Just doing a little reading

Following the ... err... interesting news coming out of the Vatican in the last few days.

You might want to have this handy. I've found it helps.


The talk from Cardinal Kasper (he's baaaaa-aaaack!) to the cardinals at the weekend's consistory, the one that wasn't going to be published has been "obtained", as they say, by (surprise faces ready) our old pal Cindy Wooden at CNS.

Jesus' teaching on the indissolubility of sacramental marriage is clear, the retired German cardinal said, and it would harm individuals and the church to pretend otherwise. However, "after the shipwreck of sin, the shipwrecked person should not have a second boat at his or her disposal, but rather a life raft" in the form of the sacrament of Communion, he said.

Which my Baltic friend summed up as, "But how come I can't have the cookie? Everyone else gets the cookie!"

And Bishop Bergoglio has helped during another one of his helpful off-the-cuff homilies at D. S. Martha, with:

"As the Father had married the People of Israel, Christ married His people. This is the love story, this is the history of the masterpiece of Creation – and before this path of love, this icon, casuistry falls and becomes sorrowful. When, however, this leaving one’s father and mother, and joining oneself to a woman, and going forward... when this love fails – because many times it fails – we have to feel the pain of the failure, [we must] accompany those people who have had this failure in their love. Do not condemn. Walk with them – and don’t practice casuistry on their situation.”

Whhh...I don't.. I don't even...

Then we have the helpful water-carriers here, helpfully saying how "hopeful" it all is... though what, precisely, it is we are to be helpfully hoping for I'm not sure about.

And then the other people, the difficult people, saying, "But wait... Matthew 5... he who eats unworthily...eternal flames... gnashing... "

And all I can do is keep clicking that big red button, which is getting to be my last comfort.



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Book bleg bump-up

So, my friend and I are enjoying our monastic karaoke experiments, but we've got a problem.

The kindly nuns at Rosano gave me a nice old copy of the Monastic Diurnal they weren't using, and it just happens to be exactly the book the monks at Norcia recommend for use by oblates. It's the 1962 edition translated by the monks at Collegeville (the translations into English are terrible. I mean REALLY bad, occasionally entirely changing the sense of the original Latin... but it just serves to keep us on our toes.)

Br. Anthony, the oblate director at Norcia, told us that it does pretty much exactly reproduce their own Divine Office.

Trouble is, it's a little awkward only having one book between the two of us, and I've checked around and the things are rare as hen's teeth, and considerably more expensive. Yowch! I thought that Baronius does them, but it turns out not. They do a three-volume M. Breviary, but not the single-volume Diurnal.

I am therefore making a little book-bleg.

If anyone has a spare Farnborough Monastic Diurnal lying around they're not using, we can guarantee it will be given a good home and be put to good use.

Drop a note if so...


(btw: I'm getting more and more confused about books. I just found the St. Michael's Abbey Press shop, where they purport to sell a thing called the Monastic Diurnal, that has the right hours in L. and Eng. But from the pic, it looks about twice the size of mine. Any of you liturgy nerds out there know why this would be? Is there maybe music in that one? Any other differences?)



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Monastic Karaoke

Here's a bit of fun you can have with the internet and any decent edition of the Monastic Divine Office in Latin.

Every day, the good and holy monks of St. Benedict's monastery in Norcia post their Lauds and Vespers on their blog.

Go to today's spot in your Monastic Diurnal, Liber or D. Office, or whatever you're using, and click play.

Sing along with the monks!

Hours of monastic fun!

(Try the archives.... which don't work in Chrome for some reason, where you will find Compline. Compline is a good one to start with since it is the same every day.)



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Canticum Novum

Cantate Domino canticum novum
cantate Domino ominis terra ...


Or, Canticum Vetum, as the case may be.

Something to brighten up your Septuagesima Friday.



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Inclina aurem cordis tui - book bleg

So, my friend and I are enjoying our monastic karaoke experiments, but we've got a problem.

The kindly nuns at Rosano gave me a nice old copy of the Monastic Diurnal they weren't using, and it just happens to be exactly the book the monks at Norcia recommend for use by oblates. It's the 1962 edition translated by the monks at Collegeville (the translations into English are terrible. I mean REALLY bad, occasionally entirely changing the sense of the original Latin... but it just serves to keep us on our toes.)

Br. Anthony, the oblate director at Norcia, told us that it does pretty much exactly reproduce their own Divine Office.

