What Dover could do without effort, most scholars could not do even with the most painstaking labor. When his autobiography, Marginal Comment, first appeared in 1994, I was visiting Dover and his wife Audrey at their home in St. Andrews. With a mischievous smile, he dashed into his study—to emerge a short time later with an inscribed copy. On the flyleaf was a Greek elegiac couplet in which Dover had managed (1) to use in an apposite and humorous way a Greek word whose meaning we had discussed in a co-authored article, disputing its translation with John Finnis; (2) to express pleasure at the collaboration; and (3) to compare the “daring” outspokenness of our article to that of his own memoir—all with not only impeccable meter and style, but also graciousness, wit, and elegance. This in ten minutes . . . .

But note that Nussbaum’s praise of Dover focuses on the major advances made in our understanding of human sexuality by his 1978 book, Greek Homosexuality; bear in mind that this is praise from one author with an interest in deviant sexuality to another.  Her heart bursts forth with this fulsome line: “A life devoted to mastery of such arcane matters illuminated the world for us all.”  The world? Come on, if she had called this book a fine example of the fruits of a life dedicated to free inquiry in pursuit of the truth, I’d be ready to go with her; I’ve not read the book, but I agree with the point in principle. But Dover didn’t illuminate the world with yet another book sexuality. With endless “gender studies” and “queer studies” and “sexuality studies” and “peace studies” and “cultural studies”, classicists and other humanists have lost sight of the truly human and have lost their connection with the world of humane letters that spans the centuries. Dover famously had a tin ear for philosophy; in his commentary on the Symposium he more or less says that Plato was one of the mentally ill few who believe that reality has both a physical and non-physical dimension. If you can only appreciate Plato for his prose style and his dialogues for what they suggest about homosexuality in Athens, you’re probably not the type to salvage funding for the humanities (when the money is needed for government pensions and health-care), let alone to set the world on fire for the truth.

As for the money running dry in England and in Europe – here’s looking at you, progressives. How many humanities programs around the world have you seen endowed with tax dollars? In the United States, the great colleges and universities were built through the philanthropy of those who had prospered in the free market and whose money had not been confiscated by taxation. You want to live in a progressive society, Nussbaum, with endless sexual license and government regulation? I’d get your REF report ready.

Isabella was a woman of great faith, an exemplary wife, a queen with a unique apostolic zeal, a great Christian. She gave permission to Colombo to cross the ocean only on condition that his primary purpose was to evangelize the lands he might discover. I believe and hope that as soon as possible she rise to the honor of the altars. I confess that often as Archbishop of Granada, especially when I had some important problem to deal with, I would go to pray at the tomb of Isabella, which is there in the Cathedral, and I always felt I had been helped.

Cardinal George prefaced his remarks by noting that as USCCB president he does not have jurisdiction or authority over other bishops, but nonetheless has “some moral authority, without any kind of jurisdiction or any sort of real authority.”

How many ways can you say it? That was good stuff. But I’m less excited about what Cardinal George went on to say – that you can’t just disinvite the President of the United States. On the one hand, there’s something true about what he said; it’s just not the done thing: publicly to invite the biggest muckety muck and then publicly to disinvite him. It wouldn’t just remove the honor, but would add an insult or slight as well. We’re talking, however, about the done thing, not about the requirements of morality. Notre Dame would go a long way in reparation of the scandal already caused by rescinding the invitation. Yet I’m confident that they won’t withdraw the invitation because as the kind of folks who would issue an invite to Obama in the first place, they’re incapable of violating every protocol in reaching the conclusion and then admitting, before the whole world, that they were wrong.

Romae in Italia vi Kal. Aprilis

Dear students and scholars interested in the Latin language and things,

As you can see the calendar has not favored our summer projects. A broken thigh followed by an infinity of complications both here and in the USA has totally impeded my recovery, so, in fact, I am many months late.

Some of my best friends and advisers have given me counsel to cancel the summer school this year. It is simply too late to calmly and intelligently organize the matter and the layout of summer school, which you know is extremely dear to me.

I realize how much money, time, attention, concern you have reserved for the summer school. It breaks my heart to disappoint you and fail in something that I would never have wanted to fail in. The participants in the Academia Romae Latinitas from October until May have long since been informed of this situation; now it is your bitter turn.

I wish there were something that I could do to compensate for your losses and troubles, but this is physically impossible.

I thought I could wait it out and do everything normally, but I see that is not workable. The suggestion was made about a one-half or partial summer school, but this I find more frustrating than anything else.

So I am trusting your fraternal comprehension and extreme tolerance in this way. If you never want to have anything to do with me or my projects in the future, I respect your decision.

