More Thoughts On The Ordinariate Missal

I've moved on from studying Lumen Gentium and Gaudium et Spes and have started Anthony Esolen's The Beauty of the Word: A Running Commentary on the Roman Missal. This is described as "A comprehensive, step-by-step commentary on the changes in the Order of Mass (including Prefaces), the Proper of Time, and the Proper of Saints" for the 2011 revision of the Roman Missal.

Looking back on my various confirmation classes, including Evangelium and the RCIA course, but going even farther back to my Episcopalian confirmation class, almost nothing covered in the Vatican II constitutions, and none of the key insights Esolen brings to the liturgy, was in any of those classes, which is unfortunate, but I'm at least glad to have been able to catch up. For instance, it was only after researching the subject several years ago that I discovered the three-year lectionary, now adopted by most US Anglicans as well as something like 200 other Protestant denominations, was an innovation stemming from Vatican II.

In fact, the lectionary, which I admire tremendously, seems nevertheless to be at the basis of objections in the US to The Episcopal Church's 1979 Book of Common Prayer. But so little time was spent on this in my Episcopalian confirmation class that I assumed it came from the Church Fathers or something -- only someone like St Augustine could have had the comprehensive understanding of scripture to put something like that together. At least, that's what I thought. Instead, I discover it was developed much more recently by people who were nearly as smart.

I haven't followed critiques of the ordinariates' Divine Worship missal very closely, except that in light of reading Esolen, I'm beginning to see that in comparison to the 2011 Roman Missal, the DW missal is looking more and more like a slapdash job. My regular correspondent from the old blog brings me up to date:

Presumably most ordinariate members/attendees outside the UK are quite happy with Divine Worship:The Missal. But it has many detractors, although from inconsistent points of view. Christian Campbell from time to time lobs an acid comment onto one or other of the two main Ordinariate-themed Facebook pages regarding DW’s debt to the Ordinary Form mass, a very Bad Thing in his opinion. Presumably he and those who “Like” his comments want the Ordinariates to uphold English standards of church decor, choral music, liturgical taste and tone, etc but are really Traditional Latin Mass supporters at heart.

On the other side we have Christopher Mahon and the “Anglican” contingent, who lament DW’s every departure from the Book of Common Prayer: the three-year lectionary and the consequent disharmony between the Collects and the readings, the Cranmerised Roman Canon, the general cut-and-paste nature of DW. Naturally there is overlap in their specific complaints about the Ordinariate liturgy, although they come from opposite perspectives.

I think the problem is summed up by Bp Lopes’s decision regarding the celebrations of Ascension Day and Epiphany. The Anglican tradition is to celebrate these on the fortieth day after Easter and January 6, respectively; the USCCB has moved both to Sundays. Bp Lopes stated that the OSCP could not differ from the USCCB on both celebrations, and after consultation left Ascension Day on a Thursday and moved Epiphany to the Sunday. A foot in both camps, in other words.

My impression is that anyone who is genuinely knowledgeable about liturgy finds much to deprecate about DW, however satisfactory it is to those who simply enjoy its Olde English Bulldogge/TLM-lite aesthetic. Consequently it’s hard to imagine how Bp Lopes could be regarded as qualified to chair a liturgical committee, but then Bp Rozanski also would also seem an odd choice.

BTW, one of the announcements at the recent annual meeting of all active OCSP clergy is that there will be an external audit of every community’s finances this coming year. Not a minute too soon, I would imagine. Presumably an attempt to avoid a repetition of the debacle at St Barnabas, Omaha.

So what I'm seeing is that there's a cult of traditionalists who not only object to mass in the vernacular, but who also object to the three-year lectionary. I've run into this now and then, but the specific issues remain unclear to me -- the reasoning seems to be that if Catholics were less reverent after 1970, it was due not only to the departure from Latin, but also the new lectionary. And this is also related to traditionalist Anglican objections to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer.

