On the Coronation of King Charles III

Since the Act of Union in 1707, there have been only thirteen British monarchs, the first being Queen Anne.  The current royal family, if we discuss direct and not remote ancestry, dates back only to William of Orange, who was king from 1689 to 1702, prior to the Act of Union.  Anne was his successor and reigned until 1714.  She was in ill health most of the time.

Had the throne passed to Anne's nearest relatives, it would have gone to a member of the House of Stuart, who were Catholic. Anne was an Anglican, but she was the daughter of Charles II who became Catholic on his deathbed and who harbored strong Catholic sympathies, in spite of living a wild life, his entire life.  Indeed, his father Charles I was a High Church Anglican who teetered on that edge himself.  George I was chosen over 60 Stuart claimants simply because the Whigs had taken control of parliament, and he was a protestant.

I note this as people not familiar with the English monarchy, or perhaps more accurately the monarchy of the United Kingdom, seem to assume that the throne has always been inherited.  Not so.  It's been inherited since George I, when he was crowned the King over Catholic claimants who held undoubtedly better claims.

The second item of interest there is that the British monarchy is, therefore, by recent tradition, and by law, "Protestant", which his to say, Anglican.

Those watching the coronation yesterday, if they were not familiar with the process, would have been struck by how deeply religious it was.  I don't think people, or perhaps more accurately Americans, expected that, as Americans have the stupid Disney view of monarchy, in which there'd be a two-minute coronation involving beautiful people, rather than an hours long service.  Moreover, people with some religious knowledge, but not familiar with the process, would have been surprised that it was recognizable as a Mass, in Catholic terms.

Indeed, some commentators, including the Catholic Cardinal who participated in it, noted that it has "some" Catholic elements. 

"Some"?

Baloney, it's 100% Catholic in form save for the King having to take the mandatory oath that he support the United Kingdom's Protestant faith.

That became a topic running up to this because, in spite of the impressive performance, the Church of England is in real trouble in England.  It does remain strong in some places, but not in its old footholds.  In the United States and Canada, its North American expression, the Episcopal Church, is in really deep trouble.  In the UK, more Catholics attend services weekly than members of the Church of England, which is really something given that Catholics are a minority religion in the UK and have been at least since Elizabeth I forced the "religious settlement" on the country.  Lest that seem too encouraging for Catholics, all devout religious adherence has been on the decline in the UK for a very long time, a product of the disaster of the Reformation, which is playing out presently.

Be that as it may, at least to Catholic eyes, the absurdity of the English Reformation is brought to full light by such events.  The ceremony was so Catholic that the question has to be asked why the Church of England doesn't just come back into the fold, something which is becoming increasingly difficult in light of its recent accommodations to popular social trends.

Which brings me to my next observation.

I know one fallen away Episcopalian who is deeply anti-Catholic.  It's interesting how that tends to be the last thing that those raised in the "main line" Protestant Churches retain.  The Baby Boomer children of adherent Main Line Protestant churches may have chosen to ignore their faiths in favor of the world and its delights, but they remember the fables and hatred that the Reformation used to justify its actions, and still cite it as if they were buddies with John Calvin himself.  Odd.

I know that I'm personally tired of it.  But in part, that's because I'm tired of having to listen to two people I personally know debate religious topics as if it's a sport.  It isn't.  It's serious.  But then maybe I'm tired of people who argue just for sport as well.

Profoundly Christian, and frankly about as close to Catholic in form as you can get and not be Catholic, another interesting aspect of the coronation was reinforcing the United Kingdom's Christian heritage. 

And that's a good thing.

The Coronation really brought the monarchy haters out in droves, which was interesting.  Lots of "Not My King" and "Not My Queen" individual protests were here and there. Well, unless Parliament abolished the monarchy, if you are English or a resident of the English Commonwealth, he is your king.  You don't have to love him, but that doesn't mean he isn't the king.

This also brought out a lot of sanctimonious blathering by people who hail from former imperial possessions about the horrors of the British Empire. Well, whatever they may be, King Charles III and his mother Queen Elizabeth II weren't responsible for any of them.

Indeed, it's been eons since there was a king or queen really had extensive power.  Maybe since King Charles II.  The UK has been a constitutional monarch at least since Queen Anne.  If monarchy had been what people imagine, one of her Stuart relatives would have been the next monarch, not King George I.  So if people have a beef with the British Empire, it shouldn't really be with Queen Elizabeth, whom some proclaimed they could not mourn, or with King Charles III, whom some proclaim they cannot celebrate.

Let's make no mistake.  Colonialism in general was bigoted and racist by its very nature.  The underlying premise of it was that the European colonial power, and here we will limit this to European powers, was empowered by some sort of superior value which gave it a right to take the land of others and rule its people. That was the underlying thesis of colonialism everywhere. Generally the "superior" something they had was technology, which made it possible, but which didn't make it right.

But before we get too self-righteous about it, we probably need to take a look at in context, and over time, and then ask if the compulsion that gives rise to it is a universal human norm. That would not mean that it was right, but it might lessen the overall guilt.

