Did The Second Vatican Council Ruin Everything?

There's an amorphous faction in the Catholic Church that's often called "traditionalist" that often embraces themes like more comprehensive restoration of the Latin mass, as well as less common and more extreme beliefs like sedevacantism, the view that the Holy See has been vacant since the death of Pius XII. Even if many traditionalists aren't formal sedevacantists, there's a more widespread view that Pope Francis is a heretic.

In most cases, although there doesn't seem to be a single, unifying traditionalist manifesto, the view seems to be that Vatican II represented a preemptive surrender to modernism, and a return to a single mass rite in Latin, including the Roman Canon, is the cure. (If anyone can refer me to something that might effectively summarize this set of beliefs, I'll be delighted to hear of it and pass it on.)

My impression is that many traditionalists are too young to have lived throuh the 1960s, when the Second Council took place, and haven't looked closely at the 1950s, where many of the trends that dominated the 1960s became visible.

I put together the following timeline that suggests the Second Council took place, first, in a context where Christian figures recognized cultural trends and worked to counter them well before the Council; second, that the Council was also a major response to those trends; third, that key events that define the current era took place before and during the Council; and especially fourth, that the implementation of the novus ordo mass took place only after most of the relevant events had actually occurred.

At minimum, the Council can't have caused any of the problems that traditionalsts attribute to it, as they manifested themselves either well before or during the Council.

• 1948 Alfred Kinsey publishes Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
• 1949 Billy Graham Los Angeles crusades make him a national figure
• 1951 JD Salionger publishes The Catcher in the Rye
• 1952 Fulton Sheen begins Life is Worth Living television series
• 1952 Christine Jorgenson undergoes gender reassignment surgery in Denmark
• 1953 Hugh Hefner publishes First issue of Playboy
• 1957 Jack Kerouac publshes On the Road
• 1958 Death of Pius XII
• 1959 Fidel Castro overthrows Batista regime in Cuba
• 1960 birth control pill first approved by US FDA
• 1960 Episcopal Bishop James Pike publicly opposes John Kennedy's election as US president due to his Catholic beliefs
• September 1960 Kennedy insists no politician should request or accept instruction on public policy from the pope
• 1961 Joseph Heller publishes Catch-22
• 1962 US Supreme Court in Engel v Vitale rules compulsory school prayer unconstitutional
• 1962 Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest published
• 1962 John XXIII opens Second Vatican Council
• 1962 Hugh Hefner begins serailizing the Playboy Philosophy
• 1963 Timothy Leary fired by Harvard for LSD experiments
• November 1963 assassination of John F Kennedy
• 1963 Sacrosanctum Concilium, The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy
• 1964 Lumen Gentium, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church
• 1964 Dr Strangelove film released
• 1965 Dei Verbum, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation
• 1965 Gaudium et Spes, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World
• 1965 US Supreme Court outlaws government restrictions on birth control in Griswold v Connecticut
• 1966 avant-garde comic Lenny Bruce (no relation) dies of heroin overdose
• 1967 The Graduate film released
• April 1968 Martin Lutrher King assassinated
• May 1968 Jesuits Daniel and Philip Berrigan, with other Catholic activists, use homemade napalm to destroy draft records in Catonsville, MD
• June 1968 Robert Kennedy Assassinated
• July 1968 Paul VI promulgates Humanae Vitae
• 1969 Paul VI promulgates Missale Romanum, beginning process of implementing vernacular mass and other revisions
• 1970 Kent State shootings
• 1973 US Supreme Court issues Roe v Wade, protecting a woman's right to abortion
• 1974 Richard Nixon resigns as US president

What About Fr Z?

Bishop of Madison, WI Donald Hying appears to be moderate-to-conservative based on his public record, which includes public denunciation of rioters who desecrated religious statues during the 2020 riots, as well as leading opposition to discriminatory COVID limits on church attendance by Madison civil authorities. The photo above is from a post at The Hermeneutic of Continuity congratulatiing Bp Hying on his appointment as Bishop of Madison and noting that "Fr Zuhlsdorf is upbeat and positive about this news."