The question I would raise is that the only ordinariate that's doing well at all, the one in North America, is still functioning at a C-minus level, to the point that the chancery seems now to be worrying about where such money as the communities have is being spent. (Let's not think for now about the priest who beat his wife before the altar, or the one who got the hospital sisters upset by celebrating OF daily mass ad orientem.) Well, maybe if they could clean up the collects, the prefaces, and the readings, things would get better. Yeah.

The problem I have with that is as I read Esolen, I discover that the people who put the 2011 missal together had all the potential discrepancies worked out. And they did a good job with it. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?

Two Incongruous Bishops

This morning, the sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Given all that isn't happening with the BBB, the BIF, and the debt ceiling, yesterday's big news was the elevation of Dr Rachel Levine to the rank of four star admiral, a breakthrough for transgenders. The crack journalists at the RedState blog posted a word salad headline: Democrat Counter to Glenn Youngkin Enthusiasm Enters Into the Pathetic.

But with everyone else on virtual vacation, I can at least fall back on the Roman Catholic ordinariates for recovering, or maybe not, Anglicans. Let's take the case of The Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali:

{T}he former Anglican bishop of Rochester, England, was received into the church Sept. 29 by Msgr. Keith Newton, head of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, which was established in 2011 by Pope Benedict XVI for the corporate reception of Anglican communities.

I'd noticed Bp Nazir-Ali on occasion when he was still in Rochester as a conservative voice in the Church of England, but his course since then strikes me as erratic. The story continues,

The married father of two retired from Rochester, England, in 2009 and, since 2010, has served as the visiting bishop of the Anglican Diocese of South Carolina.

A "visiting bishop", at least in The Episcopal Church, is a largely honorary position awarded to retired bishops. Their chief duty is to "visit" parishes for confirmations and other ceremonial "episcopal visits", mainly to relieve the schedules of the diocesan and suffragan bishops. However, Bp Nazir-Ali held this position in the Anglican Diocese of South Carolina, which is part of the Anglican Church in North America, a breakaway body from The Episcopal Church that is not in communion with it, the Church of England, or the rest of the Anglican Communion.

As a result, the Catholic reporting on Nazir-Ali neglects the point that by this time, he's an Anglican-with-an-asterisk and had already left the Anglican Communion. In fact, from what I hear of the screening process for former Anglican priests seeking ordination in one of the ordinariates, a reasonable question for the bishop would be why he chose to go to the more-Protestant-than-the-Protestants ACNA rather than simply to convert to Catholicism once his dissatisfaction with Anglicanism became clear to him.

In fact, the ACNA is known for being "low church", that is, leaning toward the side of Anglicanism that takes the XXXIX Articles seriously. These, among other things, denounce the pope and transsubstantiation. Was he not serious in going to the ACNA? If not, how do we know he's serious in now converting to Catholicism?

Another question that Msgr Newton might not ask him is why he chose to be received via the UK ordinariate, which is moribund. Few of its parishes own their property, and few use the Divine Worship missal that is used mainly in the US. Beyond that, Nazir-Ali is 72, retired first as a bishop and now as a "visiting bishop". It would seem his ordination is a purely political gesture, actually not much different from the elevation of Admiral Levine to flag rank.

A visitor sent me a link to this piece in California Catholic Daily, The strange race for chair of the USCCB liturgy committee with the remark that Bp Steven Lopes of the North American ordinariate, who was left indisposed for many months last year after a mysterious fall from an attic ladder, may simply have been practicing to climb another ladder. The article says,

But this year, the race to chair the bishops’ liturgy committee features an interesting pair of choices, Archbishop Mitchell Rozanski of St. Louis and Bishop Stephen Lopes of the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter. Neither appears an obvious selection for the job, which might suggest that some potential candidates have steered clear of running for a seat on the third rail of American ecclesiastical life.

. . . Lopes was made a bishop in 2016, making him relatively young in the conference for a senior committee chair. Like Rozanski, he possesses no advanced degrees in liturgical studies, though he has studied sacramental theology. But perhaps most interesting is that Lopes doesn’t even lead an ordinary Latin rite diocese at all.