I hope we will meet some day and have a glorious summer Latin celebration. Take care and let me know what you really think.

Sincerely, Reginald Foster.

Note from transcriber (Daniel McCarthy): Please pass this letter on to interested parties. Reggie has asked how people might best communicate their responses to him. Vincent Drago has agreed to print and take emails to Reggie in hospital: vincentdrago – at – hotmail.com

So if Satan was ignorant of what was going on with the Blessed Virgin, how, pray tell, would he find out? Would he send out periodic patrols of demons to gather the word on the street? It doesn’t make any sense to me. The only way I can see it making sense, short of my original understanding, is if God Himself were to make information available to the demons for the purposes of testing certain folks. Other than that, I just don’t see how demons could “learn” things other than by pure intuition which results in immediate knowledge of all propositions verifiable as true up to the present time. The one caveat being that they don’t know all the true propositions, they’re not omniscient, because they’re temporal and free will being what it is, the future is undetermined.

Does someone else see a way to make sense of what St. Ignatius of Antioch said?

Which got me thinking: in this age of school shootings (they seem to be the plumpest of targets), is it prudent to take measures to be prepared in the event of such an incident? Of course, despite the sensation that these horrible events cause, they’re extremely rare; it would be like winning an awful lottery to find yourself at the center of one of them. But since Mark Steyn’s point is so often that individuals ought to take responsibility for themselves (and their helpless neighbors, as the occasion demands), is there anything that can reasonably be done to prepare for the unthinkable?

For example, though it would probably defy every regulation in the book, it seems perfectly possible to keep a firearm (I’m not taking about an M60) in one’s office. If you were in your office when a shooting breaks out, you’d at least be in some position to defend yourself and even to be proactive in stopping the shooter. But I don’t see that there is much you could do in the classroom; even if you teach in a place where everyone wears suits, carrying a concealed weapon in such circumstances would almost certainly be cumbersome or a nuisance.

But about keeping a gun in your own office, tucked away, assuming that you’re not subject to random office inspections and so forth, is this the move of a prepared individual or is it sufficient to say, “Such a thing is so unlikely to happen that the more cost-effective course is simply to ignore the possibility altogether.” Would it be paranoid? Or would it be the embodiment of that preparedness to take care of himself that the true conservative should rush to embrace?

You get the impression in reading Steyn’s America Alone that he would favor complete freedom to carry weapons, even on airplanes. Then, if some terrorist wants to try his chances against a bunch of Bible thumpin’, gun-clinging Americans, he’d better hope he can draw his Glock faster than his intended victim. This approach does have the advantage that, when you go down, you can probably go down shooting, but I rather doubt that it would increase the overall safety of our public places. I just don’t know.

Anyway, I’d liked to hear your thoughts: should (conservative) educators invest in firearms? Or do events like the Virginia Tech shooting not merit such a response?

Habemus Papam!

“Es war einmal ein Kaiser”
(Joseph Roth, 1928)

Some years ago, Dr. Alice von Hildebrand told me an anecdote about her husband’s presence in the crowd in Rome at a canonization ceremony. I do not remember the saint concerned, but that really does not matter. The point of her story was that Dr. Dietrich von Hildebrand was in the company of the great Church historian, Ludwig von Pastor, and that that very fine scholar displayed a face running with tears.

Pastor’s face was running with tears because he was a believer and his belief had been confirmed anew. Here was a man whose forty volume History of the Popes was filled with accounts of just how much shame Catholics of all sorts—pontiffs, emperors, kings, barons, bourgeois, and peasant farmers—could bring upon the Mystical Body of Christ due to their deep human flaws. And yet here was a man who had in front of him a contemporary selection of those same flawed individuals all giving public testimony to the fact that Catholics did not have to be so bad, and that the Church was more than the sum of her fallen parts. Truth and holiness triumphed at that canonization ceremony, placing all the seemingly endless cynicism and betrayal Pastor’s research revealed into their proper perspective. And tears were his spontaneous reaction to such a joyful fact.

This story could not help but come to my mind as I write this piece from Rocco’s with tears in my eyes. My work involves adding my own humble contribution to what we know of Church History. I, like Pastor, clamber through seemingly endless examples of Catholic cynicism and betrayal to do so. But the truth and the holiness of the Church often shine through the darkness, and when they do I am wont to respond in the same way that he did.

Truth and holiness came to me today in the form of the pope’s letter to the episcopacy (Thursday, March 12th, 2009) explaining and defending his lifting of the excommunications of the four bishops consecrated for the SSPX in 1988. After reading it, all I can say, with tears in my eyes, is habemus papam! We have a pope: a pontiff concerned, as he himself clearly and distinctly says in this document, for the truth about the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; a supreme pastor filled with zeal for the truth about Jesus Christ, and Him crucified and resurrected from the dead. We have a good pope; a high priest who fills me with hope for the future of the Church when there seems to be little if any grounds for hope in any other realm. If this is not a reason for me to shed tears of joy I see no other grounds that I could ever have for doing so.

