Seeking Truth
The coincidence of today’s Mass readings is revealing. The 600,000 men (not counting their families) going up from Rameses to Succoth represent the truth-and-freedom-seekers of all times, vigorously on the march (Exodus 12.37ff.). What happens, though, when Truth turns up in person? People plot against him, want him out of the way, ‘discussing how to destroy him’ (Matthew 12.14ff.).
It is an aspect of our fallen nature that is at once tragic and absurd: the tendency consistently to miss our goal and forfeit homecoming, opting instead for fruitless gyrovaguery. Great attention is needed in this area. Setting out from a given captivity is one thing; remembering what the journey’s destination is (and what freedom feels like) is another.
In Memoriam
The latest issue of Pluscarden Benedictines, always readable, reprints Bishop Hugh‘s homily at the requiem for Fr Maurus twenty years ago, after he disappeared mysteriously. It is a beautiful, affectionate, shrewd re-reading of a remarkable life that blessed countless people. Who was Fr Maurus? An ‘energetic, self-possessed, single-minded, masterful man, sometimes severe, often hilarious, detached and so warm, rough and gruff but capable of heart-rending kindness, full of himself but never selfish, full of Christ, full of Mary, full of the Bible, full of stories, often frustrated, always content, silent and full of pithy, punchy words that went to your heart, sometimes uncannily perceptive, always with a mystery to him’ – above all one ‘visibly outstandingly faithful to prayer’. His disappearance after years of dementia, ‘already a form of disappearance’, was somehow characteristic: ‘He once said to me, I hate goodbyes’. ‘Fr Maurus, loyal as he was, was always bigger than what he did, more than what made him. He had prayed and built this community for 58 years, it was time to go to God.’ Requiescat!
The Region Where One Loves
In adolescent novels, no trespass is more dastardly than that of reading another’s intimate journal, all those entries beginning, ‘Dear Diary’, containing outpourings of contemplative hearts. There are diaries, though, written with a readership in mind, be it a future one. Such are those of A.C. Benson, son of E.W., archbishop of Canterbury, and brother of R.H., Catholic priest and apologist. A.C. decreed that his 180 personal notebooks should be locked away for fifty years post mortem. That term has long since passed: he died in 1925. D.J. Taylor recently wrote a splendid review of The Benson Diary just out, edited by Eamon Duffy and Ronald Hyam. I smiled at cited character studies like those of Talbot Peel ‘in whose veins runs the blood of generations of maiden aunts’ or of a noxious brandy-swilling woman met on a train to King’s Lynn in whom A.C., as the train advanced, discerned a vulnerable person ‘so anxious & sore stricken at the perils of the journey, & so resolved to safeguard her own health & comfort’ that she needed a tot now and again. Really striking is this confession in the first person: ‘The only fine things come out of the lonely part of the mind – out of the region where one loves and hopes – the stale things come out of the place where one jostles & scores off people.’
Nightingale
The ancients had an affinity for birds. Unexposed to our modern registers of fancy which let us broadcast our own voice, which let us fly, they were sensitive to birds’ fragility and strength, enchanted by the strangeness they bring near human society. I marvel at this poem in which Alcuin of York (740-804) mourns the disappearance of a nightingale that used to cheer him at night. Alcuin knew the greatest, most influential people of his age, including Charlemagne. He is said to have been the learnedest man of his generation. Yet he took the trouble to write this epitaph to a vanished wild creature. Thanks to it, we can hear the echo of its singing yet.
From Mediaeval Latin Lyrics by Helen Waddell.
Christian Politics
What do Christian politics look like? The question concerns us all. I thought of it while watching this recent Q&A session in the German parliament. One question (at ’49) concerns the controversial nomination of Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf as judge in the Federal Constitutional Court, emblematic of confrontations taking place in many countries throughout the western world. Mrs Brosius-Gersdorf has a stated a priori position that human dignity does not apply wherever human life exists; on that basis she supports, for example, the provision of abortion until term. In the Q&A the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, who represents the Christian Democratic Union, is asked whether he can in conscience support the nomination to this critical position of an individual for whom a nine-month-old foetus two minutes before birth has no human dignity ascribable to it. The chancellor answers monosyllabically: ‘Yes’.
