The Banished Heart.

Origins of Heteropraxis in the Catholic Church.

- by Dr. Geoffrey Hull;

published by Spes Nova, Sydney, 1995

320 pp., $42.50, postage included.
Available from: the author, Spes Nova league, p.o. box 403, Richmond, N.S.W., 2573.

Booming the Message Out, Loud and Clear.

In Sydney on 18 January 1995, Pope John Paul II beatified Mother Mary McKillop. That day he
also presided over ceremonies which would have filled her with horror.
With no apparent disapproval or even discomfort, John Paul II that day presided over ceremonies
in which, with such monstrosites as female altar servers, Australian aboriginal "sacred smoke" and liturgical
dancing, the basic rubrics even of Paul VI's reformed liturgy were flouted.
At these papal liturgies and in empty churches around the world the message booms out loud and
clear: God is more or less pleased by any religion, and anyway there will be no eternal Hell for anyone.
For over 30 years now, the once great and proud Roman Catholic Church has been crashing in
chaos into ruins. What happened?
How did traditional Catholics come to be reduced to the level of a "traditionalist" faction, hardly
more than a lunatic fringe, in their own Church?
What had we done to deserve it? Yet how did nearly all of us come to co-operate so meekly with
the 1960's revolution in the Church?
Only a wholesale return to Catholic liturgical tradition will halt the ongoing disintegration and
disappearance of the Church. Why can only a few see this?
Any such return, of course, the Modernist enemy occupation will fight to the bitter end. But how
did the Modernists come by so many conservative Quislings so willing to do their dirty work for them?
Why do so many otherwise orthodox Catholic "Conservatives" continue to defend a liturgy so
manifestly in breach with sacrificial worship and Catholic tradition? Why do they continue, effectively, to
support their supposed arch-enemies, the Modernists?
The answer is that they believe that, in doing this, they are following the Pope. But how, out of all
Catholic traditions, that one about total obedience to the Pope came to oust all the rest?
The answer lies in history.
A lot of that history can be found in Dr. Hull's book, The Banished Heart. In the beginning St. Peter
and his successors had ruled the early Church as the servus servorum Dei (Servant of the Servants of
God). In 107 St. Ignatius the Patriarch of Antioch had addressed his famous Letter to the Romans as
"presiding in love" over all the churches united to her by the one faith and the same seven Sacraments.
This unity of faith and sacraments has remained the criterion of Church unity in the Orthodox
churches of the East. As the Patriarch of the West, however, the Successor of Peter, after the schism of
1054, over-centralised the Western Church upon his office which in turn led to his being over-involved in
worldly affairs.
As long as the Pope's first concern remained the preservation of Catholic tradition, this did not
matter so much. It all changed in 1958 however when the Church saw the first of her present liberal Popes.
How we came to have such a Pope as he who today happily presides over the present chaotic reign
of sacrilege is vast and complex. Dr. Hull tries to tell it all and this has made his book unwieldy.
Unfortunately also this book contains much which is tendentious and which will unnecessarily
complicate issues and distract readers from todays urgent tasks of priestly and liturgical restoration.
It could, however, abbreviate down to a most useful book indeed.