Allow me to make two “qualifications” when I shout my joyful, tearful, habemus papam! The first of these is that I am in no way claiming that we have somehow not had a “real” pope from the days of the Council until today. I am not now and never have been a sedevacantist. Moreover, despite my many and often quite intense criticisms of John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, and John Paul II, I never argued that there was nothing decent that they did. Nor did I ever state that these pontiffs were personally bad men. I even had my “habemus papam moments” with each of them as well.

Still, I would be lying to the world and to myself if I were to argue that those “habemus papam moments” were the same as I feel today. Obviously, I have not been a thrilled spectator of the pontificates following the reign of Pius XII, the last of which, that of John Paul II, I myself once labeled the worst in history. I am a Catholic, I accepted them, I obeyed them, I appreciated whatever was said and done under them for the Faith in general—and, under John Paul II, for the traditionalist cause in particular. Nevertheless, my response to these Vicars of Christ was with my head, while my response to Benedict XVI is with my head, my heart, and my whole soul.

Perhaps I have said so in these pages before, but I think it bears repeating that my wholehearted response to Benedict began the evening in 1996 that I met him when he was Cardinal Ratzinger on the street outside the simple Roman trattoria called Mario’s in Trastevere. My party had just left the restaurant, my friend and colleague at the Roman Forum, Fr. Richard Munkelt, recognized him, and we stopped and chatted with him out there in the little Via del Moro for a while. My wife then asked his blessing for our one-year old son, Nicholas, which he happily gave. His intelligence, simplicity, pastoral graciousness, and—dare I say it?—his tremendous sincerity very much impressed me at the time.

This impression was confirmed and turned into a real feeling of love on my part when I was in Rome shortly after his election in the spring of 2005. I ran to St. Peter’s after attending a Traditional Mass my first Sunday back in the city in order to hear him speak at the time of the Angelus. Irrational as it may sound, I immediately knew that my feelings on the Via del Moro were justified when I listened to him. Why? Because it was exactly that same voice—-just as intelligent, simple, pastoral, and sincere—that had spoken to us and blessed my child outside Mario’s. Habemus papam, I thought, and I cheered my guts out and cried.

Then came Summorum pontificum, the lifting of the excommunications, and finally, today, this letter which I have in front of me as I write. Behold the man; the same man! An intelligent man, simple, gracious, pastoral, utterly and totally open and sincere, leaving not the shadow of a doubt in my mind that this document was written by him and him alone.

My readers cannot know what I heard in Trastevere in 1996 and in St. Peter’s Square in the spring of 2005, but they can pick up this 2009 piece addressed to the bishops of the world and read it to see what I mean. Despite what the world press may say about it, this document is not at all primarily about Holocaust, Holocaust denial, and papal errors of judgment. On the contrary, its primary concern is loving, pastoral care for the whole of the misled human race. It tells the tale of a conscientious, believing preacher—the pope himself—hunting for words to address Roman seminarians while burdened down with the terrible personal woes occasioned by the events of the last month or more; a preacher discovering new meaning in a passage of St. Paul regarding Christians tearing one another apart like wild beasts, as well as inspiration in the Marian feast of the day, as he set about fulfilling his homiletic task. It tells the tale of a man of the highest office—the pope himself—who feels deeply a manifold set of personal responsibilities in undertaking his public duties: an obligation to reach out to traditionalists like ourselves who have called out to him repeatedly for fatherly help, and who continue to be unjustly treated today as in the past; an obligation to reach out specifically to an SSPX that remains in an unsettled canonical position and is rightly disturbed about the errors of supporters of Vatican II who act as though the Church had no history before 1962; an obligation to reassure other believers upset by parochial, short-sighted tendencies within that same Society; an obligation to find nuanced ways to bring the message of Jesus crucified and resurrected simultaneously to a moribund Christendom, to Moslems and Jews who treat conversion as though it meant annihilation of their very being, and to an atheistic and agnostic world going to hell in a hand basket and yet “smiling as it dies”. Most importantly, it tells the personal tale of a holy man—our reigning pontiff—who needs to warn all of us that we cannot undertake any apostolic activity with any hope of success if we do not love one another; a man of charity who does indeed see some bitterness and closed-mindedness in our traditionalist circles, but much more of it in the ranks of that segment of the episcopacy, clergy, and laity which somehow feels that the SSPX is the one sole group with which the pope can open no dialogue and for which he can display no pastoral Christian love. When I read this, I see the truth and holiness of the Catholic Church before me, and I enthusiastically say habemus papam, like I have never said it before.