Indeed, in spite of what people might now wish for claim, when European colonialism started the concept of one nation ruling over another was not only common, it was the norm.  In the early 17th Century when British Colonialism really started, Ireland and Wales were already unwelcome members, to some extent, of the United Kingdom, and Scotland wasn't all that keen on it. Figuring out who governed in the Low Countries and the German Principalities requires an epic flow chart.  Russia ruled vasts lands with no Russians. This condition would go on well into the 19th Century, and even to some extent into the 20th Century.  Contrary to what people claim, national feelings existed, but people didn't regard empires and monarchies that ruled over a collection of nations to be abnormal.

And it would have been extremely difficult for Europeans, early on, to be confronted with foreign cultures beyond their seas and treat them as equals given the varied states of development.  It's easy for us to say that the British should have landed at Jamestown in 1607 only after asking for permission, but frankly, it would have been impossible for them to have conceived it that way at the time.

This might not be the case for later European colonial efforts, but by that time competition between European powers nearly mandated acquiring colonies and a person would have to be naive to imagine that if the British had abstained, the French, Dutch, Germans, Spanish, and so on, would have done so also.

Indeed, frankly, if we were to land humans on Mars today, and find something waddle up and address us in some bizarre Martian tongue, I don't believe we'd abstain from colonizing the planet now.

Which gets to this point.  I can't really think easily of a people anywhere that had the power to colonize, and didn't do it.  Everyone did.  It seems to go back to our earliest days.  That doesn't make it right, once again, but it's obviously a common human trait.

Which means in turn that the only really valid criticism of empire that mean anything today has to come in terms of relatively recent historical context.

A conversation on this point the other day made me realize how different my "relatively recent" is.  The actual conversation was on British primogenitor in the monarchy.  I sincerely regard everything after 1066 as recent in terms of the British monarchy.  

Apparently, other people don't.

In this context, however, i.e., that of empire, I'd probably go back to 1800 or so.  If you are going to levy guilt on the British, therefore, you might have to start in 1858 when Parliament caused the British to officially take over India.  

There's a lot to blame the English for after that, but then there's a lot to blame the French, Belgians, Dutch and Germans for after that as well.

It's really the late 19th Century and 20th Century when you get into the full-blown "shouldn't you people have known better" type of situation. The Scramble for Africa is pretty difficult to justify in any sense.

Which takes us, I suppose, to this.  In its late stages, while it was still an empire, and should have known better, at least the British did a good job of trying to administer what it was administering well. Its actions weren't always admirable or successful.  The Bengal Famine of 1943 provides a shocking example of that.  And frankly, there's no way to reconcile the claim that the British were fighting for freedom only during World War Two, except comparatively.  I.e., the Axis wasn't seeking to liberate colonial peoples, but to enslave them to somebody else less democratic yet.   But, having said that, the British, more than any other colonial power, managed to depart from empire gracefully and with some rationale hope that the best things it had given to the people it had occupied would remain.

It didn't always work out, but to a surprising degree it did.  British Dominions largely did evolve into full-blown parliamentary democracies and largely separated from the UK peaceably, although this was notably not the case with Ireland.  Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland and South Africa are all democracies today due to the British example.  So, frankly, is the United States, the UK's first failed imperial endeavor.

The coronation of King Charles III probably contains within it a series of lessons that will only be evident in the coming days.  But for those who want to protest it, well you probably would better spend your time on real problems of the world, of which there are many.

Related Items:

King Charles III

Britain's projection of its hopes and gossip on its royal family may be more useful than America's projection on its presidential families

Social fantasy confronted by science. Transgenderism.

And evolutionary biology and science rear their heads:

More children and adolescents are identifying as transgender and are being offered medical treatment, especially in the US—but some providers and European authorities are urging caution because of a lack of strong evidence. Jennifer Block reports

And:

Internationally, however, governing bodies have come to different conclusions regarding the safety and efficacy of medically treating gender dysphoria. Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare, which sets guidelines for care, determined last year that the risks of puberty blockers and treatment with hormones “currently outweigh the possible benefits” for minors.24 Finland’s Council for Choices in Health Care, a monitoring agency for the country’s public health services, issued similar guidelines, calling for psychosocial support as the first line treatment.25 (Both countries restrict surgery to adults.)

Medical societies in France, Australia, and New Zealand have also leant away from early medicalisation.2627 And NHS England, which is in the midst of an independent review of gender identity services, recently said that there was “scarce and inconclusive evidence to support clinical decision making”28 for minors with gender dysphoria29 and that for most who present before puberty it will be a “transient phase,” requiring clinicians to focus on psychological support and to be “mindful” even of the risks of social transition.30

And: 

Guyatt, who co-developed GRADE, found “serious problems” with the Endocrine Society guidelines, noting that the systematic reviews didn’t look at the effect of the interventions on gender dysphoria itself, arguably “the most important outcome.” He also noted that the Endocrine Society had at times paired strong recommendations—phrased as “we recommend”—with weak evidence. In the adolescent section, the weaker phrasing “we suggest” is used for pubertal hormone suppression when children “first exhibit physical changes of puberty”; however, the stronger phrasing is used to “recommend” GnRHa treatment.

And, in Scandinavia:

The Norwegian Healthcare Investigation Board, (NHIB/UKOM) has deemed puberty blockers, cross-sex-hormones & surgery for children & young people experimental, determining that the current “gender-affirmative” guidelines are not evidence-based and must be revised. /1

"Transgenderism", in the fashion, at any rate, it's boosted by the political left just frankly really doesn't exist.l  What does exist is mental illness, and this is a symptom of a mental illness, doubtless different in men than women.  But in the world of the "progressive", we've gone to a state where we define our own reality, which in turn, is the epitome of anti reality.  Fantasy is elevated, so that cries for help or distress cannot be heard.