As was widely published,

A popular traditionalist priest who performed live-streamed exorcisms falsely alleging widespread election fraud will no longer serve in ministry in the Diocese of Madison, Wisconsin.

A statement sent to the priests of the diocese on Jan. 14 said Fr. John Zuhlsdorf will relocate to "pursue other opportunities" and noted it was a mutual decision reached between Zuhlsdorf and Madison's Bishop Donald Hying.

. . . Although Zuhlsdorf initially defended himself saying he received permission from the bishop, the bishop publicly corrected him, issuing a statement to clarify that his permission for the exorcism rite was "for the intention of alleviation from the scourge of the coronavirus pandemic" and not for "partisan political activity."

. . . Without having priestly faculties in the Madison Diocese, according to the church's Code of Canon Law, he will now need to receive the permission of another bishop to continue his work elsewhere.

As far as I can determine, this hasn't taken place, and although Fr Z continues his blog -- when I checked yesterday, his activity appears to have increased markedly -- he hasn't received faculties from another bishop. It may not be coincidental that in a post yesterday, ASK FATHER: “Do you know a time with blessed bishops?”

Consider that the very first collegial act of the entire Body of Bishops was to abandon the Lord. There were only Twelve, but they all abandoned Him. . . . One 12th of all the Bishops in the world (at the time) sold the Lord for 30 pieces of silver.

That’s not a great foundation and history has shown time and again that bishops can be and often are rotten to the core. It has ever been so, it is now, and shall be until the Lord returns.

Fr Z is not high on bishops at the moment. On the other hand, I'm not ready to revert to my Calvinist roots. Instead, I come back to Lumen Gentium:

For the discharging of such great duties, the apostles were enriched by Christ with a special outpouring of the Holy Spirit coming upon them, and they passed on this spiritual gift to their helpers by the imposition of hands, and it has been transmitted down to us in Episcopal consecration. And the Sacred Council teaches that by Episcopal consecration the fullness of the sacrament of Orders is conferred, that fullness of power, namely, which both in the Church's liturgical practice and in the language of the Fathers of the Church is called the high priesthood, the supreme power of the sacred ministry. But Episcopal consecration, together with the office of sanctifying, also confers the office of teaching and of governing, which, however, of its very nature, can be exercised only in hierarchical communion with the head and the members of the college.

Lumen Gentium ephasizes the need for unity among the bishops. I think this is something Abp Gómez has been publicly working for as head of the USCCB, and as I've said elsewhere, the bishops are steadily working to reclaim the public narrative they'd lost in the 1960s.

But one factor is the question, which the pope has also raised, of freelance internet priests. Thus I saw another recent disciplinary action by another Wisconsin bishop:

Fr. James Altman has been removed from ministry after Bishop William Callahan of La Crosse sought privately to correct the priest for his inflammatory, though in some circles popular, commentary on social media.

“The obligation of a bishop is to ensure that all who serve the faithful are able to do so while unifying and building the Body of Christ,” the La Crosse diocese said July 9. “Bishop William Patrick Callahan, in accordance with the norms of canon law, has issued a decree for the removal of Fr. James Altman as pastor of St. James the Less Parish.”

. . . Fr. Altman stirred controversy for numerous public statements he made in 2020 and 2021 on politics, racism, feminism, and the coronavirus pandemic. In viral video that was posted online Aug. 20, 2020, Fr. Altman said that no Catholic can be a Democrat, because of the party leadership’s support for abortion.

Now, of course, it appears that the US bishops are in fact moving toward a unified statement on Catholic politicians who support abortion, and I would guess that both Bps Hying and Callahan would be among the large majority currently in support of it. The problem is that internet priests like Frs Zuhsdorf and Altman are getting out in front of the bishops, and especially when they make extreme or blatantly political statements, they make unity harder to achieve.

I started reading the Vatican II constitutions on Bp Barron's recommendation. I've found them extremely helpful in understanding what's going on right now, and I recommend them highly. At the moment, I'm in the middle of Sacrosanctum Concilium.