And I was led to reflect, with regard to the question with which I set out: Surely not like this.
Summer Break
Coram Fratribus will take a holiday for a couple of weeks. Thank you for visiting the site. I hope you get something from it.
With best wishes,
+fr Erik Varden
***
I remember one day in June.
The height of summer and the sun
still rising on one of those days
that calls all nature into song.
R.S Thomas
La Traviata
Works of art affect us in different ways at different stages of our lives. Seeing La Traviata this evening I was moved, of course, by the drama of Violetta, a character showing that it is possible for the leopard to change its spots and for a life to begin again on fresh terms; but I was especially struck by the late insight of Germont, Alfredo’s father, who for the sake of social ambition forced apart two people who loved one another and were able to make each other happy. Owning his mistake he exclaims: Oh, malcauto vegliardo! Il mal ch’io feci ora sol vedo! — ‘Oh, rash old man! Only now do I see the harm I have done.’ It’s way too late, though.
Oh, to weigh the consequence of one’s words and actions in due time.
Chastity in French
My book Chastity was recently launched in a fine French translation published by Artège.
On that occasion I was invited to present it in a number of media, in conversation with Vincent Roux of Le Figaro, with Aymerick Pourbaix in En quête d’Esprit, with Cyriac Zeller of Famille Chrétienne, a magazine that also dedicated an article to the subject in its print edition.
‘We progress with patience from what is partial to what is whole, ordering and making chaste our bodies, souls and minds in the obedience of charity. The eyes of our love are opened thereby. We pass from blindness to sight. The journey is laborious at times, but leads through lovely landscapes. The further we travel, the more keenly we are conscious that we do not walk alone.’
You may be interested in this thoughtful review of the English volume by Harry Redhead.
Corpus Christi in Toledo
I have had the privilege of celebrating Corpus Christi in Toledo. It is like nothing else, not only on account of the splendid pageantry, of the streets strewn with scented herbs, of the famous monstrance that holds an ostensorium Isabelle of Castille had made with the first gold brought back from America, of the tapestries adorning houses in which locals stand on balconies throwing handfuls of rose petals; all this is beautiful and impressive. What pierces one’s heart, though, is the corporate, tangible focus on the spectacle’s Protagonist – the Lord of the world sacramentally present in the Sacred Host, greeted at each turning of the winding, narrow streets with applause while people kneel in reverence. None of the mighty of this world would be greeted thus. Never before have I seen so clearly that the Corpus Christi procession manifests the mystery we celebrate on the final day of the liturgical year, when we venerate Christ as Universal King. I shall never forget this day. Edgar Beltrán from The Pillar was in Toledo, too. You can read his account here.
Accepting Mercy
How striking is this panel from a door in the Jesuit church in Büren, artwork from the mid-eighteenth century. The parable of the Prodigal Son is presented, quite as in the sermons of St Bernard, as a universal parable of redemption. The palace is an image of eternity. The father steps across its threshold to call and embrace his long-lost child, freed now of illusions of self-sufficiency. The prodigal’s ragged clothes suggest his inward poverty in spirit, making him apt for the kingdom of heaven. The elder son, meanwhile, by his outfit attuned to his environment, stands ready with hat and coat to leave desertwards. He remonstrates with the servant bringing a ring for the prodigal’s finger, unable to endure an environment founded on mercy, not computation.