I noted above that I had a second qualification to make while shouting out these words with tear-stained face, and that is the fact that my love is not the love of a love-struck teenager. There are ideas expressed by Joseph Ratzinger, now gloriously reigning as Pope Benedict XVI, with which I do not agree. There are actions taken by the current Pope that I wish he had not taken, and others that I wish he would and that I doubt he will. If I am correct in disagreeing with him on certain thoughts and deeds, then there is still much prayer that I must make for him and much to be fearful of in the future. If I am wrong, which is always more than possible, my prayers will never go wasted.

Whatever happens, I think that it would be well for me—as well as for my fellow traditionalists—always to keep continuing disagreements and fears in proper perspective. What helps me to do so is a short story penned in 1928 for Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) by his tragic, fellow Jewish Austrian writer Joseph Roth (1894-1939), entitled Es war einmal ein Kaiser (There was once an Emperor). This is now to be found under the name Seine k.und k. apostolische Majestät (His Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty) in a collection called Deutschland Erzählt, republished in 1998 by Fischer Verlag.

Zweig and Roth, along with Karl Kraus (1874-1936), another great Jewish literary figure of the era, all regretted the passing of the old Hapsburg Monarchy and the petty democratic politicians and totalitarian dictators dominating the interwar period. Roth, in this moving little piece, recounts his standing guard as a soldier at the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna in 1916 at the death of Franz Josef and compares it with his visit to watch the Kaiser leave for summer vacation from the same site in happier days before World War One. Both experiences reminded him of the fact that this man really was an emperor and not a cheap vote-catcher or miserable tyrant. Roth knows that nostalgia tempts him to think that life was untroubled under the Kaiser’s rule, but he fights this off and makes it clear that this was not the case: there were difficulties and mistakes in “the good old days” as well as the bad new ones. Nevertheless, cold though it sometimes might have been, the sun did shine under the old man’s Hapsburg scepter. And one can see that Roth wishes that it could shine again, blemishes and all. Flawed as they were, the old days were undeniably better.

Es war einmal ein Kaiser is helpful to me because I know that I, too, in wicked times like our own, am tempted to look back on the Church’s past and think that everything was wonderful under the reigns of its greatest popes. Still, my historical research has taught me that this was never the case. There were blemishes and errors, even catastrophic ones, even under the best of pontiffs, even when saints ruled over the Mystical Body of Christ. But the sun, however cold it might have been, did indeed shine when they were there. And would that that sunshine might come again! Perhaps even to be strengthened through the insights obtained in the intervening period of storm.

Dear friends, I wish you would believe me when I say that the sun is shining again. Unlike Roth, who never had the opportunity to say es gibt jetzt noch einmal einen Kaiser, “there is now an Emperor again”, we Traditionalists can rejoice in saying habemus papam: not just a legitimate pope, but a pope open to our concerns, filled with love for us, and in our own day. We can now say habemus papam not just with our head, but with our whole heart and soul as well.

Still, in doing so, we must always keep in mind that this does not mean that we are now inhabiting the New Jerusalem. This does not mean the end of struggle. This does not mean a pontificate where the lion will lie down happily with the lamb. We have our work for the years to come cut out for us. And to underline this sober reality, I end with a citation from an article I wrote for Seattle Catholic on April 20, 2005 entitled “Two Popes, Saint Benedict, and the Soul of the West“, not one word of which I would change today.

Fellow traditionalists, the Holy Spirit has given us a new reason for hope with Pope Benedict XVI, first and foremost with respect to the cause of the Mass. Those hopes will, however, only be realized through terrible turmoil. I am convinced that a brutal battle for the soul of Christendom, greater than any we have witnessed over the past forty years, is about to commence, under the leadership of a man who knows the enemy all the better from having once been on the inside of its camp. This will be a war of attrition, a war in the Vatican, diocesan, and parish trenches. We must pray that the Holy Father stays the course in fighting on those battlefields that he already has spotted and reconnoitered, and that he will be still further awakened to the full nature and extent of the conflict before him. We need to send the word over there, to Rome, that we will be behind him if only he will lead; that we will not leave the trenches until the war is over—over there, over here, and everywhere.

But the Pope was absolutely right to have said what he did: it is quite reasonable to think that condoms would exacerbate the problem. Now to make such a claim, as we saw from the world’s reaction yesterday, sends people into a frenzy. They appear to understand the Pope’s words in the following way. The Pope was claiming that if a given couple has sex with a correctly used condom they are more likely to pass the AIDS virus between them than if they had sex without a condom. Such a claim is, of course, patently absurd and it is ridiculous to think that the Pope had such a claim in mind.