Who Is Fr John Hunwicke? -- III

Yesterday, I looked at Fr Hunwicke's account of his formation as an Anglo-Papalist in this interview and concluded that he's effectively been the same sort of fringe Anglican for much of his life, and he's brought those views into his Catholic conversion without much insight and, it would seem, without much change. He especially seems to see the Catholic Church fron the high-church Anglican perspective, whereby a select group has "correct" opinions that are constantly threatened by the less correct and, in Anglicanism, is always defeated by them.

Frederick Kinsman understood that this is a shell game that was always part of the Tudor design as Elizabeth worked it out. I think Hunwicke's difficulty is that he's always believed Anglicanism and Catholicism are functionally equivalent. Anglo-Papalists see themselves as "real" Catholics, when actual Catholic authorities would gently explain the options available for them to take actually to become Catholic. A difficulty now is that Hunwicke and the small number of others like him have taken Anglicanorum coetibus to be a tacit acknowledgement by the Church that Anglicanism and Catholicism are equivalent, and indeed, Anglicans have better ideas.

Thus, without much reflection, tney bring the high church lost-cause mindset with them and think it makes them the best kind of Catholic. This seems to be what's behind remarks like this in Hunwicke's interview:

My blog started out as a place where ‘Liturgical notes’ were published, as opposed to the blog of Father Z, who provides a sort of liturgical service to the faithful. And yet, little by little, it became natural to support and explain the restoration that Benedict XVI had made possible.

Later on, when the crisis of the current pontificate became obvious, it seemed natural to explain what is going wrong in the Church and to support Catholics puzzled and distressed by what Cardinal Brandmüller has rightly called the Apostasy made manifest under the current pontificate.

. . . Curiously (from the Bergoglians’ point of view), the ‘traditionalist movements’ belong to the least sclerotic sections of the Church. As a matter of fact, clericalism, as something evil and oppressive, appears under its cruelest light in the areas of the Church where Bergoglian ‘apparatchiks’ dominate. Therefore laymen must show the way, especially when the clergy are too afraid.

So the Catholic Church has gone wrong, but the high church Anglicans have arrived, like Colonel Custer and the cavalry, to reinforce the body of faithful led by Fr Zuhlsdorf. (It would seem that Bp Hying, who eased Fr Z out of his diocesan territory, has revealed his true nature as a Bergoglian heretic.)

It seems to me that Fr Hunwicke, formed by the high-church lost cause paradigm, has brought this model with him into the Church. But the Second Council simply posits a different model, and Lumen Gentium, as authoritative a Church document as you can find, provides this outline:

2. The eternal Father, by a free and hidden plan of His own wisdom and goodness, created the whole world. His plan was to raise men to a participation of the divine life. Fallen in Adam, God the Father did not leave men to themselves, but ceaselessly offered helps to salvation, in view of Christ, the Redeemer "who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature". All the elect, before time began, the Father "foreknew and pre- destined to become conformed to the image of His Son, that he should be the firstborn among many brethren". He planned to assemble in the holy Church all those who would believe in Christ. Already from the beginning of the world the foreshadowing of the Church took place. It was prepared in a remarkable way throughout the history of the people of Israel and by means of the Old Covenant. In the present era of time the Church was constituted and, by the outpouring of the Spirit, was made manifest. At the end of time it will gloriously achieve completion, when, as is read in the Fathers, all the just, from Adam and "from Abel, the just one, to the last of the elect," will be gathered together with the Father in the universal Church.

I can only think Hunwicke had Lumen Gentium in mind when he said in the interview,

I don’t believe that Vatican has taught formal error, but it was based on, and relied (as Cardinal Ratzinger pointed out) on, an excessive and dangerous optimism.

As far as I can see, Hunwicke never quite gets around to making clear what he seems to keep implying: the Second Council was in error. Certainly as I began reading the Vatican II documents, I couldn't help but note how many of Pope Francis's statements simply echo Lumen Gentium. This would normally make him a faithful pope, but if you think Lumen Gentium is in error, he must certainly be a heretic. I think Fr Hunwicke has at least the minimal good sense never quite to say this straight out. And not only that, he says,

Fortunately my Ordinary has always been favourable to me.