At the end of the day, this is in some ways the ultimate result of October 31, 1517.  On that date, what began as a questioning evolved ultimately into a revolution, defeating its own original thesis pretty quickly.  Questing perceived abuses, and being concerned about actual ones, lead to a radical proposition, that being that we are not subject to any larger existential authority, but can define the nature of an existential authority on our own.  That lead to endless redefinitions, and cemented in, north of the Rhine and west of the Channel, the concept that individuals defined what was existential, not metaphysics.

From there it was only a matter of time that, when wealth and science allowed for it, that those cultures adopting the revolution of 1517 would ultimately reject any concept of the existential at all, and instead go to it being all internal.  Each person would be their own god, at the end of the day, defining a reality which everyone else must acknowledge.  With no external to be considered, no existential standard would exist.

Pundits of the Robert Reich ilk like to claim that the opponents of progressives are fascinated by sex, when in fact the opposite is really the truth.  Progressivism, in a very real sense, only cares about sex in the crudest, most pornographic, terms and in tying people to employment. That's pretty much it.  You'll serve your corporate master, who will be taxed heavily to make you feel better about it, and then go home to your apartment and look at yourself, your own individual special being, a they, them, it, he and she.

Problem is, none of it is real.  And those crying for help keep crying.

A shooting just recently in Colorado Springs was by a person who claimed to be "non-binary".  In Denver, another shooter identified as transgender.  The recent Aberdeen shooter did as well.  The Ulvade shooter pretty clearly was, although the press avoided stating it plainly.

Prior shootings, mostly by males, have tended to almost all be by men who placed on "the spectrum". A recent shooting by a minor was by a child who was such, who had been forced into school on the popular basis that you can socialize people out of organic conditions.

In the 60s, the Who released The Kids Are Alright, which went:

I don't mind other guys dancing with my girl

That's fine, I know them all pretty well

But I know sometimes I must get out in the light

Better leave her behind with the kids, they're alright

The kids are alright

Sometimes, I feel I gotta get away

Bells chime, I know I gotta get away

And I know if I don't, I'll go out of my mind

Better leave her behind with the kids, they're alright

The kids are alright

I know if I go things would be a lot better for her

I had things planned, but her folks wouldn't let her

I don't mind other guys dancing with my girl

That's fine, I know them all pretty well

But I know sometimes I must get out in the light

Better leave her behind with the kids, they're alright

The kids are alright

Sometimes, I feel I gotta get away

Bells chime, I know I gotta get away

And I know if I don't, I'll go out of my mind

Better leave her behind with the kids, they're alright

The kids are alright, the kids are alright, the kids are alright

The song was sort of about rebellion, and sort of not.  The Who was basically safetly rebelling in the song, as the rebellion was against a standard they were implicitly adopting and leaning up.

Well, the kids aren't alright anymore.

Because ignoring reality and the cries of the desperate isn't alright.

A comment about Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Hog Leg. Sunday games, rural activities, and gatherings.

Soccer, Scotland, 1830s.

Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: Hog Leg: Nothing says America like shooting guns and watching the Super Bowl. A nice sunny afternoon was the perfect time to try out my newly borrowe...

This is interesting.

The Super Bowl used to be a bigger deal in this house than it now is. Seems like a lot of things once were.

I’m not a football fan at all, and I didn't really start watching the Super Bowl until my wife and I were married.  She is a football fan and will watch the season, and always watches the Super Bowl.  

When we were first married, there were Super Bowl parties.  We didn't have kids at first, and my wife's brothers were young at the time.  Later, however, it carried on until the kids were teens.  Then something changed, including the giving up of the farm (the farm, not the ranch), longer travel distances, and some residential changes at the ranch.  Ultimately, the parties just sort of stopped, although I'm sure my two brothers-in-law, who live in houses at the ranch yard, still observe a party, and my father and mother-in-law, who live a few miles away, likely travel to that.

Much lower key than it used to be.  No big gatherings like there once were.

Back in the day, we had a couple of them at our house.

Basically, the dining fare was always simple. Sandwiches bought at one of the local grocery stores, chips and beer.  Typical football stuff.

At some parties at the farm, there were bowling pin shooting matches. For those not familiar with them, people shot bowling pins from some distance with pistols.  It was fun.  Frankly, I don't think a lot of people are all that interested in the Super Bowl to start with, and at least at the Super Bowl parties with bowling pin matches people went out to the match, and it ran into the game, which says something.

The other day also, I wrote on community.

I note this because, at one time, Schuetzen matches were big deals in German American communities.  And while they involved rifles, and indeed very specialized rifles, they were also big community events.

And such things aren't unique to just those mentioned.  In parts of the country, men participating in "turkey shoots" were pretty common.  

Of course, shooting clubs and matches still exist nearly everywhere, and lots of men, and women, participate in matches.  

Less common, however, are the rural informal matches.

All sorts of rural activities were once associated with holidays, and events.  I guess that the Super Bowl is some sort of large-scale informal civil holiday, even though of course it always occurs on a Sunday.  Indeed, the playing of the game on a Sunday is curious.  I put a little (very little) time looking into that, and found this CBS Sports comment on it, which it must be first noted explained that football really started being popular in the 1920s.