Priest or Professor?
From the beginning, and certainly long before the New Testament books were all written, the
Apostles were daily worshipping and every Sunday offering the Holy Sacrifice.
Over the centuries the liturgy of the Church's worship was enriched by develpments which, until the
16th century, were always aimed at the greater honour and glory of God.
 Catholic doctrine has always been enshrined in, preserved by, and conveyed down the centuries to
each generation by Catholic worship.
But just as Jesus had always been challenged by the lawyers and scholarly elites of His day, so has
His priestly and teaching authority down the centuries always been challenged by lawyers and scholars.
In many souls the battle is lost, and Martin Luther the priest has been ousted by Martin Luther the
Professor.
Indeed lawyers and scholars have set up the three great "Religions of the Book", all priestless and
all run by scholars: Judaism with its Rabbis and Torah, Islam with its Mullahs and Koran, and
Protestantism with its Pastors and mutilated Bible.
None have the religion and priesthood of Jesus Christ. Never did Our Saviour cry "Woe upon you
priests!" but "Woe upon you lawyers! ... Woe upon you scribes and Pharisees!"
As the centuries passed Apostolic worship had come to be enshrined in a mass of traditional
liturgical practice called orthopraxis. True teaching needs true worship. Orthodoxy needs orthopraxis.
Catholic orthodoxy is expressed and preserved and conveyed down the centuries by Catholic orthopraxis.
But the scholars have always been burrowing away. Professor Martin Luther - was he the first
liturgical historian? - has had his hordes of scholarly successors devoted to the reformation of the Church
after their own scholarly image and likeness.
Invariably these liturgical scholars idealise a particular period of the Church's history, decry all
other eras as corruptions and degenerations, and advocate that all the Church's worship be returned to
conform with the forms of whichever happens to be their favorite period of the Church's past.
But what liturgical historians like Jungmann and Bouyer regarded as so many later distortions, the
traditional Catholic accepts as so many providential and beneficial gains in the organic growth of the
liturgy. Or as Dr. Hull well put it: "Just as the Christian cultus had been enhanced by the adoption of
compatible elements from Judaism and Pagan religions, so too did these corrective responses to the
challenges of heresy have a fertilising and creative effect." (p. 210)
The opposite of orthopraxis is heteropraxis: "false worship". Heresy must naturally express,
preserve and seek to convey itself by heteropraxis. Just as one who enters into the spirit of orthopraxis
becomes Catholic, so too does one caught up in heteropraxis quietly cease to be Catholic.
The Protestant John Henry Newman had become Catholic by the near orthopraxis of his High
Anglican worship, and today millions are quietly becoming non-Catholic thanks to the heteropraxis of the
New Order Mass ordered upon the Church by Pope Paul VI in 1970.
Dr. Hull shows how worship takes natural precedence over doctrine. Just as we worship God
before reasoning about Him, so must liturgy (called theologia prima) always take precedence over dogma
(theologia secunda). God's reality comes first, our faith in Him second.
The Church's traditional liturgies had united her throughout the world and her history until Paul VI
turned his papal power against his own Roman liturgy to impose an entirely artificial New Order.
(Dr. Hull cites the opinion of the 16th century Jesuit theologian Francisco de Suarez that a Pope
would become schismatic "if he were to change all the ecclesiastical ceremonies of the Church that have
been upheld by Apostolic tradition..." (Tract. de Charitate, Disput. No. 12, p. 1).)
In the fifth century St. Prosper of Aquitaine had written "lex supplicandi legem statuat credendi"
("let the law of prayer determine the law of belief"). This was the rule in the Church all the way until it was
explicitly reversed by, believe it or not, Pope Pius XII in his encyclical on the liturgy: "the law of our faith
must establish the law of our prayer"! (Mediator Dei, iii, 52)
This new precedence of doctrine over prayer is fully accepted by today's Catholic "conservatives".
One of the few systematic attempts to present the conservative position to Catholic traditionalists was that
by James Likoudis and Kenneth Whitehead in 1981: The Pope, the Council and the Mass: Answers to the
Questions the "Traditionalists" are Asking. Their position, too, is that "It is to...magisterial documents that
we must look first, as far as the faith is concerned, and not exclusively and in a spirit of suspicion at the
Mass." (p.133)
They expect our Catholic faith henceforward to survive no longer on the Apostolic tradition of
worship in which the Faith has always been lived and reflected upon, but on a series of defined beliefs
celebrated in the ever changing patterns and forms of the "New Mass".

The 'Latin Heresy'.