This might be the most disturbing thing Fr Hunwicke has said. What's encouraging is how much Msgr Newton's flock, with Fr Hunwicke its most visible member, has shrunk.

Who Is Fr John Hunwicke? -- II

There are two former Anglican converts to Catholicism that I frequently rely on to keep my own Catholic bearings. Both of them explain important things that weren't brought up in my Episcopalian confirmation class. One is Fr Dwight Longenecker, a moderate-to-conservative former priest in the Church of England, now a priest in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charleston, SC. (He came in outside either Anglicanorum coetibus or the Pastoral Provision.) At a Lenten mission at our Catholic parish, he gave a quick overview of the kinds of Anglicans, and he made the point that he'd have to listen for a while to what any particular Anglican had to say before he could give a rough estimate of what party he belonged to.

The second is Frederick Kinsman, who was Episcopal Bishop of Delaware from 1908 to 1919 before resigning to convert to Catholicism. He wrote several highly underrecognized books critiquing Anglicanism. Significantly, he was an Oxford-educated member of the Anglo-Catholic faction, which is the same one Fr Hunwicke represents, although as Fr Longenecker points out, there are many subcategories of each faction. Kinsman makes the point that the basic Anglican parties date from the formation of the Church of England in its modern politics under Elizabeth I.

The main parties are High Church, Low Church, and Broad Church, or as Kinsman calls them, Anglo-Catholic, Anglo-Protestant, and Anglo-Liberal. He makes the important point that, through much of Anglican history, the Anglo-Liberals have been the dominant strain with control over doctrine. In The Episcopal Church, its most noted figures have been bishops like James Pike and John Spong. The liberal faction has been generally successful in conflicts over the ordination of women, gays, and transsexuals and, well before then, loosening of policies over birth control and divorce. It's also been able to discipline or force retirements of bishops who opposed such policies.

Kinsman, writing mostly in the 1920s, made the point at the time that such developments weren't anything new. As a matter of policy, Elizabeth I allowed such conflicts to continue unresolved by making no definite determinations but giving each side the impression that she was secretly with them. Thus Kinsman noted in his time that Anglo-Catholics were in a continuing state of bewailing this or that compromise with "true" principles while losing every battle, except that as Elizabeth odrered things from the start, there were no actual principles over which to compromise. As he concluded, Anglicanism was a system in which those who considered themselves Catholic had the latitude to fancy themselves Catholic. This was no matter, as others were actually in charge.

As Anglicanism evolved, Anglo-Catholic style proved extremely popular, although as Fr Longenecker understands, Anglo-Catholic style merges easily with Anglo-Liberal elitism, which is why same-sex "affirming" parishes can mainifest extreme high-church forms in liturgy. Another, minor Anglo-Catholic strain is Anglo-Papalism, of which Fr Hunwicke, both before and after his conversion, is an extreme example. In yesterday's post, I linked to an interview in which Fr Hunwicke made it plain that since his youth, he'd effectively believed he was Catholic. Interestingly, Kinsman seems to have been a member of this faction as well until, as a professor of church history and then a bishop watching at first hand the ecclesial sausages being made, he began to recognize he'd been misled, there were no "truths" to be found in Anglicanism.

For a Protestant to believe he's Catholic reflects a fundamental denial, the same as if someone believed his beat-up Chevy is a Rolls Royce, or a guy who lives in the family basement believes he's married to Jennifer Lawrence. Kinsman believed something like this until he woke up to the fact that he was a patsy in a rigged game. There simply is no equivalence between the Roman Church and Anglicanism. If you want to be Catholic, you have to recalibrate and do what you need to do to become Catholic.

In the interview cited, Fr Hunwicke goes on to say,

Catholics ought to learn from the Anglicans that if a community surrenders to the Zeitgeist instead of following its own faith and fundamental beliefs, this will lead it to disaster and collapse.

I think this misstates the issue. Anglicans, I think the historical record reflects, never had their own faith and fundamental beliefs. What does Fr Hunwicke do with the XXXIX Articles, for instance, which would at least theoretically represent that denomination's fundamental beliefs? How About Article XIX?

As the Church of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch, have erred; so also the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and manner of Ceremonies, but also in matters of Faith.