As ordinary of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, Lopes is responsible for shepherding former Anglicans who came into communion with the Church after Benedict XVI’s 2009 apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus.

Lopes's version of the liturgy, whose approval he facilitated while at the Vatican, is an overlong and clumsy merger of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer with a translation of the Tridentine Roman Canon, larded with archaisms and normally celebrated ad orientem. The ordinariate over which he presides has been dogged with repeated scandals and infelicitous ordinations. It numbers about 40 communities and has membership in the mid four digits, though with that, it's far more successful than those in the UK and Australia.

I ran this by my regular correspondent from the old blog, who reported on the consensus in the blogosphere:

Some support for the point of view in this article — ie nobody wants the job, but there is also the suggestion that Bp Rozanski does want the job and has made a deal with Cdl Cupich in return for supporting something or other. In any event, Bp Lopes seen as a no-hoper, but along with his Prayer Breakfast gig and some other appearances does suggest to me that he is trying to raise his profile and get away from narrow identification with the North American ordinariate, which is going nowhere.

How Is This "Negotiation" Anything But A Charade?

Media reports from both ends of the spectrum on what's being hyped as "negotiations" on the BBB and BIF bills are in a strange never-never land. I noted yesterday that the Washington Examiner says the BBB is "still unwritten", but this doesn't stop CBS News from referring to a 2,465 page bill and listing a series of line items. So how does Susan Ferrechio, Chief Congressional Correspondent for the Examiner, who wrote that piece, still have a job if someone from CBS can give a page count?

CBS calls it the standard $3.5 trillion in that piece, but this story by Sean Moran, who happens to be a a congressional reporter for Breitbart News, calls it "the $3.1 trillion reconciliation bill, or the Build Back Better Act". This is just one of the many discrepancies over the actual numbers for both the BBB and BIF that I've seen in recent weeks.

The only conclusion I can draw is that none of these people is working real hard. Sean Moran goes on to say,

Since Senate Democrats only have a one-member majority, either Manchin or Sinema could tank the Build Back Better Act by withdrawing their support.

A promising middle school student who follows current events knows this is incorrect: the Senate is tied, nobody has a majority, but the vice president, currently a Democrat, casts the deciding vote in a tie. How does a professional journalist anywhere on the spectrum get this so wrong? The whole press corps, with only a few exceptions, is lazy and ignorant, and they get away with it. People like me have to spend some amount of time and energy every morning double checking these paid and prestigious experts.

But we're basically getting the same happy talk about "progress" that we got last month. The Hill has this story:

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) met separately Monday with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Congressional Progressive Caucus Chairwoman Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) as liberals and centrists in the party struggle to cut a deal on President Biden's sweeping spending plan.

Except it isn't "President Biden's sweeping spending plan"; reports are that Sanders is the author. Biden has been detached at best. The story goes on,

"I would hope that we're going to see some real action within the next week or so," Sanders told reporters. "We discussed the way forward."

But NBC News reports,

As the clock ticks with few signs of progress, the White House is holding a series of meetings this week to pressure Democrats to resolve their differences and reach a deal on President Joe Biden's sweeping economic policy bill.

. . . "The president is certainly feeling an urgency to move things forward, to get things done. I think you've seen that urgency echoed by members on the Hill who agree that time is not unending here and we're eager to move forward with a unified path," White House press secretary Jen Psaki said.

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., a key centrist holdout who has rejected the proposed $3.5 trillion level, expressed doubt that a deal could be reached by the end of the month.

"There's an awful lot that's going on. I don't know how that would happen," he told reporters Monday.