So what was the Pope saying? I was fortunate last semester to hear a talk by a professor of economics in which he gave an economic analysis of the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. The substance of his talk was an explanation of the way in which ready access to contraception (and abortion) increases promiscuity as well as unwanted pregnancies. The first claim – that ready access to contraception increases promiscuity – should be almost a priori obvious. But the latter and more interesting claim is interesting and substantive, and is supported by statistical evidence. (I’m happy to get the specifics from this professor, if anyone wants them; just email.) A study found that when a Planned Parenthood center opened, the rate of uwanted pregnancy increased in the area around the clinic. Setting aside unwanted pregnancy, the spread of STDs would have increased for the same reason.

The question of AIDS and condoms in Africa is not what happens in an individual instance of “successful” condom sex (when it is worn correctly, doesn’t break, etc.), but how ready access to contraception would influence the sexual behavior of the population at large. The economic angle – incentives and disincentives – is that condoms remove disincentives to promiscuity (unwanted pregnancy, STDs). Yet once we’ve encouraged greater promiscuity by instilling the belief thanks to the condoms that sex is safe, we also have to consider the impact of the disincentive to use condoms: sex with a condom is less pleasurable than sex without one. Thus, people sometimes have sex without condoms because they also know that the woman is not always fertile. So when you increase the rate of promiscuity generally, you also increase those times when promiscuous, condomless sex happens. (I suppose that the situation becomes more complicated if you consider just the population who know that they already have the AIDS virus; you would think that they would, for fear of spreading the disease, have stronger incentives to engage in sex only with condoms.)

In short, the idea is that if now 1 in 10 sex acts are safe and condoms from Spain raise that number to 8 in 10, you’re still in the hole if your initial promisicuity rate was 1000 (900 instances unsafe) and it becomes, say, 4600, for you now have 920 “unsafe” sex acts. Of course, I’m just making those numbers up to show the possibility. And the Pope’s words – whether he said “even” or “risks” (what’s the difference, really, anyway?) – are cautioning against just such a possibility.

Even if it were the case that the number of unsafe sex acts would be reduced, it is still nearly morally certain that contraception – I’d like to use an f-word here for the sake of a pun, but that would be in bad taste – really messes with society. I’m sorry to say something nice about First Things, but Mary Eberstadt had a nice article there in the August/September issue entitled “The Vindication of Humanae Vitae.” It just goes to show that you could give a very utilitarian argument for the benefits of adhering to this hocus-pocus that the Catholics called the “natural law”: humans flourish on a societal level when they live in accordance with the natural law. So even conceding that you could reduce the number of unsafe sex acts, you’d then have to contend with the damage caused by increased promiscuity, the blame for which your typical liberal antagonist will never accept.

As a further point beyond the concern over AIDS, condoms do little to prevent against the transmission of some STDs. HPV, for instance, is spread through genital contact. A quotation from the CDC’s website: “Protection against genital ulcer diseases and HPV depends on the site of the sore/ulcer or infection. Latex condoms can only protect against transmission when the ulcers or infections are in genital areas that are covered or protected by the condom. Thus, consistent and correct use of latex condoms would be expected to protect against transmission of genital ulcer diseases and HPV in some, but not all, instances.”

(Diogenes take on the story was, as usual, creative and diverting.)

I have said all of this, of course, speaking only to the utility of using condoms to “fight AIDS” in Africa. Even if it were established that they would be very beneficial in stopping the spread of the disease across the population, we would never be morally justified in endorsing their use. All serious Catholic commentators agree on this last point; I just hope that they would look more closely at the supposed utility of condoms, loudly trumpeted by all the wrong people.

Ut Christiani, ita et Romani sitis.

This is ex dictis Sancti Patricii, Book of Armagh, folio 9. “As you are Christians, so ought you also to be Romans.”

This is amazing; from the old old Roman Breviary: “Ajunt enim, íntegrum quotídie Psaltérium, una cum Cánticis et Hymnis ducentísque oratiónibus, consuevísse recitáre, tercénties per dies síngulos fléxis génibus Deum adoráre, ac in quálibet Hora diéi canónica cénties se crucis signo muníre.” “They say that it was his custom to repeat every day the whole Book of Psalms, together with canticles and hymns, and two hundred prayers; that he bent his knees to God in worship three hundred times every day, and that he made on himself the sign of the Cross an hundred times at each of the seven canonical hours.”