Sunday was a free day during a decade where it was common to work on Saturdays, so the APFA played most of their games on that day. Fast forward 30 years to the advent of television networks, who were desperately looking for programming on Sundays in the 1950s.

That makes some sense to me, as I still work on Saturdays.

I'd note, however, that is this makes sense, it doesn't quite explain why baseball games occur all throughout the week, and I think there are Monday night professional football games as well, albeit televised ones.

I wonder, however, if it has deeper roots than that. American football is the successor to Rugby, and Rugby and Soccer were hugely popular in the United Kingdom.  Prior to major league fun sucker Oliver Cromwell taking over the English government, in the United Kingdom, Sunday had been a day for church and then games.

This went back to Medieval times, before the Reformation.  People worked, and worked hard, six days out of seven, but on the seventh, they rested. And resting meant going to Mass, and then having fun, and fun often meant games and beer, as well as other activities.  In spite of their best efforts, major Protestant reformers weren't really able to make a dent in village observance of tradition until Cromwell came in and really started ruining things.  To Calvinist of the day like Cromwell, Sunday was a day for church and nothing else, although contrary to what some may suspect they were not opposed to alcohol.  Cromwell's Puritan government banned sports.

It's no wonder he was posthumously beheaded.

Cromwell and his ilk did a lot of damage to the Christian religion in the Untied Kingdom, and if you really want to track the decline in religious observance in the UK to something, you can lay it somewhat at the bottom of his severed head.  Indeed, while hardly noted, what we're seeing going on today, in some ways, is the final stages of the Reformation playing out, and playing out badly.

Anyhow, after Cromwell was gone and the Crown restored, games came back, and they came back on Sunday.  Not just proto-football, but all sorts of games.  And games became hugely associated with certain religious holidays in the United Kingdom.  The day after Christmas, Boxing Day, is one such example, as is New Years, the latter of which is a religious holiday in and of itself.

I suspect, however, that this had a lasting influence.  I don't know for sure, but I think football is on Sunday as Sunday was the day of rest, and watching the village football game and having a tankard of ale was all part of that, after church.  I also suspect that this is the reason that some American holidays are associated with football, such as Thanksgiving, which had its origin as a religious holiday, and New Years, which as noted also is.

Now, of course, with the corrupting influence of money, it's become nearly a religion to some people in and of itself.  People who dare not miss a single football game never step foot in a church.

Also lost, however, is the remaining communal part of that.  Watching a game played that's actually local, rather than corporate national, to a large extent.  And one free of advertising.  Indeed, the Super Bowl has become the number one premiere venue for innovative advertising, some of which isn't bad.

Anyhow, maybe the Super Bowl Party, in some form if properly done, is a step back in time to when the game was more a vehicle than an end in and of itself, and when it wasn't such a show that a big freakish half-time performance was expected.

We can hope so.

Appendix: Down the rabbit hole. (Additional topic references).

This appendix consists of additional labels for this entry:

Down the rabbit hole.

Out of Sync. The Hail Mary makes a surprising appearance in advertising.

How you can tell you are: 1) out of sync with the culture, and 2) Catholic.  I thought this Coca-Cola tweet was about real Hail Mary's, the prayer.

Go big or go home, that’s what game day is all about! Here’s to giving every game and watch party your all. #CocaCola

coca-cola.com

Savor Every Moment

Coca-Cola was referring, of course, to the long desperate forward pass in football which has been irreverently nicknamed after the prayer.  I don't watch football (it's titanically boring), and it took me a minute to realize what this was referring to.

The Hail Mary is, of course, the ancient Christian prayer petitioning Mary for assistance.  Its basic text is:

Hail, Mary, full of grace,

the Lord is with thee.

Blessed art thou amongst women

and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

pray for us sinners,

now and at the hour of our death. 

Amen.

I actually learned it in the post Vatican II American Church as:

Hail, Mary, full of grace,

the Lord is with you.

Blessed are you amongst women

and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

pray for us sinners,

now and at the hour of our death. 

Amen.

The formulation of the prayer is a little lost to history, but it seems to have come about gradually.  Some of it's text, of course, comes right from the New Testament.  References to early forms of the prayer appear in the mid 11th Century through the 13th.  It rose in the Latin Rite and therefore, the early versions took shape in Latin, which of course was also the language of the Latin Rite up until the 1960s.

In Latin, it's the Ave Maria, the text of which is:

Ave Maria, gratia plena

Dominus tecum

benedicta tu in mulieri­bus, 

et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus.

Sancta Maria mater Dei,

ora pro nobis peccatoribus, 

nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. 

Amen.

Contrary to what some seem to think, it has an Eastern Rite expression as well, and therefore also an Orthodox one.  The Eastern version is not used as extensively as the Latin Rite version, but isn't infrequently used.  Its text is:

Θεοτόκε Παρθένε, χαῖρε,κεχαριτωμένη Μαρία, ὁ Κύριος μετὰ σοῦ. εὐλογημένη σὺ ἐν γυναιξί, καὶ εὐλογημένος ὁ καρπὸς τῆς κοιλίας σου, ὅτι Σωτῆρα ἔτεκες τῶν ψυχῶν ἡμῶν.

