives some background as it looks at the conflict between the Byzantine Empire and the emerging Rus’ during in the two centuries or so before the events covered in this research. The article can be read at When the Byzantine Empire Fought the Early Russians Over Crimea

That English military exiles served in the Varangian Guard in Constantinople is well known. A friend who is also a medievalist with whom I shared this story told me that he was once talking with M.R.D.Foot, the historian of S.O.E. who recalled visiting Istanbul, as it was after 1931, in the 1930s and seeing lots of blond-haired boys playing in the street outside his hotel. He was convinced that they were descendants of the Varangian Guard and pure Anglo-Saxon!

And finally, here is a throwback to 2020 and a comic take on HMG and Covid …..

but maybe it was no laughing matter ….

 

Early Christian Churches in Anatolia

I recently came across an online article from The Independent with an account of recent archaeological work and discoveries in western Anatolia that reveal significant aspects of the early Christian churches built after the Peace of the Church and about communities in the region of the Seven Churches of Asia addressed in the Johannine text of Revelation. 

Amongst the discoveries is in a tomb at Iznik - ancient Nicea - and is the best preserved example of those few paintings which survive showing Christ as the Good Shepherd with a definitely Romanised figure of Christ. This is dated to the early to mid third century

The Good Shepherd and other paintings in the Iznik tomb

Image: MSN

It is also covered by another Independent article from late last year which can be seen at Jesus fresco found in ancient tomb sheds light on early Christianity

At the other end of the social scale are the Christian graffiti cut onto walls and, arguably, the small pilgrim flask with the figure of St George from Pergamum. Christianity had come to be, and remained, part and parcel of the life of the region.

The more recent article also looks at evidence that has emerged of the scale of the Imperial cult, and sees the emerging Christian Church as a direct counterpoint to that in the pre-Constantinian era.

The discoveries are illustrated and outlined alongside these interpretative points in the article at Spectacular archaeological finds in Turkey shed new light on origins of Christianity

There is a video with commentary about the Good Shepherd painting from africanews which can be seen at 🔎 recent early christian discoveries in Turkey   

A longer version without commentary from AP may be viewed at 🔎 recent early christian discoveries in Turkey 

 

Another video reports on excavations and conservation  of a flooded basilica site at Iznik, the site of the original city of Nicea and of the Council of 325. As I understand it a subsequent earthquake submerged the original city beneath the lake, and Nicea was rebuilt on the hill above its drowned predecessor.

The video can be be seen at 🔎 recent early christian discoveries in Turkey 

What has been revealed by these discoveries is further evidence of the extent and stability of Christian life despite occasional persecution, and underscores the point that the Persecution under Diocletian and his supporters was not merely more intense but came after a period of seeming acceptance and co-existence.

The tomb with the Good Shepherd painting also demonstrates that at least some Christians belonged to an affluent social sphere and able to appreciate and commission artworks. The world of these Christian Anatolians was clearly not just one of slaves and the downtrodden but part of Roman society, even if that society did not officially recognise them, and was sometimes hostile.

Marian Pilgrimage - an afterword

Having completed this May Pilgrimage once again here are a few thoughts to share with my fellow pilgrims, and to thank them for accompanying me.

The itinerary is not one that I came up with originally, but one which I took over from Fr Stevenson and Fr.father Hunwicke. As I have made additions, I have tried to remain consistent with the original route but the additions emphases the meandering nature. Every every year I say, I will sit down and rationalise the Pilgrimage Into one that could actually be followed around the country, but time never seems to permit, and I must admit to having developed a quiet fondness for the sheer eccentricity of where we go.

This year‘s additions have amounted to something like an upgrade of the whole Pilgrimage, adding to my knowledge as well, I hope, of my fellow pilgrims.

Inserting pictures where possible, despite the difficulties of downloading in some instances, hopefully made it more attractive and again I learned quite a bit in doing my picture research.

 

Searching online these days draws one into the clutches of AI. This certainly helped on an occasion, but it also had a tendency to sketch out devotion to Our Lady in a particular place, but then, in fact have no evidence to back it up. Researchers, beware!

Looking back over the past month, one thing that strikes me is that these shrines existed, alongside the usual daily devotions of people in their own parish churches, as I tried to highlight in the examples of Flawford and Stamford, as small localised places of devotion, whilst a few miles away there may well have been a much larger and renowned place of pilgrimage. In most cases, we know very little about what actually went on in these churches and chapels, but the evidence of Marian devotion teased out by nineteenth century scholars such as Fr Bridgett and Edmund Waterton in so many forms is very considerable. Apart from the work of Martin Gillett this topic was largely ignored by mainstream historians until another Catgolic scholar Eamon Duffy shook the complacency of academe with “The Stripping of the Altars” in 1993. I was not surprised because I had spent years exploring and leading others around the medieval churches of my home area and beyond, but unless you were a Catholic or Anglo-Catholic to most people the richness and complexity of medieval elite and popular piety was blanked out, replaced by socio-economics and a confident belief in the inevitable progressive virtues of English Protestantism. Thanks to Prof. Duffy, to J.A.F. Thompson, Nicholas  Orme, Jonathan Hughes, and others, including, paradoxically, Anne Hudson, we see not some  Chestertonian bucolic idyll, but a complex, at times conflicted but very largely, comprehensively Catholic society.