Between Bacci and Foster was a towering figure among the official Latinists of the Roman Curia, the Abbot Carlo Egger of the Canons Regular of the Lateran Congregation of the Most Holy Savior. A holy and gracious man from Tyrolean Italy, he was a gentleman to his fingertips and held his students spellbound by his wit and erudition. He went home to the Lord not long ago, but will never be forgotten by those who had the honor of knowing him.

Doesn’t that make you want to know more about the guy?

On Sundays or feasts of precept, the law of abstinence or of abstinence and fast or a fast only ceases, except during Lent, nor is the vigil anticipated; likewise it ceases on Holy Saturday afternoon.

What does this mean? The Lenten fast also holds on Sundays? But the earlier The Glories of the Catholic Church had said: “These rules regard the days of fasting; but as to those that are only days of abstinence, such as the Sundays in Lent, where meat is prohibited, and the Fridays throughout the year, we are only obliged to abstain from flesh on those days, but nowise confined to one meal.” What gives?

But I should set 1252#4 in the context of the rest of 1252, which says:

#1 The law of abstinence only must be observed every Friday.
#2 The law of abstinence together with fast must be observed every Ash Wednesday, every Friday and Saturday of Lent, each of the Ember Days, and the vigils of the Pentecost, the Assumption of the God-bearer into heaven, All the Saints, and the Nativity of the Lord.
#3 The law of fast only is to be observed on all the other days of Lent.
#4 On Sundays or feasts of precept, the law of abstinence or of abstinence and fast or a fast only ceases, except during Lent, nor is the vigil anticipated; likewise it ceases on Holy Saturday afternoon.

First of all notice, that both Friday and Saturday during Lent are given as days of fast and abstinence. Did a subsequent indult release the universal Church from abstaining on Saturdays? Or only in America?

How does any of this square with the material I cited yesterday? Interestingly – though I guess it’s not that surprising – there doesn’t appear to be harmony between the articles in the Encyclopaedia on “Lent” and “Fast”. The article on “Fast” is very particular about how to go about it during Lent, but says nothing about Sundays. But the article on “Lent” mentions indults: “But, what more particularly regards Lent, successive indults have been granted by the Holy See allowing meat at the principal meal, first on Sundays, and then on two, three, four, and five weekdays, throughout nearly the whole of Lent.” Still, if we had only the 1917 Code to judge by, there’s no indication that the fast ceases on Sundays, even if we can see how the use of meat came to be permitted by indult, at least at the principal meal.

Just to mix things up even more, here’s an excerpt I found from A Catechism of the Catholic Religion (1889):

421. What are we commanded by the Second Commandment of the Church?

We are commanded by the Second Commandment to observe the days of fasting and abstinence appointed by the Church.

422. Which are Fast-days? The Fast-days are:

1. The Forty Days of Lent—that is, every day from Ash-Wednesday to Easter, Sundays excepted, 2. The Ember Days—that is, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday at the beginning of each of the four seasons; 3. The Vigils or Eves of certain Feasts; 4. The Fridays of Advent.

In most parts of North America there are five Vigils— viz., Christmas Eve, Easter Eve, Eve of Pentecost or Whit-Saturday, the Eve of the Assumption, and the Eve of All Saints.

423. Is it sufficient to abstain from flesh-meat on these fast-days?

No; we must also not eat more than one meal, and that not before noon. But a small collation at night is not forbidden.

424. Who are bound to fast?

All Christians who have completed the age of twenty-one are bound to fast, unless excused by some just cause.

425. When are we commanded to abstain from flesh-meat?

We are commanded to abstain from flesh-meat, unless dispensed: 1. On all Fridays and Saturdays (Christimas-day excepted); 2. On the Sundays of Lent; and 3. On all fast-days.

Our holy mother the Church has judged it expedient to mitigate the severity of this ancient and general law, in modern times, by dispensations which vary somewhat, according to the different conditions of life, in various countries. In virtue of those for the United States, 1. Saturday is not a day of abstinence unless it be also a fast-day; 2. Meat is allowed on all the Sundays of Lent, without restriction as to times; 3. On some other days each week in Lent, to be annually appointed for each diocese by the Bishop, meat is also allowed at the dinner or principal meal. But when meat is so used by dispensation at the principal meal on a fast-day or on a Sunday in Lent, fish cannot be used at the same meal. Every one is bound to conform to the regulations and the practice approved of by the Bishop or ecclesiastical superior of his diocese.

Here’s the specific section.

If you’re still reading this post, my apologies, for I haven’t shed any light, but have only succeeded in confusing myself. I think it’s clear that we’re not obliged to fast on Sundays, though I still don’t understand what Canon 1252#4 is saying. It has, moreover, been interesting to see what the spirit of the fast was: one meal and that meal not before noon and generally not taken in the evening.