Translating from the Greek is a little dangerous, as terms can be translated straight across and lose their meaning, but using that sort of translation, this translates to:

God-bearing Virgin (Theotokos), rejoice, grace-filled Mary, the Lord with thee. Praised thou among women, and praised the fruit of thy womb, because it was the Saviour of our souls that thou borest.

The Slavonic version, used in some of the Eastern Rite churches, is:

Богородице дѣво радѹйсѧ

ѡбрадованнаѧ Марїе

Господь съ тобою

благословена ты въ женахъ,

и благословенъ плодъ чрева твоегѡ,

Якѡ родила еси Христа Спаса,

Избавителѧ дѹшамъ нашимъ.

The prayer not only has crossed certain lines following the Great Schism, but it's done the same in regard to the Reformation, being used in the Lutheran churches and in the Anglican Communion.

All of which goes to show something, and among the things shown by Coca-Cola's use is that somebody at Coca-Cola is as clueless on certain things as I am.

Thursday July 28, 1921. Parliament and the Church of Scotland.

Parliament passed the Church of Scotland Act of 1921, making the Presbyterian church in Scotland independent in religious matters while retaining its status as the Scottish national church.  The act provided.

Church of Scotland Act 1921

1921 CHAPTER 29

An Act to declare the lawfulness of certain Articles declaratory of the Constitution of the Church of Scotland in matters spiritual prepared with the authority of the General Assembly of the Church.

[28th July 1921]

Whereas certain articles declaratory of the constitution of the Church of Scotland in matters spiritual have been prepared with the authority of the General Assembly of the Church, with a view to facilitate the union of other Churches with the Church of Scotland, which articles are set out in the Schedule to this Act, and together with any modifications of the said articles or additions thereto made in accordance therewith are hereinafter in this Act referred to as " the Declaratory Articles " :

And whereas it is expedient that any doubts as to the lawfulness of the Declaratory Articles should be removed :

Be it therefore enacted by the King's most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows:—

1Effect of Declaratory Articles.

The Declaratory Articles are lawful articles, and the constitution of the Church of Scotland in matters spiritual is as therein set forth, and no limitation of the liberty, rights and powers in matters spiritual therein set forth shall be derived from any statute or law affecting the Church of Scotland in matters spiritual at present in force, it being hereby declared that in all questions of construction the Declaratory Articles shall prevail, and that all such statutes and laws shall be construed in conformity therewith and in subordination thereto, and all such statutes and laws in so far as they are inconsistent with the Declaratory Articles are hereby repealed and declared to be of no effect.

2Other Churches not to be prejudiced.

Nothing contained in this Act or in any other Act affecting the Church of Scotland shall prejudice the recognition of any other Church in Scotland as a Christian Church protected by law in the exercise of its spiritual functions.

3Jurisdiction of civil courts.

Subject to the recognition of the matters dealt with in the Declaratory Articles as matters spiritual, nothing in this Act contained shall affect or prejudice the jurisdiction of the civil courts in relation to any matter of a civil nature.

4Citations and commencement.

This Act may be cited as the Church of Scotland Act, 1921, and shall come into operation on such date as His Majesty may fix by Order in Council after the Declaratory Articles shall have been adopted by an Act of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland with the consent of a majority of the Presbyteries of the Church.

Scotland became a Presbyterian country in 1560 when the Reformation hit the country, following only shortly after King Henry VIII separated the Church of England from Rome. The story in Scotland is complicated and tied up with that of England's which was attempting to force a union at the time.  The origins of the Scottish Reformation has its beginnings in Europe where some Scottish religious figures were exposed to characters of the Reformation on the continent.  The attempted forced union by England and the competing claims of the adherents of Queen Mary created additional tensions. Added to that, the Catholic Church in Scotland and the Scottish government made little effort to prevent individuals from espousing Protestantism.  The turmoil associated with the reign of King James V and Queen Mary ultimately politicized the situation and gave John Knox, like Luther a one time Catholic Priest, an opening to create a Protestant fissure.

It also created a long-running peculiar situation in that Presbyterianism resisted being an established church for a long time and the English crown, once Scotland was subject to it, had the model of the Church of England which was much closer to the Crown and, ultimately after a long period of religious strife, less Protestant than the Presbyterian Church.  The status took all the way until 1921 to basically resolve.

Like most Protestant churches worldwide the Church of Scotland, or rather the Presbyterian Church, has suffered a large decline over the decades.  Often presented as a current crisis, in reality the close adherence to the Presbyterian church has been in decline for many decades.  The Presbyterian Church is a Calvinist church traditionally and the Church of Scotland tended to be extremely stern in its views.  As with England, but in a more pronounced way, some areas of Scotland never did abandon the Catholic Church and in the 19th Century, Irish immigrants to Scotland increased their numbers.  By the 2010s only 32% of Scots claimed membership in the Church of Scotland while 16% were Catholic. While scandals have hurt the Church in Scotland, as elsewhere in the European world, Catholics outnumber Presbyterians in some Scottish districts presently. In the late 2010s a study suggested that by the mid 2020s Catholic Church would resume its status as the largest church in Scotland, which of course does not set aside the fact that the majority of Scots "unchurched", but basically Christian.  

The Presbyterian Church in the United States was heavily associated with Scottish immigrants at one time. This would be much less true today.

Life magazine came out on this date, with a cover of a dog disrupting a tea party of sorts.