Dr. Hull introduces us to certain tendencies which have been regular sources of error and distortion
in the Western or Latin half of Christendom: rationalism and centralism.
 The revival of pagan philosphy in the West which began with the Aristotelian revival of the 11th
and 12th centuries led to a redefining of the Church away from the sacramental and towards the juridical.
This coincided with the breach with the Eastern churches. These continued to adhere to the original
sacramental concept of the Church as a communion of churches united by the same Faith and seven
sacraments.
In tandem with rationalising tendencies came an ever stronger centralisation of the Church upon the
Papacy. This was accompanied by a lot of clericalisation and institutionalisation, which was especially
strengthened by the Counter-Reformation, led by the Jesuits.
In the wake of the Counter Reformation, rationalist tendencies ravaged Church life from the 16th
to the 20th centuries. Various scholarly groups schemed for liturgical reforms to return the Church's liturgy
to conform with the liturgy of this or that idealised era of the Church's past.
Most notably the Patristic age was revered by the Jansenists of the 18th century who in their turn
had their admirers among leading advocates of liturgical change in the 1950's, such as Frs. Jungmann and
Bouyer.
In vain did Pope Pius XII strongly condemn the work of these liturgical antiquarians as "a wicked
movement" (Mediator Dei, 68).
These rationalist currents however could not triumph in the Church until a Pope was found willing
to impose them. And before any Pope could do any such thing, the Church had to be totally centralised
upon him, and all Catholics then conditioned to follow the Pope anywhere regardless of tradition.
The replacement of tradition by obedience as the criterion of the true Catholic was the product of
the Counter Reformation.
The Over-Centralisation of the Western Church.
In Chapter 5, Peter's Rome or Caesar's? Dr. Hull outlines how, from Apostolic times, the Roman
church has always been acknowledged in the East as the final court of appeal in the early Church.
Until the 9th century Roman interventions in Eastern ecclesiastical affairs remained at the level of
answers to appeals by this or that orthodox bishop against a heretical or immoral adversary.
Pope Gelasius I (492 - 496) however had declared that "the see of Blessed Peter has the right to loose
what has been bound by the decision of any bishop whatever".
This declaration has never been accepted by the Eastern Orthodox churches. These hold that
legislation binding upon the universal church can only be deceed by an ecumenical council the canons of
which have been ratified by the Pope.
It was Pope Nicholas I (858 - 867), whom Hull describes as "the first papal monarch", who first
attempted to absolutise Pope Gelasius' claim for the papacy. In 861 he told the Byzantine Emperor that
"without the Church of Rome there is no Christianity".
Dr. Hull continues this history of the growth of papal power in Chapter 6, entitled Tightening the
Screws. After the chaotic tenth century, a new era dawned when Pope St. Leo IX (1049 - 1054) and
Nicholas II (1058 - 1061) set about the work of centralisation.
Innocent III (1198 - 1216) repudiated his traditional title of Vicar of Saint Peter in favour of Vicar
of Christ, a title first coined by St. Bernard of Clairvaux.
After the unqualified contentions of papal monarchists like St. Gregory VII (1073 - 1085) and
Boniface VIII (1294 - 1303) that the Roman Pontiff was not subject to the laws of the Church, it was only
natural that the beleaguered Clement V (1305 - 1314) could convince himself that he no longer even
needed Rome to be fully Pope.
This Pope it was that moved the papacy to Avignon, a location more centrally located hence better
for administrative purposes. Thus began the disgraceful era of the Avignon papacy (1309 to 1378) and the
Western Schism (1378 to 1417).
As papal supremacists drew on the pagan legacy of Roman law with its absolutist concepts of
imperial power, "Papal pride and intransigence", according to Dr. Hull, undermined the 14th century
Conciliarist movement. Nevertheless it was this movement which finally rescued the Papacy in 1417 and
made inter-ecclesial reconciliation possible at the Council of Constance and Florence (1438 - 1445).
Papal centralism and use of Roman law was readily copied by secular governments. To such effect
that in the 16th century many of these newly centralised governments were able to impose heresy on whole
Catholic populations.
The 'sacramental' ecclesiology of the early Church was remembered only in an East hostile to an
"irremediably centralised Roman communion". "The lessons of Constance and Florence were all but
forgotten when the Latin Fathers gathered at Trent in 1545 to plan the recovery of what remained of
Western Orthodoxy." (p. 84)
In Chapter 8, The Quest for Uniformity, Dr. Hull continues to show how having lost the valuable
Greek counter-balance to its autocratic tendencies, the papacy after 1054 came increasingly to confuse
unity with uniformity, and launched on a career of imposing Romanisation in the West and Latinisation in
the East.
Obedience and the Crumbling of Tradition.
In Chapter 9, From Tradition to Obedience Dr. Hull outlines how in the wake of the Counter-
Reformation, Catholic tradition came gradually to be ousted by the virtue of obedience as the benchmark