Setting out to Sea
I read Adam Nicholson’s wonderful book on Homer years ago, in Cameroon. Recently I came upon this essay, ‘Sailing with the Greeks’, in The Plough. He remarks how Western thought has long unfolded in a terranian framework. It has been on ‘a long campaign to establish “foundations” for what it does. No thought can be valid without some meaty “groundwork” having been laid. “Grounds” are where truth is thought to begin.’ What if, instead, we attuned our thinking to the sea? ‘When lying on a sofa or having lunch in a restaurant, nothing seems more obvious than our ability to choose. The menu of life encourages the illusion of potency and feeds the arrogance that comes in its wake. The boat is the opposite of that. It imposes a necessary modesty, a submission to the all too obvious reality of the defining situation around you. You can only do what the boat requires you to do. And in that compulsion, mysteriously, a sense of freedom flowers, one in which your life is momentarily liberated from the need to choose’.
Speech
One doesn’t expect an essay on Pentecost in a secular broadsheet, but that is what Carsten Knop, an editor of the FAZ, provided yesterday in a beautiful, wistful piece: ‘[Those present at Pentecost] recognise the power of human words. They notice that a divine origin shimmers behind words not destructively used: we are intended for relation with each other. The purpose of words is to live out relationship. To be endowed with language is not just about emitting grunts. We are able to confide in one another; we can establish connections and networks; we can enthuse each other, create shared knowledge and elevate ourselves in its light. That is the effect of the Power that, in the story which provides us with an extra holiday, is called Holy Spirit. Don’t laugh: anyone who has known what happens when people leave an auditorium amicably together in order, afterwards, to speak about what they have experienced, has had a sense of what it is about, not just at Pentecost. We must simply try to understand each other.’
Mary McCarthy
I recently picked up a copy of Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood re-edited by Fitzcarraldo. I didn’t want it to finish. Gloriously written, each sentence of chiselled perfection, it displays McCarthy’s signature cynicism; yet at the same time it is tender. Often scathing of her childhood’s religion (‘In the Catholic Church, even the most remote eventualities are discussed with pedantic literalness’), she yet recalls exalted moments when ‘the soul was fired with reverence’. There is wonderful comedy in accounts of absurdities, pathos in the retelling of grief. She sums up the persona of an émigrée teacher remarking, ‘she took being Scottish personally‘. The self-irony is delicious: ‘My nose was my chief worry; it was too snub, and I had been sleeping with a clothespeg on it to give it a more aristocratic shape.’ The final essay, on McCarthy’s grandmother, lends this book greatness. I shall not forget the description of an intimate bereavement: ‘A terrible scream – an unearthly scream – came from behind the closed door of her bedroom; I have never heard such a sound, neither animal nor human, and it did not stop. It went on and on, like a fire siren on the moon.’
Where’s the Bar?
Listening to Fr Michael Suarez’s keynote address at UVA’s Final Exercises a couple of weeks ago, a clarion call for academic freedom and a reflection on the university’s role in society, I was struck by his reference to one of his teachers, Dorothy Bednarowska. He refers (at about ’16) to a run-in he had with her while still a research student. Critical of his priorities, she told him squarely: ‘You are wasting your time! You think the bar is here right in front of you, but excellence lies much higher, and you should be chasing it!’ Where, these days, are the voices, in society, in the Church, that urge us to pursue excellence? Does anyone still believe in it? Bednarowska, a founding fellow (alongside Iris Murdoch) of St Anne’s College in Oxford, taught generations of young people to read responsibly and intelligently. Content to let her students be her legacy, she never published. What is more, as an obituarist pointed out, ‘she actively enjoyed teaching’. Clearly formidable, she was unconcerned to leave a monument to herself. Hers is, in the best sense, a provocative legacy. I am glad to be confronted with it.
Reading Görres
In a post about Görres you wrote, “Hers is a crucial voice for the present moment.” What do you find “crucial” about Görres’ voice for Catholics today?
I like the fact that she is analytical, utterly unsentimental, yet acutely sensitive. A learned, intelligent woman, she was conscious of the riches of Catholic tradition, delighting in them; and she sought ways of making these known to her own times, proposing thoughtful answers to contemporary queries. She was lucid about the reforms of the 1960s, wary of facile optimism. Her notes from those years are a help to a serious, uncynical, hopeful rereading of history now.