Wednesday, June 23, 1971. The UK goes forward into the EEC and Poland goes east and back to the pre Reformation.

On this day in 1971 the European Economic Community came to a resolution with the United Kingdom on terms for the UK to enter the EEC and its Common Market. The principal point of the resolution involved payments to the EEC by the UK.

And they all lived happily ever after. . . right?

Poland turned over 6,900 former German Churches, many of which had been Lutheran Churches, to the Catholic Church.  This came about due to protests that occurred in Poland in December 1970.

This may seem odd, but at the end of the Second World War the Soviets had moved the German population east, clearing out much of eastern Prussia and all of East Prussia from its German residents.  Many had already fled the advancing Red Army in 1944 and 1945 in any event, and many who remained were killed by the Soviets.  The Soviets also, in turn, shoved the Polish population in eastern Poland west.  Effectively the Russians redrew the map tin the way that they favored it and those borders have since stuck.  While the forced resettlements may seem barbarous, and really were, they did have the effect of concentrating the populations in a fashion that involved a clearer ethnic concentration than they had previously.

As a Catholic jurisdictional matter, it's always the case that a Catholic diocese includes, from a Catholic prospective, all of the souls within its territorial boundary, and the Parish Priest is responsible for all of them.  In Poland's case, nearly 100% of the population were and are observant Catholics. While there were Polish communists, the movement had never been very popular in Poland and such Polish communists as existed tended to have ended up in the USSR in the post World War One period.  Catholics resisted the Nazi and Soviet occupation of 1939-1941, the Nazi occupation of 1941-45 ,and the Soviet occupation thereafter and the Church remained a strong force even in Communist Poland.  As the Church needed Church buildings, the transfer made sense. Additionally, as a practical matter, many churches in northern and eastern Europe were for Catholic congregations at the time they were built, so the transfer was effectively a reversion to their original status.

As a final note, since fall of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany, there has been a tourist phenomenon of Germans revising their former homes in what is now Poland. They're generally unwelcome.

Churches of the West: Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church, Denver, Colorado.

I recently posted on Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church on our companion blog, Churches of the West.  That post is here:

Churches of the West: Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church, Denver ...: This is Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church in Denver Colorado. Many people, when they hear the word "Catholic", imm...

The entire entry is below, followed by my commentary.

To add what I posted in the entry linked in, as is sometimes the case with Catholic churches, I not only took a photograph, as it was Sunday, I attended there.

I won't say that I attended "Mass", as the Eastern Rite doesn't use that word.  It uses the term Divine Liturgy instead.

Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church, Denver Colorado

This is Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church in Denver Colorado.

Many people, when they hear the word "Catholic", immediately have what, in the English speaking world, are frequently referred to as "Roman Catholics" in mind.  In fact, however, "Roman" Catholics are Latin Rite Catholics whose churches use the Roman Rite.  Roman Catholics make up the overwhelming majority of Catholics, and indeed the majority of Catholics, on earth.

They aren't the only Catholics however.   The Roman Rite itself is just one of several Latin, or Western, Rites.  There are also several Eastern Rites, of which the Byzantine Rite is one.

The Byzantine Catholic Church, which is also called the Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church, uses the same liturgical rite as the Greek Orthodox Church and shares the same calendar.  It dates back to the conversion of the Rusyn people in the Carpathians to Christianity in the 9th Century.  That work, done by St. Cyril and St. Methodius brought to the Rusyn people the form of worship in the Eastern Rite.  They Rusyn church initially followed the Orthodox Churches following  the schism of 1054, but in 1645 the Ruthenian Church started to return to communion with Rome, resulting in the Rutenian Byzantine Catholic Church, which is normally called the Byzantine Catholic Church in the United States.

Immigration from Eastern Europe brought the Church into the United States. Originally a strongly ethnic church, in recent decades it has become multi ethnic and its strongly traditional character has caused it to obtain new members from both very conservative Latin Rite Catholics as well as very conservative former Protestants.  Indeed, while this church is very small, it has been growing and now has a Byzantine Catholic outreach to Ft. Collins, Colorado, where it holds services in Roman Catholic Churches.

We pick up from there.

When people hear the world "Catholic", they tend to think of what they sometime call "Roman Catholics".  The term "Roman" Catholic is itself a post Reformation English term, which the English tagged on to the Church in their effort to justify the position that the Church of England had a theological basis for separating from the Church.  Serious conservative members of the Anglican Communion still take that position and I suppose that Episcopal clergymen are schooled in it in some fashion, although it appears to be the case presently that the Episcopal Church is ordaining at least some members of their clergy who attend seminaries in a remote fashion, which is very much the opposite of how the Catholic Church does that.*  Anyhow, there aren't really "Roman" Catholics, although in the English speaking world Latin Rite Catholics have themselves adopted the term and don't regard it as a pejorative, as it originally was.

I heard some statistics on it the other day and I won't get them precise, but they were interesting in what they conveyed.  The largest single religion in the world, and in spite of what some modern statisticians might suggest almost all humans are members of a religion, is Christianity.  Christianity is in fact growing in most of the world and only in the rich Western World is there really a more lackadaisical approach to faith.  Even in parts of the globe where Christianity has historically had a difficult time penetrating this is the case.  About 30%, for example, of Koreans are Christians.  While numbers are very hard to come by, good anecdotal evidence suggest that post 9/11 conversions to Christianity in the Middle East rank in in the millions in an area in which open conversion is illegal.  Conversion by Muslims immigrating to some regions of Europe have been so high that they've filled the pews in Churches in some regions that were formally only used by locals.  Both France and Germany, in some areas, have seen large conversions of that type.