I found the beginnings of specific, not too long ago regulations here, but they don’t go into enough detail. Another presentation of the Second Commandment of the Church here. From the Irish Ecclesiastical Record, here is a long entry devoted to questions regarding the Lenten fast; the date is 1880 and it also speaks specifically to regulations in Ireland (not surprisingly).

Utamur ergo parcius,
Verbis, cibis, et potibus,
Somno, jocis, et arctius
Perstemus in custodia.

I’m trying to find accounts – book chapters, articles, etc. – about the experiences of Catholics before the Lenten fast was done away with altogether. I’m especially interested in the subjective side of it, I mean, how they thought about it, what kinds of things they ate; did they get every ounce out of their collations, or just stick to one meal and nothing besides? did they stay up until midnight on Saturday night to eat a snack?

I haven’t found anything like what I’m looking for yet, but I did find some interesting material about the nature of the Lenten fast in the bad old days. The article on “Lent” at the Catholic Encyclopaedia provides a useful synopsis of how things stood in 1910. And they appear to have stood more strictly than they did whenever the current standards for the “traditional” Lenten fast were fixed!

I also found some nice things in The Glories of the Catholic Church: The Catholic Christian Instructed in Defense of His Faith. The book is Catholic apologetics via question & answer. Here is one such exchange:

Q. What are the rules prescribed by the Catholic Church with regard to eating on fasting days ?

A. 1st. The Church prohibits all flesh-meat on fasting days; and in Lent eggs also and cheese: formerly wine was prohibited; but this prohibition, by a contrary custom, has been long since laid aside. [Deo gratias!] 2d. The Church allows her children but one meal on fasting days; besides which, custom has introduced a small collation at night. 3d. The meal which the Church allows on fasting days must not be taken till toward noon: formerly, for the first twelve hundred years of the Church, the meal was not to be taken in Lent before the evening; and on other fasting days not till three o’clock in the afternoon. These rules regard the days of fasting; but as to those that are only days of abstinence, such as the Sundays in Lent, where meat is prohibited, and the Fridays throughout the year, we are only obliged to abstain from flesh on those days, but nowise confined to one meal.

Bet you can’t tell me why the name “collation” for the meal taken in the evening? I was actually thinking about that earlier this week: how in the world, I thought, does collatio have anything to do with a meal? The Catholic Encyclopaedia is Johnny on the Spot:

As this evening drink, when first tolerated in the ninth-century monasteries, was taken at the hour at which the “Collationes” (Conferences) of Abbot Cassian were being read aloud to the brethren, this slight indulgence came to be known as a “collation”, and the name has continued since.

Try that one at a (traddie Catholic) party!

The bit about the restriction on eggs and cheese is also interesting. Again, the Cath. Encyc.:

St. Gregory writing to St. Augustine of England laid down the rule, “We abstain from flesh meat, and from all things that come from flesh, as milk, cheese, and eggs.” This decision was afterwards enshrined in the “Corpus Juris”, and must be regarded as the common law of the Church. Still exceptions were admitted, and dispensations to eat “lacticinia” were often granted upon condition of making a contribution to some pious work. These dispensations were known in Germany as Butterbriefe, and several churches are said to have been partly built by the proceeds of such exceptions. One of the steeples of Rouen cathedral was for this reason formerly known as the Butter Tower. This general prohibition of eggs and milk during Lent is perpetuated in the popular custom of blessing or making gifts of eggs at Easter, and in the English usage of eating pancakes on Shrove Tuesday.

And now you’ve got a conversation starter while at your next Easter Egg hunt! The Cath. Encyc. goes on to note:

Other mitigations of an even more substantial character have been introduced into Lenten observance in the course of the last few centuries. To begin with, the custom has been tolerated of taking a cup of liquid (e.g., tea or coffee, or even chocolate) with a fragment of bread or toast in the early morning. But, what more particularly regards Lent, successive indults have been granted by the Holy See allowing meat at the principal meal, first on Sundays, and then on two, three, four, and five weekdays, throughout nearly the whole of Lent. Quite recently, Maundy Thursday, upon which meat was hitherto always forbidden, has come to share in the same indulgence.

So I’m beginning to get the impression that Leo XIII wouldn’t have been cool with the massive NY strip that I had at my main meal this evening. But, boy, if you knock out milk and eggs, too, you’re really down to just . . . bread.

This is all very hard for someone like me to compute, someone who considers it a black fast when only one type of meat is served at a meal. I’m (partly) joking, of course, but wow, there is some considerable room for tightening what happens during the “traditional” Lenten fast, at least as far as this group of traditionalists has understood it amongst themselves.