For now, I think what's happening is that Pelosi is quietly dropping the Götterdämmerung strategy the Democrats adopted after the 2020 election: if the world is going to end, the thing to do is run up your credit cards just before it does so you don't have to pay them back. Conservative Treehouse, a blog on the Kraken right, summarizes this strategy:

Joe Biden is an appointed figurehead for a background agenda driven by Obama’s Chicago Marxists. The Biden far-left policy agenda is strategically a massive throw everything at the legislative process in an effort to create major change in a short period of time. Biden is the disposable front man for this operation, and Pelosi is the facilitating legislative cohort.

. . . Everything you would normally consider to be a concern that would limit the extremes of any legislative effort has been removed. They plan to lose next year, so they have nothing to lose right now.

I question that this anything like a strictly Marxist agenda -- Marx had nothing to say about climate change or gender dysphoria, for instance -- but it's correct to see it as an attempt to run up the credit cards before the world ends.

The problem is that Visa is already declining charges well before you've bought the yacht. The actual strategy for now is to transition to "never mind" without seeming to. So just as we did last month, we're goinng to see happy talk about we're gonna work all weekend until something else comes up and the whole thing drops off the screen. The point now is exclusively to save face.

I suspect the press knows this and isn't putting much effort into the story.

Is Obama Pulling The Strings?

Back in August, I was frustrated that nothing was happening in the news, but at least I could justify it, because it was August. But as of this morning's headlines, still nothing. The big event is the death of fully vaxxed Colin Powell from COVID. But right after that, a major aggregator has Washington Post Deputy Editorial Page Editor Ruth Marcus getting trolled for mask-shaming some dude in an elevator. Nothing's happening.

So this may be one reason for a steady stream of speculation about who's pulling President Biden's strings, mostly focusing on Barack Obama. Most recently, commentators have noted that Obama is campaigning for McAuliffe in Virginia when Biden would probably be a net negative there.

The problem is that if Obama were in fact pulling Biden's strings, it's hard to imagine that Biden would be doing as disastrously as he is. But Obama himself reportedly said, “You know who really doesn’t have it? Joe Biden.” Obama may be campaigning for McAuliffe, but as far as trying to negotiate the BBB deal among the feuding Democrats, he's nowhere to be found. Other people have the leverage there.

Respectable media is finally starting to notice that nothing's happening. The Washington Examiner has begun to catch up:

The House and Senate return to session next week and will have only 10 legislative days [actually eight] to meet an Oct. 31 deadline set to pass both the social welfare spending package and a bipartisan infrastructure bill.

The two measures, which make up the entirety of President Joe Biden’s economic agenda, are in doubt.

. . . In an interview Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t commit to the Oct. 31 date she set just weeks ago.

“We’ll bring the bill to the floor when we have the votes to bring the bill to the floor,” the California Democrat told reporters at a San Francisco event touting the still-unwritten legislation.

In addition to getting the number of legislative days wrong, this story also illustrates the obtusenss of reporters on either end of the spectrum. The BBB is hardly "still unwritten". In 2009, the late Rush Limbaugh made an important point about Obamacare: he said that bill must have been drafted years earlier in think tanks, and the draft had long been circulating. The BBB agenda is the same. It's described, as it is above, as "the entirety of President Joe Biden’s economic agenda", but stories also say now and then that Sen Sanders, the self-described socialist, is the one who drafted it.

And likely Sanders himself had little to do with its actual content, except to endorse what other well-placed loonies had put into the draft, which a Limbaugh in health would be asserting now is likely a years-old pipe dream that Sanders and his allies could finally bring to the floor due to Pelosi's and Biden's weakness. But the pipe dream was something concocted in a time when the Democrats had bigger majorities. Their current control of congress is so thin that in both houses, tiny groups of recalcitrants in the low single digits can stall a putative juggernaut.

Right now, if anyone is pulling the strings, it's Sen Sinema. Everyone else is in a fantasy.