Of Christians on Earth, the largest denomination by far, if we want to put it in those terms, are Catholics. Catholics dwarf all other denominations, something that's hard to grasp in the U.S. as the U.S. was and is a Protestant country.  Indeed, of interest there, the U.S. and areas strongly influenced by the US are really the only regions of the world were certain types of Protestantism that refuses to acknowledge that the Catholic Church dates back to Christ in an uninterrupted fashion, although both the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches both have uninterrupted Apostolic Succession and can note the same.  That statement surprisingly amounts to fighting words for some Protestant denominations in the English speaking world but in an era in which resources are so easily obtainable it cannot really reasonably be debated by anyone any longer and indeed most of the larger original Protestant churches don't debate that and never have.  The Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is part, for example fully acknowledges that as do all branches of Lutheranism.  Some other branches of the old Protestant world have claimed apostolic succession, thereby recognizing its importance and the Catholic history on it, and others have gone so far as to occasionally find bishops in the Orthodox or Old Catholic faiths who are willing to do ordinations in an effort to clear up any question regarding it, which again acknowledges the position.  The original "protest" wasn't over that, which was always fully acknowledged.  People who insist on debating it are debating a non point, as its indisputable and if a contrary position is a person's only theological point, it's a lost one.

The point on that isn't to start such a debate, but to note something else.  Most Catholics are in the Latin Rite, which actually is several rites, and of these most are in the Roman Rite.  Hardly any Catholic has ever been in a Catholic Church that celebrates another rite.  Something like 80% of the Christians on Earth are Roman Rite Christians and if we include the the Protestants who are familiar with that style of worship, and many do, its even higher.

The percentage of Christians who are Eastern Rite is really small.  If we include both the Orthodox and Eastern Rite Catholics its still only around 10% or less of all Christians. 

But it's growing.

Okay, we've discussed the Great Schism here before and we're not going to go into that, but as we've previously noted, the Eastern Rites of the Church date back to prior to the schism and all Eastern Rite churches use the same forms of worship.  Lost to a lot of people, that means that there are plenty of Catholics, although a small minority of Catholics over all, who worship in the Eastern Rite.

But there are getting to be more.

The Byzantine Catholic Church is more fully referred to as the Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church.  There's also a Greek Byzantine Catholic Church. The two use the same liturgy and their services would be very similar, but the Greek Byzantine Catholic Church is extremely small and has a different history.

The Ruthenians were one of several Eastern Rite churches that followed Constantinople when the Great Schism occurred.  Indeed most, but not all, of the Eastern Rite did that, reflecting the Eastern Rite's strong association with Constantinople.  Ironically, perhaps, the Greek Byzantine Catholic Church reflected the fact that not everyone in the Eastern Rite in Greece did, and that in fact there remained churches that continued to accept the Bishop of Rome as the head of the church rather than the "first among equals", as the Orthodox have stated it.  The Ruthenian Church, however, did wholly follow Constantinople at first but, in the 17th Century, came back into communion with Rome, something that a variety of Eastern Rite churches have (not all Eastern Rite churches, it should be noted, followed Constantinople even at the onset).  The Church had a presence in the United States since the second half of the 19th Century as Eastern European immigrants brought it over from Eastern Europe. At first it frankly unfortunately had a rocky relationship with the larger Latin Rite, which was in fact attributable the the Latin Rite's view at the time that in a country where Catholics were a minority it was better if everyone who was Catholic was Latin Rite. That view has long since passed however and today the Catholic Church not only encourages the Eastern Rites in the U.S. but discourages anything that would stand to erode them.

Now they're not only not eroding, they're growing.

This is an interesting phenomenon in and part its due to the collapse of conservative doctrine in the old Protestant churches. As conservatives in those churches have found themselves unable to accept the adoption of positions that run counter to what Christians have held for eons, they've looked out at other churches that retain the traditional holdings and nothing is more traditional than the Eastern Rite, be that in the Orthodox or the Catholic spheres.  

Indeed it's the Orthodox who have primarily benefited from this development, and they're aware of it. As we posted here some time ago, the new Orthodox church in Cheyenne holds itself out as an "Orthodox Christian" church, not a "Greek Orthodox" church, which it is.  In fact, as this evolution occurs, those cultural monikers matter less than they did.  The Greek Orthodox in the U.S. hold Divine Liturgy in English.  So does the Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church.

And like the Orthodox, the Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church is also expanding, and in part for the same reason just noted above.  It's not really hard to find at the present time converts in a Byzantine Catholic Church.  In our recent trip we met a very devout parishioner who self declared as a convert.

In addition, however, to Protestants entering the Byzantine Catholic Church, it's clear that Latin Rite Catholics are as well.  And some of this is for the same reason, while some of it is not.

Conservative Roman Catholics who have grown weary of the reforms of the 1970s which seem to hang on in some parishes have, in some instances, gone over to Eastern Rite Catholic churches where the big reforms never took hold.  About the only thing really notable in terms of reforms in Eastern Rite Catholic Churches is that the services are in English, not the original languages.  This is true, however, of the Eastern Rite in general.  Additionally, Eastern Rite Catholics are really serious Catholics, their knowledge boosted by their minority status.  The service we attended was shockingly serious, with the Priest addressing, in what started off as a children's liturgy, the Problem of Evil.  And he addressed it in a remarkably effective fashion.