From a recent conversation with Jennifer Bryson. See also previous entries here and here and here and here and here.
Eve
A generous art historian has introduced me to a painting by Joakim Skovgaard (1856-1933) of which you can here see a detail. It is at once faithfully Biblical and timelessly existential. It is Biblical in so far as it portrays the almost amicable conversation between Eve and the serpent as we find it related in Genesis 3. The tempter, in this account, gives no brusque commands to the woman. Instead he delicately subverts her perception, and so her judgement. He does this by gaining her attention and trust, speaking soft, flattering words. Often enough this is how temptation insinuates itself. It seems so innocuous, even somehow kind, surrounded (as the serpent in this canvas) by peacefully fluttering butterflies. So seductive can temptation’s voice be that we forget to look it in the face. Had Eve looked into her interlocutor’s eyes, would she have believed that his intention coincided with her flourishing?
Shoddy History
We tend to assume it is AI that will corrupt our sense of historical processes and contingencies. The fear is not unfounded. But shoddy, biased scholarship also has much to answer for. I am shaken to read, in a single issue of the TLS, the accounts of two serious historians (Robert Tombs and Felipe Fernández-Armesto) denouncing the work of their colleagues as well below par, ‘so self-indulgent, so partisan, so ignorant, so poorly written and so carelessly checked’. Tombs analyses what he presents as a rough-shod ride over historical truths determinedly pursued by the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Church Commission; Fernández-Armesto reviews with exasperation (‘I opened the book expecting instruction and entertainment, I closed it in despair’) ‘A New History of the New World’. The latter remarks: ‘We should be wary of wallowing in self-righteous judgements of the past: they will be visited on us in return.’
A Single Melody
On a journey this afternoon, I found myself in an airport lounge listening with tears in my eyes to the pope’s homily from this morning’s Mass of Inauguration: ‘In this spirit of faith, the College of Cardinals came together for the Conclave; assembling from a variety of background stories, from different itineraries, we placed in God’s hands our desire to elect a new successor to Peter, a bishop of Rome, a pastor able to safeguard the rich patrimony of Christian faith while at the same time looking far ahead, so to go out and encounter the questions, anxieties, and challenges of today. Accompanied by your prayers we were sensitive to the work of the Holy Spirit, who managed to tune the diverse instruments of music so that the chords of our hearts vibrated with a single melody.’ He went on to summon us all from discord to concord. May we heed that call.
The full text of the Holy Father’s homily is here.
La Resurrezione
One of the joys of Eastertide is to listen to Handel’s oratorio La Resurrezione. It is a youthful work: the composer was 23 when it was first performed in Rome on Easter Sunday 1708, with an elite orchestra led by Corelli. As Graham Abbott has written, ‘It is in fact an unstaged opera on a religious subject, with a text by Carlo Sigismondo Capece, secretary to the Queen of Poland, who was exiled in Rome.’ Capece strikingly set the Christian drama with reference to both apocryphal and pagan traditions, showing forth Christ’s Easter victory as the culmination of even implicit hopes. This is a lovely recording. My favourite, though, is this, conducted by Minkowski, with Jennifer Smith singing gloriously in the role of Maria Maddalena.
Catholic
During the past eight days, attempts to predict what will be Pope Leo XIV’s priorities, method of government, and style have been legion. The lucidest, most helpful statement I have read so far appeared yesterday in an essay published by Daniel Capó in The Objective:
‘His own biography speaks to us, moreover, of a man who is truly Catholic in the sense of universal: North American and Peruvian, a scholar and a missionary, a mathematician and a canonist, a past superior of the Augustinian Order and a Vatican Prefect, a polyglot and a diplomat. Someone with this curriculum is unlikely to yield to the temptation of engaging in a culture war that is as divisive as it is, often enough, histrionic.’