But Fr Hunwicke says that since his youth, he's believed in papal infallibility, which is contrary to Anglican fundamental belief. I'm sure he gets around this with some form of tergiversation or verbal sleight of hand, but his problem is that as an Anglican, an Anglo-Papalist is forced to say that Anglicans don't take the Articles, or at least some of them, seriously. And this isn't recent, it's baked in from the start. So Fr Hunwicke's problem is that from youth, he's been groomed to betray stated fundamental Anglican beliefs -- and by celebrating any Anglican mass in a form other than the Book of Common Prayer, he was doing this himself. Where did he change his mind about fundamental beliefs -- or in fact, has he ever?

His problem is that he continues to think Anglicanism is in some way equivalent to Catholicism. It isn't, in a basic way. If nothing intervenes, I'll have more to say tomorrow.

Who Is Fr John Hunwicke? -- I

I never gave Fr Hunwicke much thought. I knew he had a large following for his blog, although I only occasionally glanced at it, in part because active involvement with a real Roman Catholic parish and active study of scripture and Catholic thinkers meant I saw little need to visit. I did, thoiugh, have an impression that he had a certain Blimpish persona with "Rule Britannia" always playing faintly in the background.

Then Pope Francis began to speak of "traditional" and "rigid" internet priests, by which I assumed he meant men like Frs Zuhlsdorf and Hunwicke. As a good Catholic, I wanted to get a better idea of what he meant, especially as Fr Z, as he became more controversial, lost the support of even the conservative bishop in whose diocese he lived. So I decided to look at Fr Hunwicke more closely as well, as just the other day I found him calling the Holy Father a heretic as he underwent surgery and insisting that even the OF Roman Canon had been "messed around with". Colonel Blimp must be in his lineage.

My first question was simply of what parish is he the priest? It turns out that, although he styles himself Fr and converted to Catholicism in 2011, his ordination under the terms of Anglicanorum coetibus was put on hold until June 2012 due to questions related to his blog. While he is listed on the UK ordinariate directory as a priest in the Oxford group, he is just one of four priests who are members there but is not the pastor.

The Oxford group, like many ordinariate groups, meets in an off hour at a diocesan parish and seems tiny in the photo at left and moribund as well, since its on line schedule hasn't been updated since June 2018, and its image of St John Henry Newman, canonized in 2019, is still captioned "Blessed John Henry Newman, pray for us". It appears that Hunwicke takes little interest in this group and would seem not to be a very inspiring figure there -- his efforts must go to his own blog and fostering his own image.

Another incongruity is that, although Fr Hunwicke insists that the Roman Canon, presumably the one in the Divine Worship missal, not the OF breviary, is the only valid form of the mass, this version of course dates only from 20l5. I have no idea what version he prayed prior to 2015, although in this interview he insists he has actually "always" been a Catholic at heart. The only other valid English version of the Roman Canon dates from the 1960s, but according to Fr Hunwicke, it's been "messed around with". So which version did he pray before 2015?

Beyond that, it's generally understood that Anglicans of the "papalist" variety switched to the OF English mass in the 1960s, because that was what Rome did, and they saw themselves as fundamentally Catholic. In the interview linked above, Hunwicke places himself in the "papalist" faction:

For a long time now there has existed within Anglicanism a “Catholic” tradition. As I’ve belonged to this current since my youth, I naturally subscribed to the entirety of the beliefs of the Catholic faith, including the dogma of papal infallibility as defined at the first Vatican council. At the time we all hoped one day to reach complete unity with the Catholic Church.

So, what version of the Roman Canon did he pray in his youth? Was it the Latin one? On his blog, he says he'd served three curacies and been a parish priest in the Church of England. If he used the mass in the Book of Common Prayer at all as an Anglican, this was never a valid Catholic mass. If he used the Latin mass, this was never a valid Anglican mass, and his use of it for an Anglican liturgy would typically occur only because his Anglican bishop feared the consequences of disciplining him. If he used any English version of the Roman Canon other than that in the Book of Common Prayer, this again would be only because such diversion was widely tolerated, not because it was at all valid.