and guarantor of true Catholicism.
The Church's debt to the Jesuits can hardly be exaggerated, but it is upon the Jesuits the blame
must be laid for the steady ousting of the heritage of custom and traditions by 16th century absolutist ideas
of the virtue of obedience.
"I must be as a dead man's corpse without will or judgement". Thus did St. Ignatius of Loyola sum
up the Jesuit ideal of obedience.
Where mediaeval royal power had been limited by custom and the law, from the 16th century
onwards absolutist monarchs ruled through an ever stronger army, civil service and judiciary.
Dr. Hull believes that "Jesuit Counter Reformation absolutism led to a paradoxical relativisation of
the truth". These champion defenders of Catholic truth helped form the "obedient" (i.e. anti-intellectual and
uncritical) Catholic of the mid 20th century who has been such "easy meat" for the wolves of Vatican II.
In this chapter Dr. Hull also discusses how in the 19th century there developed in the Church a
tendency to attribute not only infallibility but also general inerrancy and even impeccability to the Pope.
This breach with Catholic tradition, a breach indeed with reason and even the facts of history is known as
ultramontanism.
If not outright heresy, ultramontanism is at least certainly heterodox. It may be the secret however
of how the mass of Catholics jeopardised their faith and their very salvation by so meekly allowing
Protestant forms to be imposed upon them after 1970.
In 1870 the idea that the Pope could rule without reference to Tradition was simply dismissed by
the Council Fathers at Vatican I. A proposed canon that "If anyone says that the authority of the Pope is so
full that he may dispose of everything by his mere whim, let him be anathema" they rejected as absurd.
Dr. Hull even suggests that 19th century ultramontanism was a forerunner of 20th century
totalitarianism. (p. 131) I think this is a little far-fetched.
More interesting is his discussion of voluntarism - the error which holds that goodness is not
intrinsic but is dependent upon the will of God. Voluntarism says that lying, stealing and murder are evil
not in themselves but because God forbids them.
This error of voluntarism is a feature of the heterodox tradition of Nominalism which passed from
Duns Scotus in the 13th century and William of Ockham in the 14th via Luther in the 16th and Descartes in
the 17th century to our own Pope John Paul II: "...the power to decide what is good and what is evil does
not belong to man, but to God alone." (Veritatis Splendor, 1, 35)
In fact lying, stealing and murder are evils in themselves. They contradict God's own nature as
Goodness and Truth itself, and He is bound by His own nature to forbid them as such.
In Chapter 10, Reformed Catholicism Dr. Hull recounts how the Counter-Reformation got
underway with a series of bureaucratic measures which paradoxically led, albeit 400 years later, to
imposing in the Church the very Protestantism they were meant to avert.
The 1570 codification of the Roman Rite by Pope St. Pius V, from the simple fact that it was the
Church's first ever codification of the immemorial Roman rite of the Mass, could be used as a "precedent"
for the Pauline "reform" of 1970.
In 1588 Pope Sixtus V instituted the ritual centralism of the Counter Reformation by founding a
new Congregation of Rites and Ceremonies. He thereby deprived local bishops and provincial councils of
much of their authority and initiative in cultic matters.
The first Index of Prohibited Books was published in 1559, and onto it in 1661 were placed, there
to remain until 1897, all vernacular translations of the Mass.
Thus with the progress of the Counter Reformation did Catholic life became ever more dependent
upon papal indult rather than upon sacrosanct immemorial custom enjoined by tradition.
In chapter 11, Respectable Religion, Dr. Hull discusses how popular Catholicism crumbled before
the assaults of "two enemy clerical groups, the Jansenists and the Jesuits".
 The Jansenists, as the declared enemies of "superstition" warred against the "pagan" aspects of
Catholic life: "festivals of saints, seasonal processions, confraternities, carnival celebrations, and
pilgrimages..."
Meanwhile the Jesuits killed off Christian Latin by replacing it with Classical Pagan Latin as an
esoteric academic pursuit.
Also, in the 19th century the clergy were heavily involved in the suppression of dialects and local
village traditions.
Dr. Hull spends a bit too much time on this last subject. Nowhere does he seem to have considerd
how the social dislocation caused by the industrial revolution and the beginnings of modern transportation
and communications inevitably made local traditions so much harder to care for let alone to preserve.
In chapter 12, The Cost of Belonging, Dr. Hull regales us with the woes of the Uniates, those
Eastern Christians who, after making their submission to Rome found themselves subject to various
pressures to Latinisation. Until 1913 Latin Catholics were forbidden to receive sacraments in Eastern
Churches while Uniates were encouraged to do vice versa.
In the Far East, permissions to inculturate - i.e. to use local cultural forms and practices where
these do not contradict Catholic teachings - granted in the early 17th century were withdrawn in the early
18th century.