The variety of these shrines reveals something else - Our Lady was everywhere - in the rosary Edward and Little Hours at home, be it cottage or castle, but also at the at the well, in the churchyard you passed whilst travelling, at the loo cal monastery, in the cathedral or great abbey, always in the parish church, in the city centre or the wayside shrine, and especially in some places, such as “Stiffkey’s fair vale” at Walsingham. England may have been made to reject being Mary’s Dowry in the mid-sixteenth century but it did not mean that Mary renounced her dowry.

Our Lady is still here, waiting, willing….

May Our Lady pray for us and for her Dowry

    

   

Marian Pilgrimage - Our Lady of Walsingham

So finally, perhaps mentally footsore after the curious and circuitous route, and in need of a drink ( or two, or more )  at The Bull or another of Walsingham’s hostelries after making our devotions, the Pilgrimage finally arrives at its destination, England’s Nazareth, the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.

 After this possibly arduous journey there is not just the reward of arriving in the holy and blessed place that is Walsingham - and I assure readers that it is so - there are, for historic and institutional reasons two shrines, not one, and neither on the original site of the Holy House and the adjacent Augustinian Priory. All that survives above ground is the east wall and gable of the church, plus fragments of the domestic buildings, a gateway and the holy wells. Of the original Holy House and its later surrounding structure nothing is to be seen. The canons and local laypeople provided some martyrs as the shrine was destroyed, and it fell something like two generations later to St Philip Howard to record the desolation in “Walsingham Farewell”. 

 

The Slipper Chapel 

Built circa 1325 and now part of the Catholic National Shrine

Image: walsinghamvillage.org

   

The interior of the restored Slipper Chapel

Image: walsinghamvillage.org

 

The history of the restoration and development of the contemporary Catholic shrine can be read at

The history of the restoration of the Slipper Chapel and the creation of the contemporary Catholic National Shrine  - now a minor basilica - can be read at The Roman Catholic Shrine of our Lady, the Slipper Chapel • Walsingham, Norfolk

The traditional narrative that pilgrims removed their footwear to walk barefoot the Old English Mile - slightly longer than a Statute one - into the village tends to stress the idea that this was penitential. That may well be the case, but I wonder if it was also because Walsingham was seen as being holy ground.

There is more about the history of Walsingham and the tradition of pilgrimage at The history of Walsingham, Norfolk

The statue in the Anglican created in the 1920s and based upon the Priory seal

Image: stmarybonita.org

The interior of the Holy House in the Anglican Shrine 

It is the same size as the medieval one

The altar and tester are by Sir Ninian Comper

The statue of Our Lady wears a festal cope

Image: explorenorfolkuk.co.uk

There is a detailed reconstruction of what it would have been to be in Walsingham in an article by the late John Ashdown-Hill in The Ricardian This describes the pilgrimage made in 1469 by King Edward IV and his younger brother the Duke of Gloucester. It can be read at HhlhTwKnA2heZ853I

A cut-away reconstruction of the Holy House and priory church in the period 1500-35

The Holy House is shown as being wattle and daub but archaeological investigation suggests the structure was made of split tree trunks like the church at Greensted in Essex

The well house for the springs can be seen at the top left

Image: Stephen Conlin - MeisterDrucke

 My previous posts about aspects of the Walsingham shrine, including material about the possible survival of the original statue, now known as the Langham Madonna in the V&A, and my own sense of involvement and belonging at the Shrines, can be accessed from that for last year at Marian Pilgrimage - Our Lady of Walsingham 

The Langham Madonna and the modern Catholic shrine  statue

 

Image: The Living Church 

 

May Our Lady of Walsingham intercede for us and our intentions 

Jesu mercy, Mary pray 

Marian Pilgrimage- Our Lady of the Red Mount Kings Lynn

The Pilgrimage now makes its penultimate stop at the chapel of Our Lady of the Red Mount in Kings Lynn.

 

   

Our Lady of the Red Mount

Image: Kings Lynn Civic Society

The vault of the upper chapel 

Image: Facebook - Borough of Kings Lynn

A reconstruction of the original roof

Image: GetArchive

   

This remarkable building was built as a chapel for pilgrims making their way to Walsingham. First proposed in 1483 and authorised in 1485 the upper chapel was added in 1506. It was rendered redundant by the destruction free Walsingham shrine, yet it survived, as is recounted in The remarkable tale  of Red Mount Chapel

There as a well-illustrated account on the Britain Express website at Red Mount Chapel, King's Lynn

My previous notes on the chapel can be accessed through those for last year at Marian Pilgrimage - Our Lady on the Red Mount at King’s Lynn

In two of those articles I mention the Book of Margery Kempe. This ubique dictated autobiography by a Kings Lynn businesswoman and housewife recounting her pilgrimages and her spiritual insights opens windows into early fifteenth century England in ways no other work does. If you have not read it I urge readers to do so. Margery is nothing if not her own woman - likeable, infuriating, amazing, very different yet very similar to ourselves.

 

May Our Lady of the Red Mount intercede for us and our intentions 

Jesu mercy, Mary pray