Did Fr Hunwicke ever use the Book of Common Prayer as an Anglican priest? If so, if he feels he was always a Catholic, then he was using it with mental reservation and effectifvely against his Anglican vows. If he never used it as an Anglican but always used unauthorized texts, this was also a violation of his Anglican vows and potentially disobedient. But then, why should we credit his Roman Catholic vows any other way? In Fr Hunwicke's case, I've got to wonder if this became a bad habit of mind that he's carried over.

But in any case, nearly all Fr Hunwicke's colleagues in the UK ordinariate use the OF English mass, not the one in the Divine Worship missal, as this had become the Anglican papalist practice there decades before Anglicanorum coetibus. So even in the context of the UK ordinariate, Fr Hunwicke has few or no specific pastoral duties, his ordination was delayed under a cloud, and even his colleagues would apparently view him as a liturgical outlier. His views on valid liturgy in fact seem confusing at best.

But although he affects erudition on his blog, his understsnding of both Anglicanism and Catholicism is superficial. I'll cover this tomorrow if nothing intervenes.

Masks As Class Identifiers

Just so we have our priorities straight, the UK photographer who published this image as part of a lighthearted series was forced to apologize. Masks are very, very serious.

But even the New York Times has begun to take a different perspective -- and since it's of, by, and for the elites, its perspective is through the lens of social class, which for elitists is a very, very serious topic. From this past Saturday, Are Masks A New Signifier of Social Class? (This is normally behind a paywall, but the Times will let you sign on to read it for free.)

On a recent Sunday night at Le Bilboquet, a see-and-be-seen restaurant in the Hamptons, well-heeled diners nibbled on $475 tins of Osetra caviar. A handsome man showed off his gold Audemars Piguet watch to his sparkly female companion. A party of 10 in polo shirts and striped rompers danced to a tropical house remix of Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It.”

They were all unmasked, while the waiters, bartenders and other servers kept their mouths and noses covered.

. . . Those who are still wearing masks tend to be members of the service class — store clerks, waiters, janitors, manicurists, security guards, receptionists, hair stylists and drivers — while those without face coverings are often the well-to-do customers being wined and dined.

. . . “It sends a message — one that’s been internalized on both sides — that the body of the mask wearer is ‘riskier’ than the body of the consumer,” [sociologist] Dr. [Erin] Vearncombe said. “It shows that certain groups have, and even deserve, more civil liberties than others.”

The risky body theme feeds into fear of the unvaccinated, which is also a social class issue: the unvaccinated, after all, are according to even President Biden, blacks, Hipanics, and right-wing anti-vaxxers. The Times piece continues,

“Customers have to be vaccinated to go maskless, but we can’t ask for proof,” said Jose de la Rosa, 26, who works behind the counter at the Juice Generation store in Times Square. “And we have workers who are fully vaccinated, can prove it and still have to wear them. It’s odd.”

Politico quoted Utah Gov Spencer Cox, who seems to be something of a squish, on the Sunday talks:

“Politics is becoming religion in our country,” Cox, a Republican, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “Politics is becoming sport and entertainment in our country. That everything is political. It is a huge mistake, and it’s caused us to make bad decisions during this pandemic and in other phases of our life as well. It is deeply troubling.

. . . Utah is slightly below the national average among states in terms of vaccinating adults (approximately 64 percent), which Cox said understates its achievement given the state’s conservative valence and how much of its population consists of younger people, who are generally less likely to be vaccinated than older Americans.

Still, Cox said he is concerned about unvaccinated residents, given the rise of the highly contagious Delta variant that has taken hold.

So he goes on national media to apologize for the right-wingers in his state, but he's doing his best to bring them to heel. Right.

I don't think many people needed the New York Times to remind them that masks are a symbol of subordination, an American version of the tug at the forelock. The problem is that at this point, with herd immunity rendering them moot and vaccination a much harder thing to prove, the elites are desperate to find a new thing to require as an instant class designator. In the meantime, there's the Delta variant. UCLA, an elitist bastion, is on the case:

UCLA reinstated the mask mandate for many indoor spaces on campus, regardless of an individual’s COVID-19 vaccination status, according to a campuswide email Friday.