I'm Not A Karl Rove Fan

But the clip above shows he's been paying attention. I've been focused on the putative Oct 31 deadline to pass BBB via reconciliation, but Rove speaks to the bigger picture: by the White House schedule, the debt ceiling extension, governmnent funding, the BIF, and the BBB must all be passed by December 3. He makes the point that Sen Schumer doesn't want to use reconciliation to pass the debt ceiling extension, because this leads to a "vote-a-rama". CNN explains this:

Usually in the legislative process, lawmakers can use a series of procedural maneuvers to avoid voting on amendments. But in a budget reconciliation process -- which Democrats are using to advance their sweeping package -- you can't do that.

Lawmakers cannot hold a final vote on a reconciliation bill until all the amendments have been "disposed of," or in simpler terms, "voted on." The practice involves votes on a series of amendments that can -- and usually do -- stretch for hours.

. . . These marathon voting sessions can go for hours and often all night. The amendments are not binding, but they serve as a way for each party to force the other side on the record about controversial issues. This is where future political ads are born.

Sen. John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, said Tuesday that it's possible an agreement is reached to have 10-minute votes and to finish by midnight, but he cautioned that it's "easier said than done."

Other estimates I've heard recently suggest it would take roughly two weeks to pass either the BBB or debt ceiling extension by reconciliation with a vote-a-rama. This is at least the public reason Sen McConnell allowed Sen Schumer until December to pass the debt ceiling extension, presumably plenty of time if Schumer actually takes that step. However, every indication is that Schumer won't take it.

But Rove also raises the point that the UN Climate Conference is taking place in Glasgow on Nov 1-2, to which many administration figures will travel, and it will be part of Biden's own European trip beginning Oct 30. And although Rove mentions the Thanksgiving holiday (a week-long congressional recess), he doesn't mention the additional week-long Veterans Day congressional recess, also in November. So between junkets and holidays, it's even more likely than I had originally surmised that November is a near total loss.

And so far, all we've heard from Speaker Pelosi is the same happy talk about "progress" that she gave last month. And if Sen Schumer were serious about advancing anything via reconciliation, the unlikelihood of getting anything at all done in November means he needs to start when the Senate returns from its latest recess tomorrow.

So it looks like the Democrats are continuing to channel the incompetent tech managers I used to work for, doubling down on bigger and bigger deadlines that they're gonna work all weekend to meet. But now there's yet another deadline:

Since his inauguration this year, questions have been raised about Biden's physical and cognitive wellbeing.

Psaki repeated her previous promise that once the president gets a physical - which she said in May would be before the end of 2021 - the administration would be 'transparent' about its findings.

. . . Requests for Biden's medical records were reignited last month after a September 16 speech the 78-year-old president made was frequently interrupted by his persistent cough.

Stein's Law: that which cannot continue must stop

Stuck In The 1960s

Further to yesterday's post, I'm still not seeing any willingness by congressional leftists to recognize a need to make serious reductions in their reconciliation package to get anything through, although President Biden is now making noises in that direction

President Joe Biden publicly conceded Friday that the dollar amount of the proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill was going to shrink during a speech at a child care center in Connecticut.

'We're not going to get $3.5 trillion, we'll get less than that. We're going to get it. And we're going to come back and get the rest,' he said, addressing a room partially filled with Democratic lawmakers.

But this suggests to me that there's no serious coordination taking place between the White House and congressional Democrat leaders. He went on to say,

But the question is how much of what is important will we get into the legislation. I’m of the view that it’s important to establish the principle on a whole range of issues, without guaranteeing you get the whole things here.

In other words, he seems to be endorsing the strategy that they'll fund a wide range of programs on a short-term basis and get funds to continue them later. But in yesterday's post, I noted Speaker Pelosi's position:

“Overwhelmingly, the guidance I am receiving from Members is to do fewer things well so that we can still have a transformative impact on families in the workplace and responsibly address the climate crisis: a Build Back Better agenda for jobs and the planet For The Children!”

So with two weeks and eight legislative days to go until their October 31 deadline, so far, they haven't focused on a single strategy. But Sen Sanders, who seems to be the leader of the leftist congressional faction, appears still to think they can get the whole package without negotiation, if only they can bully Sens Manchin and Sinema into going along:

Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) are ramping up their war of words as Democrats struggle to get past weeks of increasingly public infighting over their sweeping social spending plan.