I’ll wrap up this post with another Q/A from The Glories of the Catholic Church, something to add to the conversation in this post by Clara:

Q. What do you think of preparing for Lent by a carnival of debauchery and excess? [Yeah, uh, this question is gonna go over well!]

A. I think it a relic of heathenism infinitely opposed to the spirit of the Church. The very name of Shrovetide in the language of our forefathers, signifies the season or time of confession; because our ancestors were accustomed, according to the true spirit of the Church, to go to confession at that time, that so they might enter upon the solemn fast of Lent in a manner suitable to this penitential fast.

In 1843, [Peter Richard Kenrick] became Bishop of St. Louis. Four years later, when St. Louis was raised to archdiocesan status, Kenrick became an archbishop. Most bishops choose episcopal mottos like “Love One Another” or “Carry Your Cross.” Kenrick’s was Noli Irritare Leonem (“don’t bother the lion”).

That about takes the cake, me thinks. Too bad that this same bishop was on the wrong side of the Faith: he opposed the decree of infallibility during the First Vatican Council. At any rate, read McNamara’s whole post, it’s good stuff.

Adésto, Dómine, supplicatiónibus nostris, et concéde: ut hoc solémne jejúnium, quod animábus corporibúsque curándis salúbriter institútum est, devóto servítio celebrémus.

Hearken unto our prayers, O Lord, and grant that we may celebrate this solemn fast, which was salutarily instituted for healing our souls and bodies, with faithful submission.

Notice that unless we’re actually fasting during Lent, we’re not living in harmony with the Church’s public prayer, which makes frequent reference to fasting. We might in some sense call giving up (e.g.) television for Lent “fasting”, but then where is the healing of the body of which this prayer speaks? This word in the prayer is striking: corporibusque. Since most of us (and I can speak with experience for the gentlemen in this august Society) probably eat more than we ought, the Lenten fast is, apart from its primary role in the realm of the spirit, a salutary, healthful (salubriter), yearly corrective by which the Church (when she did insist upon it) helps our bodies also. If you went into the Lenten fast thinking that your primary goal was to lose weight, that would be unfortunate. But I think that this prayer indicates that we needn’t be upset if we should chance to lose weight during Lent, especially weight which was the consequence of overindulgence in the year past. This is another example of the wonderful way in which the Catholic religion embraces the whole of man’s life and promotes human flourishing in both the spiritual and physical realms.

In an address there last summer [Williamson] praised Pope Pius IX’s encyclical Quanta Cura of 1864, a considered analysis of the ills of Modernism, a liberal Catholic movement of the era.

Good thing we got that one behind us! And what have the liberal Catholics been up to since?

We’re all familiar with the meaning . . . [of] the word “gospel” …: it means an incontrovertible truth, one that is axiomatically directive of human action; as the Oxford English Dictionary expresses it, “a statement to be implicitly received.” The OED cites examples of that usage going back to the 13th century.

Behind the usage was a common social understanding according to which the Gospels were regarded as the truest thing any human being had access to. This was because the Gospels, as Dei Verbum 11 puts it, “have God as their author,” or again, in Hopkins’s rendering of St. Thomas, “Truth himself speaks truly, or there’s nothing true.”

So when was the last time you heard a homily that urged you to accept the Gospel accounts as true — true because it is God who is speaking therein? You’re probably more familiar with the backfield shift the homilist routinely performs when he climbs into the pulpit: “Luke put these words in Jesus’ mouth because the Gentile community he was writing for wouldn’t have understood or accepted Matthew‘s version …” You get the gist.

Now I wonder if this near-universal hermeneutical feint will eventually give rise to a common social understanding with secondary effects on our language. Perhaps fifty years from now a judge will pen the phrase, “It is practically gospel in the lower courts …” and the word gospel will be understood to mean “a falsehood that makes us feel good about ourselves.”

I wonder if it’s a coincidence, I say, because the reading in the old Roman breviary is from Augustine’s De consensu evangelistarum on Matthew 8:5-13, the curing of the centurion’s child. Who are the two evangelists considered therein? Matthew (of course) and Luke.

As I was reading this passage in the Breviary this morning, a thought similar to Diogenes’ had come into my head. We’re very far today from taking Augustine’s approach to the Gospels. We may claim to believe, in line with the eminent CCCCCC (that is, the, umm, Catechism of the Catholic Church), that the Gospels are historically inerrant, but the tradition, especially as we see it in a work like Augustine’s, affirms what sounds even stronger, that they can be reconciled in all particulars. Perhaps that amounts to the same thing as historical inerrancy, but it’s nice from time to time to remember Augustine’s project, one that hasn’t been “cool” for a long time now.

So I wonder if Diogenes reads the old breviary? I wouldn’t be surprised.