Leo XIV
‘I am’, said our Holy Father this evening, addressing us for the first time as pope, ‘a son of St Augustine’ — of Augustine, that supremely intelligent, compassionate, yet uncompromising prober of the human condition, who knew how to orient hearts and minds towards God in such a way that his words resound still with undiminished power. Prosper of Aquitaine held Augustine forth, too, as an example of those ‘strong figures who could tame the unjust powers of the world and protect otherwise helpless communities from the ravages of war’. As another such instance he cited Leo the Great, who turned Attila away from northern Italy in 452 relying ‘on the help of God, who one should know is never missing from the labours of the pious.’ Augustine and Leo, consummate theologians, men of prayer and courage, orderers of chaos, keen readers of the signs of the times: these are the patrons of a new papacy. Long life to Pope Leo XIV!
Interessant rapport
A Review of evidence and best practice in the field of paediatric gender dysphoria published today chimes with a growing global consensus. It concludes: ‘A central theme of this Review is that many U.S. medical professionals and associations have fallen short of their duty to prioritize the health interests of young patients. First, there was a rapid expansion and implementation of a clinical protocol that lacked sufficient scientific and ethical justification. Second, when confronted with compelling evidence that this protocol did not deliver the health benefits it promised, and that other countries were changing their policies appropriately, U.S. medical professionals and associations failed to reconsider the “gender-affirming” approach. Third, conflicting evidence—evidence that challenged the foundational assumptions of the protocol and the professional standing of its advocates—was mischaracterized or insufficiently acknowledged. Finally, dissenting perspectives were marginalized, and those who voiced them were disparaged. While no clinician or medical association intends to fail their patients—particularly those who are most vulnerable—the preceding chapters demonstrate that this is precisely what has occurred.’ Cf. this statement from the Norwegian Council of Catholic Bishops produced in 2022.
Ut i været
‘Vinden blåser dit den vil, du hører den suser, men du vet ikke hvor den kommer fra, og hvor den farer hen.’ (Jn 3.8).
Hører du vinden suse uten å vite hvor den kommer fra eller hvor den farer hen, er det fordi du sitter innendørs, bak doble vinduer, med saueskinnstøfler og en god kopp te. Vil vi leve et åndelig liv, er det første som skal til at vi går ut i været.
Disiplene gjenkjente Jesus først som Guds Sønn midt i en storm so voldsom at de var skrekkslagne (Mt 14.22-33). Det er verd å tenke på ofte.
Klegg
“Todos, todos, todos” tilsvarer nok Guds hensikt. Velger vi oss så helheten på hans premisser, etter Kristi bud, for å være der hvor han, altets og alles Opphav, er? Dét er spørsmålet.
Filosofen Sokrates kalte seg selv en klegg hvis oppgave gikk ut på å drive samtidens athenere ut av uforstyrret selvgodhet. Pave Frans har hatt noe klegg-aktig ved seg. Det har ikke alltid vært bekvemt å ha med ham å gjøre. Han har utfordret oss, presset oss til å søke klarhet, i ulike sammenhenger, om hva ting handler om, for så å ta ansvarlige valg, for å leve troverdig som kristne. Nå har denne Herrens tjener fullført sitt jordeliv. For en bør han har båret!
Via Crucis
Jeg husker hvordan jeg for drøyt tredve år siden stod i en platebutikk i Cambridge og høre et fabelaktig opptak av Liszts Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude fremført av Stephen Hough. Jeg kjøpte CD’en henført. Liszts sakrale, kontemplative stykker for klaver har altså geleidet meg gjennom mye av livet; men jeg hadde aldri hørt hans Via Crucis før jeg kom borti Leif Ove Andsnes’ nyslupne plate. Tolkningen er suveren. Musikken er essensiell, tilbakeholden. Ofte høres den ikke ut som Liszt, men autentisk er den, uttrykk for siste fase av komponistens liv – han var 68, og vigslet til kleriker, da verket ble fullført. Liszts Via Crucis ble uroppført i Budapest på Langfredag i 1929. Jeg lytter til den i dag etter å ha feiret Kirkens Pasjonsliturgi. Jeg lytter ærbødig, og finner trøst.