Sanders, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, fired the latest salvo on Friday taking the fight over the plan to West Virginia. Sanders penned a Charleston Gazette-Mail op-ed, which will run in the newspaper Sunday, to tout the benefits that could be included under a $3.5 trillion bill, a top-line figure that Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) oppose.

. . . Sanders has downplayed that he, Manchin and Sinema need to get in a room together to try to work out their differences, recently telling a reporter who floated the idea that "this is not a movie."

. . . “The time for us to be negotiating with ourselves is over, and I think it is absolutely incumbent on the two senators ... to start telling us what they want," Sanders told reporters during the Tuesday call.

Nevertheless,

Sanders hasn't yet said what below $3.5 trillion he could support, characterizing the top-line figure as a significant compromise for progressives who wanted a $6 trillion bill.

Yet again, I don't think either the leftists or the Democrat leadership understand the basic question of time and the calendar. In the 1960s, Sanders and those in his corner had all the time in the world to make useless protests and demonstrations. The difference is that now, a clock is ticking.

But there's also the increasing likelihood that the pressure Sanders is actively and tacitly putting on Manchin and Sinema to get them not just to negotiate but to surrender will serve only to irritate them further and potentially push one or both out of the Democrat party.

Yeah, We're Gonna Work All Weekend

So now I'm seeing that the Democrats plan to finish an agreement on the BIF and the BBB by October 31. Both the House and Senate have been on recess this past week, with key figures like Speaker Pelosi and Sen Sinema in Europe. The House and Senate do return next week, but the House will be working only four day weeks until the 31st, while the Senate will at least be wrorking five day weeks.

Although I had earlier seen December 3 as a deadline, November is going to be pretty much of a loss, with both houses in holiday recess for two weeks. But a Washington insiders' newsletter says,

We’ve pointed this out before, but Democrats truly are nowhere when it comes to finishing this reconciliation package. The “serious progress” that has been made is not really evident to us, or to the lawmakers involved.

→ Democratic leaders on the Hill have been unable to reach agreement on a topline number. This is key to everything and is at the heart of their stalemate.

→ Progressives, especially in the Senate, are still demanding a massive expansion of Medicare to include vision, healing and dental programs. That’s a big, big expenditure.

→ House Democrats continue to push for Medicaid expansion and making Obamacare subsidies permanent.

→ The two chambers keep exchanging proposals -- there have been some swapped this week. But they aren’t close to a deal, our sources tell us. Which is why the White House needs to lean in.

So there's unwillingness to compromise among House leftists, while Sens Manchin and Sinema appear to be holding the line on their own demands.

A major holdup in the talks is Sinema's opposition to any tax increases for individuals and large corporations, per two Senate Democratic aides familiar with the matter. Her position threatens to deprive the package of over $700 billion in revenue to finance the bulk of President Joe Biden's agenda.

. . . Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the chair of the 96-member Congressional Progressive Caucus, told reporters that progressives were open to cutting the price tag but not the overall scope of the package, favoring packing as many priorities into the legislation as possible, with shorter expiration dates.

"We're not going to pit childcare against climate change," she said. "We're not going to pit seniors against young people."

But Speaker Pelosi is sending a different message:

“In order to pass both the Build Back Better Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill on time, it is essential that difficult decisions must be made very soon,” she wrote to House Democrats, referencing the two planks of Biden’s agenda.

She continued: “Overwhelmingly, the guidance I am receiving from Members is to do fewer things well so that we can still have a transformative impact on families in the workplace and responsibly address the climate crisis: a Build Back Better agenda for jobs and the planet For The Children!”

As I've been saying, a key indicator of incompetence is an inability to plan tasks realistically and adhere to any sort of real-world schedule. It doesn't appear to me that anything has been done to resolve the problems that led to the Democrat failures last month, despite vague happy talk about "progress". We're still just gonna work all weekend to fix it.