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The Latin Clerk, The Life, Word and Travels of Adrian Fortescue - Book Review by Fr John Salter

  orientale-lumen.blogspot.com The Life, Work, and Travels of Adrian Fortescue, by Aidan Nicholls, O.P. The Lutterworth Press, P.O.Box 60, Cambridge, CB1 2NT. £25. The cover of this book tells the reader that Father Adrian Fortescue is now perceived as an icon of Catholic traditionalism, facing a crisis of conscience over his affiliation with Liberal Catholicism and objections towards the intellectual conservatism of the papacy. The Latin Clerk thus reveals an interesting discord in Edwardian culture between theological doctrine and secular developments in the historical and natural sciences, and also reflects frequent tensions existing with the Roman Catholic Church of today, making the inner conflicts of Fortescue pertinent to modern society. Not only will this book be of interest to historians and theologians of English cultural developments, but will appeal to students of the Eastern Churches. Through a presentation of F
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In worship, who comes first, God or the faithful? More than a conundrum.

In 1889 at a Eucharistic Congress in Lieges, Belgium, Dom Gerard van Caloen, a trailblazing Benedictine monk, presented a daring idea: reception of communion by worshipers at mass.   Dom Gerard had already published a Missal for the Faithful in Latin and French and la much appreciated Little Missal for the Laity and started a publication and a study group.  Participation was in the air. The new pope was to play catch-up. He would be  Pio Decimo , the tenth Pius, with a "Renew all things in Christ" motto --very much the parish priest from humble surroundings, a man of the people with a common touch but also a stern demeanor and willingness to take the battle to the enemy, in his case the moral (and cultural) evil as he saw it, of modernism. He was to push frequent communion also. As to worship in general, he was already highly supportive of participation and recognized the need for liturgy to match that goal of his, to bring the faithful to warm belief
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Note to author of soon to be published Dominus Vobiscum . . .

Dear Jim: In your soon to be published book, do the anti-Novus Ordo (New Mass) part, interspersing it with with the pro. Can you do that, Jim? Keep it dry and detached? If you try, yes. But will you try? Jim: Good question. Note continued: Make your posts a foreshadowing of arguments to be fleshed out along the way. And remember: keep it flat and noncommittal. It’s only right and it’s less you might have to apologize for. Be not overly concerned with order and sequence, but be willing to test your readers for their ability to connect things. Does that mean not concerned at all? Hardly. That would be a slatternly procedure, to be sure. Go rather for the lasting image or hit-home phrase, the (dare I?) poetic. Absolutely. Do not shrink from the poetic. Do you dare? Don’t overdo the explanatory or saying where you got such and such, as from so and so, who is not paying attention anyhow and furthermore probably does not give a care. For instance, recall the Synod of Pistoia, a regalist ga
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The bishop who lost his way: Tuscany in the 1780s

Pius X (1903-1914) is best known for promoting frequent communion, seen by some at the time as making a sacred thing unduly common and therefore less highly regarded.  This problem seems not to have risen until after Vatican 2, when communion became not only frequent but standard for mass-goers and everyone went -- as I noted in a National Catholic Reporter essay in the 1970s, calling attention to an unsung achievement of the council, namely that it had abolished mortal sin. In any case, this change of his and another, to teach catechism in the vernacular (!), are pretty tame stuff by today's standards. Let us, however, put a hold once more on this tenth Pius and his works, looking back a mere hundred or so years before him to the synod of Pistoia, a diocese in Tuscany, in 1786. Liturgy was dying on the vine. Jansenists had made worship barely approachable with hard-nose demands on worshipers. Quietists had made it irrelevant with their insistence on a God-to-individual hot
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Location: Chicago, IL, USA
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Tale of several popes. Unfolding drama unfolds further . . .

Continuing with book in progress, working title "Dominus Vobiscum . . . The first modern-day papal liturgical reformer, Pius X, 1903 to 1914, is claimed by later reformers as one of their own. But it's truly an afterthought for them because his ideas and theirs were worlds apart. Or drifted that way, as we shall see. Indeed, this Pius was more in the mold of Pius V (1566-1572), who wound down a council, of Trent, or Tridentum, 1545-1563, and followed through on its edicts and findings with the mass called Tridentine. This 5th Pius curiously has this in common with his successor-reformer of four centuries later, Paul VI, who followed through on a council he also had not convened with a new mass, "Novus Ordo," with radically new script and stage directions. The two masses endure, the first as barely tolerated (by never-Tridentiners among higher clergy and arguably the pope) or lovingly cherished (by traditionalists, or "traddies" as some call themselv
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History of “the movement” — What went wrong?

Dom Prosper Guéranger OSB and Pope (St.) Pius X were at the origin of the Liturgical Movement in the early 1900s, working towards “renewal of fervor for the liturgy” among clergy and faithful. Promoters of the New Order ( Novus Ordo ) of the Mass say that’s where the new Mass got its start. Not so, wrote Fr. Didier Bonneterre in his 1980 book,  The Liturgical Movement: Gueranger to Beauduin to Bugnini, Roots, Radicals Results. The fact is, says Bonneterre in a detailed, fascinating, aggressively partisan argument, the liturgical movement was diverted from its course. It was his business to tell how that happened, discover who set reform off on  the wrong track, what was its early deviation, what the main error, who “hijacked” the movement so as to “propagandize” for Vatican II and a New Mass. He identified major protagonists who would be “hounding” the Popes of the decades to come, names to conjure with in liturgical history, heroes, even icons, of the religious left (progressiv
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Book in small chunks

Watch a book in progress. Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton We’ll see about that.
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