Modernism and Americanism.

In chapter 13, A New Law of Belief Dr. Hull examines how Catholic "tradition" over the past two
centuries quietly ceased to be a living mass of inherited belief and liturgical practice and became instead a
"process" of transmission.
(The foundations of Modernism - Kantian idealism and Hegelian dialectic - passed into the Church
through the works of one Fr. Johann Adam Mohler (1796 - 1838).
"Mohlerian vitalism" always emphasises the process of tradition at the expense of its content. It
was Mohler also who introduced the idea that Tradition is subject to evolution according to the spirit and
needs of each age.
(This is the Modernist recipe for disaster.)
Or as Rahner defined it in his Concise Theological Dictionary of 1965: "Tradition...is the process
whereby... Dogma...is transmitted by the Church...and thereby developed; and the truth thus transmitted."
(p. 507)
An idea repeated in 1988 by Fr. Aviary Dulles against Archbishop Lefebvre: "Tradition is not so
much content as process - a process that is, in its own words, living, creative and community-based. What
Lefebvre dismisses as 'Modernist influence' can therefore be defended ...as a rediscovery of an ancient and
precious heritage. (quoted on p. 210)
Even the author of the papal bull, Ecclesia Dei Afflicta in 1988 reflected Mohler's "living Church"
theory of tradition. Archbishop Lefebvre had failed to "take sufficiently into account the living character of
Tradition, which...progresses in the Church with the help of the Holy Spirit."
What had always been regarded as something essentially old and inherited, and to be preserved as
much as possible, has now become something to be partially recreated in the present.
What we believed has been quietly replaced by how we believed. In perhaps his most insightful and
useful chapter, chapter 14, entitled Pax Americana, Dr. Hull introduces us to that fascinating phenomenon
called Americanism, the "phantom heresy" the existence of which hardly anyone in America has ever even
acknowledged.
The great tragedy of 1945 was that Europe had not liberated itself from tyranny but had been
liberated from without, by America. Europe was torn between the two tyrannies of atheist humanism to the
East and the infinitely more enticing deist humanism of America. Europe had been saved from those who
preached God's non-existence by those who lived His irrelevance.
Just as American money rescued Western Europe so did the wealth of the American church
"rescue", or rather buy, the Vatican. The bankrupt Vatican today depends upon American money. Thus
because the U.S. episcopal conference wants a sop for its feminists, the Vatican is forced to tolerate such
an abomination as altar girls.
Vatican II's amazing Gaudium et Spes was full of praise for the contemporary Western world.
Worst perhaps of all was Dignitatis Humanae, the Council's "Declaration on Religious Liberty", which in
honour of its principal author, Fr. John Courtney Murray S.J., was dubbed the "American Constitution".
 Dr. Hull says that "Americanism historically has proved to be far more lethal to the Faith than
Modernism." (p. 231) A remarkable claim.
A New Western Orthodoxy?
In his Conclusion Dr. Hull seeks to strike a hopeful note. He hopes that Rome will abandon the
heteropraxis of the past 30 years.
His position is that Traditionalists "while submitting to the doctrinal authority of the Pope and
wishing to remain united to him, (are) bound in conscience to disobey all laws made by him that are
manifestly contrary to orthopraxis." (p. 288)
Meanwhile the position of the Western traditionalists, he argues, has become that of the Eastern
Orthodox which is that "effective communion with the Petrine see cannot be restored until the Papacy
repents of its errors and returns to the fullness of Catholic faith and practice." (p. 290)
For "What, after all, was the Pauline reform but a legalistic and arrogant clerical revolt against the
liturgical and disciplinary traditions of the Latin Catholic faithful?" (p. 291)
"Without a doubt, the dissident Lefebvrist congregations and the Orthodox Churches of the East
are now more Catholic in their worship and discipline than the Church in union with the legitimate
successor of Peter." (p. 293)
He hopes that some day soon the Pope will give up today's "utopian and futile attempt to achieve
union with Protestants" (p. 294), and call a Council to restore Catholic tradition. At this Council, hopes
Dr. Hull, he will solemnly promise to act ever more like Peter and never again like Caesar, and thereby
reunite a wayward Rome not only with the remnant of his own Latin traditionalists, but also with the
Orthodox Churches of the East.
How anyone could find enough still Catholic Bishops to make up a quorum for such a Council, I
cannot imagine. Besides, the Modernists have for years been calling for a "Vatican III", if only just to
complete the work of Vatican II and finish the Church off altogether!
The thought that perhaps the Eastern Orthodox have been right all along is a nasty one, and will be
resisted by all of Dr. Hull's potential readers.
But how else can we come to terms with Rome's present abominably anti-Catholic behaviour?
To sum up, this is a scholar's book which I could only recommend for other scholars. It contains
much which would be useful indeed for ordinary Catholics, plus a lot which would be better left out as
merely confusing and distracting scandal.
It needs trimming down but would trim down to a very useful and popular book indeed.