All individuals must now wear face masks in classrooms on campus, teaching labs, libraries and indoor recreation spaces, according to the campuswide email. Passengers must also wear masks while using BruinBus, BruinAccess and UCLA SafeRide services.

The university’s announcement comes after the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health issued a recommendation Monday encouraging the use of face masks in indoor public spaces in response to the rising number of COVID-19 cases caused by the highly transmissible delta variant.

Even Dr Walensky says you're safe if you're vaccinated. The elites can't let go. Vaccine passports? I still think they should have required forehead tattoos.

The Ich Kann Nicht Anders Syndrome

One thing that strikes me about the traditionalist movement is the essentially Protestant subtext of so much that comes out of it -- the ich kann nicht anders insistence on speaking out over some perceived, often liturgical, abuse in the Catholic Church. For an example, I had only to return to Fr Hunwicke's blog and today's post. Oddly, he quotes an Anglo-Catholic priest's bombastic remarks from 1921:

Let us remind ourselves that the grand possession of Western Christendom, this great prayer, the Canon of the Mass, this noble Consecration prayer, for at least 1300 years, intact and immutable, formed the basis of the Western Rite.

and comments on it, almost as bombastically,

A hundred years later, most ordinary Latin Catholic churches have abandoned it. Those that use it in celebrations of the Ordinary Form use a version in which, at its most sacred heart, the text has been messed around with. And from Bergoglian Rome come rumours of new liturgy wars.

Surely, this is the time when all who see themsaelves [sic] as Catholic should be sure that they use the Canon and only the Canon; that they use it without the daft tinkerings of the 1960s.

I'm back to Francis's remarks about ritualism. An Anglo-Catholic priest -- that is, a Protestant priest who fancies himself in some way Catholic -- says good things about the Catholic mass taken out of its Catholic context. This is no different from, say, an atheist professor in a religion department (I'm sure there are many) using the same words to admire the esthetic beauty of the mass's language, all of it removed from any question of belief. Somehow the ritual has an existence independent of its Catholic context. But a sacrament must be valid through form, matter, and intention. You can't just separate the words out of it.

I personally would stay away from any mass celebrated by Fr Hunwicke due to what I think is a valid question of intention. Just how Catholic is he? What reservations and substitutions of private judgment does he bring to the celebration? He'll use the words, but he doesn't recognize the council's or the pope's authority? It seems you can take the man out of Anglo-Catholicism, but you can't take the Anglo-Catholic out of the man. Why did he bother to become an unhyphenated Catholic, especially if Anglo-Catholic attitudes from 1921 remain so attractive to him?

But let's look at the context of Fr Hunwicke's blog. A visitor brought me up to date on the UK ordinariate after yesterday's post:

Bp Lopes has aspirations for a career beyond the ordinariate and I am sure he does not want it to be publicly associated with Vat II-haters and quasi-sedevacantists, so they are not given any sort of official platform. Msgr Newton is the captain of a sinking ship —- UK ordinariate membership down by half from its high point five years ago, clergy deaths outnumbering ordinations, etc. Reining in Fr Hunwicke the least of his concerns.

According to this page on the UK ordinariate's official website, they have eight priests under fifty years of age. Fifty of their priests will retire in the next five years. The UK orfdinariate has only a handful of stipendiary positions. Most of its active clergy work in diocesan ministry. About ten percent of the diocesan Catholic priests in the UK were formerly CofE clergy. Those who have chosen to be ordained through the ordinariate were probably attracted to its quicker formation requirements, which, while considerably more rigorous, even in the beginning, than the distance webinars offered by the US ordinariate, did not require the up front two years of study and discernment required of former Anglican clergy by local dioceses.

According to the Annuario Pontificio the UK ordinariate has a priest for every nineteen members, so from a ministry perspective the lack of vocations probably means little. But it does suggest that the long-term future of the UK ordinariate is in some doubt.

When I think of Fr Hunwicke, surely the most visible priest in the UK ordinariate, I can think only of the deconsecrated church used as El Indio's headquarters in For a Few Dollars More. Yet again, we know them by their fruits.