Trouble is, it's a little awkward only having one book between the two of us, and I've checked around and the things are rare as hen's teeth, and considerably more expensive. Yowch! I thought that Baronius does them, but it turns out not. They do a three-volume M. Breviary, but not the single-volume Diurnal.

I am therefore making a little book-bleg.

If anyone has a spare Farnborough Monastic Diurnal lying around they're not using, we can guarantee it will be given a good home and be put to good use.

Drop a note if so...


(btw: I'm getting more and more confused about books. I just found the St. Michael's Abbey Press shop, where they purport to sell a thing called the Monastic Diurnal, that has the right hours in L. and Eng. But from the pic, it looks about twice the size of mine. Any of you liturgy nerds out there know why this would be? Is there maybe music in that one? Any other differences?)



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Too much going on

It's not that I've got nothing to say. It's that there's so much going on that I don't know where to begin.

First, the news:

"But then, Russia has always been a little bit itchy in those border regions. Sort of rolling over the border and scratching now and then. We're sort of used to it."

- A friend from the Baltic world comments...

The Guardian reports about three hours ago from my mark...

Armed men seize Crimea parliament and hoist Russian flag

Ukraine crisis escalates after Tatar leader says Crimea’s parliament building has been occupied by gunmen.

Reports earlier today said that tanks were converging on the Crimea, but were turned back. It's important because that is where the port of Sevastopol remains the moorage for most of the Russian navy's Black Sea fleet.

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And Putin has put 150,000 troops on military alert.

We seem to be revisiting those ancient quarrels. How long has this part of the world been disputed? I don't know, but I know that for a goodly number of my ancestors the names of Crimea and Sebastopol were prominent in their daily thoughts.

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And, closer to home, I think the expression "Janus Papacy" is going to come into wider use...


The latest instalment of the Chris n' Mike Show...

This weekend's consistory has catalysed the discussion. It's not just Trads anymore who are looking at the weird spectacle and asking, "Errr... hey, hang on, have we actually got two popes?"

And more to the point, have we got two popes who are "looking in opposite directions"?

Oh, and nice to know the secular media is getting tired of the Humble Pope joke. It was pretty tired for the rest of us by the end of the first day.

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And even closer to home, I'll just say that our trip last weekend to Norcia to visit those monks was wonderful. And there has been general agreement on all sides that I can become an oblate there. So, it's back to working on a personal project of the daily schedule, organising the day around the cycle of the Divine Office.

We got to Norcia exactly at their biggest annual local festa, the Nero Norcia festival that started (in the pouring rain) last weekend and goes all week and ends on Sunday.

What's "Nero Norcia," you ask?

Truffles, baby, truffles.

All week, the shop keepers, truffle hunters, pig-product vendors and salami-makers, as well as wine merchants and apple product and cheese manufacturers, all local, all small, home-based and family oriented, set up stalls along the streets of the ancient town, and hand food to you as you walk past admiring, chatting, smiling and taking pictures. Seriously. It's like a dream.

Pics to come.

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Liturgical tip of the day

Never consecrate anything bigger than your head.

#thinkingaboutliturgy



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Away for the rest of the weekend

Don't everybody freak out at once.

I leave the interwebs in your capable hands.



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That's 'Domine,' to you!

Sometimes my job leaves me helpless with laughter. Grim, humourless and horrified, but laughter nonetheless...

I just had cause to use Google to ask, "What's the gramatically correct plural for 'dominatrix'?"

Maybe it's too early to be working. I still haven't had my tea and it seems to be making me a bit strange.

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UPDATE Well, I'm happy to be informed that the "industry standard" plural is "dominatrices".

And I rejoice that they are using correct Latin.

I hope we also are using the correct form for the vocative: s. domin-e, pl. domin-i,



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It's the oldest known film of a pope, taken in 1896. It was a year before my grandfather was born in Portsmouth. The audio is his voice, recorded in 1903, the year my grandma was born in Plymouth, and also the oldest known recording of a pope.

Leo XIII was known as the Rosary Pope, for the many encyclicals he wrote on the Rosary and its merits.

It's a funny feeling, isn't it? Even though we newfangled people are all smarty-smart and sophisticated nowadays and we all know Science and stuff, seeing something like this still gives us a strange little primordial twinge of The Spooky. It's like looking into a window on the past, something our ancestors couldn't have ever done.

And yet, despite all this evidence about it, the past is perhaps more closed to people of our time than it was to anyone who lived there with their clunky, old-fashioned "books" and mass illiteracy. We smarty-smart moderns are a deracinated people who have forgotten who we are, even as we continue to load our past onto the 'net.



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