On p. 204, Dr. Hull gives some useful quotations:

1: The customs of God's people and the intitutions of our ancestors are to be considered as laws. And
those who throw contempt upon the customs of the Church ought to be punished as those who disobey
the law of God. - St. Augustine, Epistula ad Casulanum.
(Mos populi Dei, et instituta maiorum pro lege sunt tenenda; et sicut praevaricatores legum
divinarum, ita et contemptores consuetidinum ecclesisticarum coercendi sunt.)

2: Custom has the force of law, abolishes law and is the interpeter of law. - St. Thomas Aquinas,
Summa Theol. Ia IIae, q. 97, a. 3.
(Consuetudo et habet vim legis, et legem abolet, et est legum interpretatrix.)

In about 1987 the Australian people were invited to vote at a Referendum to have freedom of
speech and religion guaranteed in the Australian Constitution. To their everlasting credit the Australian
people returned a resounding 61% "No!" vote. They knew better than to allow their traditions of free
speech and non-persecution of religions to be reduced to a scrap of paper to be torn to pieces by lawyers.
Simply to define is to invite redefining.
 He also examines the dangers inherent in the simple fact of codification: to codify an institution is
to risk handing it over to the lawyers who will reduce it to a set of legal propositions. Perennially tempted
to place the letter of the Law ahead of its spirit (which must always be of justice and truth).
Whoever has the power of interpretation has power, full stop. Judaism, Islam and Protestantism are
"Religions of the Book" ruled by those who interpret their Book, their lawyers: the Rabbis of Judaism, the
Mullahs of Islam and the Pastors of Protestantism. These are priestless religions.
Not so Catholicism. "Woe upon you lawyers!" Our Saviour cried. "You bind up burdens for men's
backs, and lift up not one finger yourselves!"
Our Lord could perhaps have chosen to found His Religion on lawyers. He could have bequeathed
a Book, and left His followers to fight over who had the power to interpret that book. He did not.
He had already instituted a priesthood, the Aaronic priesthood of Moses, and this he now perfected
with His own High Priesthood of that Melchisedech who had first offered the bread and wine of His Holy
Sacrifice of Calvary, the power to offer which He invested in His Twelve Apostles and their successors: the
hierarchy (i.e. "priest rule") of the Pope, bishops and priests of the Catholic Church.

Les rois disposent de leur empire; mais les papes ne peuvent disposer du leur. - Pascal,
Pensee, 812.
Le pape serait-il deshonore, pour tenir de Dieu et de la tradition ses lumieres? et n'est-ce
pas le deshonorer de le separer de cette sainte union? - 813.
La tradizione son'io! - Pius IX (p. 127)
(Quote of Symeon of Thessalonica, in 15th century p. 106.)
113. (In the face of the order of Eugenius IV in 1442 to abolish the Ambrosian liturgy the) people of
Milan answered the papal diktat with a successful public revolt.
124. A brief list of Papal scandals and blunders. Il Duce ha sempre ragione.
147. Quotes Marie-Madeleine Martin that Voltaire and "all the speakers of the Revolutionary assemblies
were products of religious colleges (where) they had all learned to quote Cato and Brutus, to love Roman
pagan antiquity, even in its idolatrous cult of the State and its cruel harshness towards individuals."
148. This general centralisation of Catholic life and worship broke the bond between the faithful and
their proper ritual patrimony.
151. The last (French) diocese to adopt the Roman missal was Orleans in 1875. Liturgy was now
something provided by the hierarchy rather than inherited through the Church.
154. Poland..."castigated as one of the most aliturgical of Catholic nations."
Quotes the heretic Latimer near the end of Henry VIII's reign preaching against "the whole holidays to be
spent miserably in drunkenness, in glossing, in strife, in envy, in dancing, dicing, idleness and gluttony."
(Revolting stories here from W.W.II Yugoslavia).
Newman was infected too, as when he spoke of "episcopal tradition" as opposed to "prophetic
tradition" as objective versus subjective. (200) So that theological speculation today starts not from God
but from Man. (201)
201. Beauduin's bete noire was "the somewhat Monophysite character of the Byzantine liturgy". " We
are not Nestorian enough" he liked to tell priests on his retreats.
207. Congar's "Church never stops innovating" (1976)
208. "I loved the Latin Mass...to be honest, it was intolerable." - Congar.
The idealisation of the practices of the early church, to the point of idolisation.
Historicity or reality are not explicitily denied by the Modernist. He merely deems them of lesser
importance than practical significance today. They treat Orthodoxy not as a heritage to be preserved but as
a goal to be striven for. (212)
Thus have we arrived at today's consummately narcissistic Mass facing the people.
The Western church's subordination since the 16th century of primary theology (the liturgical
tradition) to secondary theology (the dogmatic tradition) has led the disastrous ouster of the former in the
name of the latter in 1970.
In 1893 Archbishop Ireland of Minneapolis, Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore and a Bishop John
Keane attended the World Congress of Religions at Chicago and spoke about Catholicism as a religion on
an equal footing with others. In 1899 Pope Leo XIII addressed his apostolic letter Testem Benevolentiae
to Cardinal Gibbons to denounce what he called Americanism -
Nowhere had the world's bait for the Church been more enticing than in the United States of
America. Surrounded by the booming wealth of the New World in the 19th Century, stimulated by
Protestant bigotry yet suffering from no open legislated discrimination, the Church had grown dramatically
in the U.S.
Free to expand in a tolerant modern democracy, and supported by a strong Papacy which upheld
doctrinal, moral and liturgical orthodoxy, the Church in the U. S. had flourished as never before. 30,000
Protestants each year had become Catholics in the 1920's and this had increased to 130,000 per year in the
1950's.
226. Deplores the "immense Irish silence"" and quotes Day a lot.
290. Institutionalism's juridical and necessarily radically subversive nature. The "pray, pay and obey" of
post-Tridentine institutionalism.
As the thirst for knowledge began to eclipse the appetite for contemplation, a process of
rationalisation set in whereby our worship of God's absolute reality gradually lost precedence to doctrines
about Him.
In this, perhaps a litle wistfully, Dr. Hull notes how "the traditional way of training aspirants to the
priesthood - apprenticeship with an experienced pastor while taking lessons in philosophy and theology
from a local scholar or at a university - gave way, after Trent, to strict, regimented seminaries turning out
batches of professional clerics." (p. 39)
Dr. Hull on p. 75 says that the judicial tortures and burning by the inquisition were "in fact an
innovation of the late twelth century, a direct consequence of the contemporary revival of Roman law and
its standard penalties." This is news to me.
"Clearly the unthinking mass of Catholics of the 1970's were of a very different mettle from those
of Milan in 1442 or Cornwall in 1549." (p. 115. In the face of the order of Eugenius IV in 1442 to abolish
the Ambrosian liturgy the people of Milan answered the papal diktat with a successful public revolt.) By
1970 it had somehow become inconceivable that reforms commanded by a Pope could be harmful to the
Faith.
Christ did not forfeit His sovereign authority to St. Peter who is bound "to feed" and not to starve,
scatter or sow confusion in His flock.
It is thanks to their sheer continuous use that ancient ritual forms convey tradition as living. (197)
Constant or sudden change, such as we suffer today, is the very antithesis of the life of Tradition. "In Hell
the damned will be tormented by unrest... unceasing...change..." (198)
Eastern Orthodoxy makes the same distinction as Latin Catholicism between "Tradition" (infallible
teaching) and "traditions" (ecclesiastical customs and pious beliefs), but in dealing with the latter the
abolitionist mentality is entirely lacking." (p. 204)
In the following chapter by chapter outline, I note what I found particularly interesting.
In chapter 1, entitled A New Law of Prayer Dr. Hull briefly recounts the events in the 1960's
leading to the liturgical catastrophe of 1970.
Dr. Hull continues his brief history of papal centralism in chapter 7, entitled Piety and Power, in
which he outlines various struggles between "arrogant Greeks and ignorant Latins" during the Dark Ages
(7th to 11th centuries) leading to the split of 1054.
All this centralisation entailed legislation which in turn fostered all kinds of creeping ills such as
Rubricism - a preoccupation with validity at the expense of authenticity, Liturgical minimalism - a Jesuit
characteristic arising from their need for greater mobility. The Franciscans and Dominicans had preceded
them in this: "Piety, mysticism and intellectualism had filled the partial liturgical vacuum of the Franciscans
and Dominicans, and would later form the groundwork of Jesuit spirituality." (p. 144)
Dr. Hull quotes lots of Jungmann on liturgical history, tending to discredit the development of the
Roman Rite. Says that a "Rubricism" crept in whereby validity became a more important consideration
than authenticity. How the Missa Lecta, or Missa Solitaria originated as a votive Mass and came in as the
daily Mass in the 9th century, until St. Pius V made it the standard form of the Eucharistic liturgy "in the
face of earlier legislation to the contrary by numerous provincial councils". (p. 143)
Whereas in the Byzantine church the penitent stood with the priest in the body of the church and
faced the iconostasis representing God and the Heavenly Court from whom he sought forgiveness, the
post-tridentine Western penitent entered a private cubicle as if for a merely private matter between himself
and the priest.
Swallows a lot of Bouyerism here; "the Jesuit recipe of liturgical minimalism, mental prayer and
new sentimental devotions" crash-course spirituality" led to "custom degraded by official legislation".
What liturgical historians like Jungmann and Bouyer regarded as so many later distortions, the
traditionalist accepts as so many providential and beneficial gains in the organic growth of the liturgy. "Just
as the Christian cultus had been enhanced by the adoption of compatible elements from Judaism and Pagan
religions, so too did these corrective responses to the challenges of heresy have a fertilising and creative
effect." (p. 210)
But while the Pope had full ruling authority in his own Latin "Patriachate of the West", and Rome
remained always the universal Church's supreme court of appeal, the norms and limits of the Pope's
authority outside the West, i.e. in the East, were laid down at the eastern Council of Sardica in 343.
Popular Catholicism crumbled not only before the the uprooting of populations by the industrial
revolution, and laws spawned by the militant atheism of 1789 but also before the "puritanical expurgations
of the clergy" infected with "the coldness and harshness of Protestantism".
Dr. Hull refers also to the notorious alienation of men in Latin countries from religious practice as
arising from the often prurient investigations of their wives by Jansenistic pastors.
In chapter 15, The Great Hijack Dr. Hull recounts how the Liturgical Movement begun by St. Pius
X in 1903 was perverted. In chapter 16, Ruins in the East, Dr. Hull tells of the woes of the Uniates in the
Twentieth Century.
In chapter 17, The Art of Double Standards, Dr. Hull recounts the Vatican's battles for a few
Eastern traditional liturgies and against its own traditional Western liturgy.
Sed quandoque praecepta praelatorum sunt contra Deum. Ergo non in omnibus praelatis est
obediendum. - S.T. IIa IIae, q. civ, a. v, ad 3. (Sometimes a prelate orders things contrary to God.
Therefore prelates are not to be obeyed in all things.)
Persona Papae potest renuere subesse officio Papae. (The person of the pope can refuse to be
subject to the office of the papacy).
- Cardinal Cajetan.