In recent years there's been a struggle, mostly in the large Latin Rite, over reforms and direction.  It's pretty clear to nearly every observer that those who would take the Church even further in the "spirit" of the 1970s have a losing argument and that this will have a negative effect.  It's also clear, from the slow return to things that predates those developments, that the opposite has a strong positive attraction to many of the Faithful.

In this context, there's lessons to be learned from the Eastern Rite.  It's growing, and its attractive to an element of those in the Latin Rite.  It has conservative, but married, Priests.  This is not to say that the Latin Rite needs to become Eastern, but it shouldn't ignore the positive examples that the Eastern branch is giving.**

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*Indeed, one of the reforms of the Counter Reformation was the introduction of the seminary system in the Catholic Church, as the Church concluded that the Reformation had been caused in part by badly educated clergymen.  That system has existed for the past 500 years and recently its been enhanced in the original direction.  It was common, up until the last couple of decades, to allow very young men, indeed not really young men so much as boys, into seminaries but reflecting social evolution this is no longer true.  Seminarians now are at the college age, at least.

**That example isn't as well received by everyone, I'd note.  In this case, of us four, my son and I were hugely impressed for a variety of reasons.  My wife and daughter were not.  In that latter example, they frankly found it just too foreign.

In speaking with a colleague who was a cradle Catholic, who fell away from Christianity in college, who re found it in the form of Evangelical Protestantism late in college, and then came back to the Catholic Church as a lawyer, he'd experienced the same thing in a different fashion.  Noting what I noted above, he studied the early history of the church and found that it was in fact, as is clearly demonstrable, "Catholic and Apostolic" and therefore briefly went into the Greek Orthodox church which can legitimately claim to be Apostolic (with the Orthodox and the Catholic church separated by a schism, something that's severe, but not as severe as the gulf between them and Protestant churches).  Anyhow, his wife had been raised in a Protestant church, as was mine, and she was likewise shocked by how foreign the Eastern Rite is.  In contrast, the Antiochian Orthodox Church in Gillette, Wyoming is made up completely of converts from an Evangelical Protestant church that converted after engaging in a study of the early church.  

The Feast Day of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.

Today, May 4, is the liturgical Feast Day of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.

The forty martyrs are the forty English Catholics who refused to ascent to the King Henry VIII's severance of the church in England from Rome and his declaration that he was the head of the Church in his domains.  That act in 1534 was followed by the dissolution of the monasteries and the suppression of those faithful who refused to go along with Henry's assertions that he held the rights to the mission of the Church in England and Wales.

I'm posting this here today due to their example, but perhaps not in the way that might seem to be immediately obvious.  Prior to King Henry VIII England was an intensely Catholic country.  Had Henry VIII not been king, there's every reason to believe that this would have continued on to the modern age.  Henry's bedroom troubles sent him in another direction that his immense powers of rationalization, combined with his immense power, allowed him to do, and the long term results were monumental.  Indeed, his rebellion against the Church can potentially be regarded as the act that assured the success of the Protestant Reformation in general and certainly the act that lead to its success on Great Britain. That revolution would also ultimately, and indeed even rapidly, lead to the rise of individualism and all that entails, and to relativism as its natural byproduct, which ironically has lead to a decline of religious observance in the west which is very notably marked in the decline of the Anglican Communion in the northern hemisphere.

All of that is an historical observance, of course, but the reason we note this is that the history of the English Reformation makes it extremely obvious that at the parish level, the population remained Catholic and would actually rise up against the Reformation in the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549.  But that act was extraordinary.  Most people simply went along, objecting in their minds, but not so much in their acts.

Cardinal John Fisher, who paid for his loyalty to the Church with his life.

Indeed, of the Catholic Bishops who were in office at the time, only Cardinal John Fisher refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of Henry's acts even though its almost certain that the majority of them did not agree with Henry personally.  Fisher paid for this with his life almost immediately, being executed in 1535, as did jurist Thomas Moore.

St. Thomas Moore, who likewise lost his life due to his adherence to his beliefs in 1535.

A person should note that a person being killed for being associated with a set of beliefs is not as uncommon as we might wish for it to be by any measure.  Indeed, members of the Church of England would be quick to point out that Bishops Ridley and Latimer, and Archbishop Cranmer, all of whom had been Catholic clerics prior to 1534, lost their lives during the short reign of Queen Mary.  Having said that, their executions had a strongly political nature and its hard to see how they would have not occurred in any event.  Indeed, Cranmer recanted at least twice prior to his execution, and only recanted his prior recanting at the moment of his execution.  In other words, no matter what a person may feel about them, Ridley's, Latimer's and Cranmer's fates were fixed prior to their being any point to whether they held fast to their beliefs or not.

Lots of people took the view of the English peasants, which was one in which they held "the Old Religion" close to their hearts and indeed did not really even recognize that the dispute going on in London directly impacted them, although it clearly disturbed them.  At the Parish Priest level its well known that many Priests just flat out ignored the Bishops and continued to view themselves as fully Catholic in every respect.  And indeed, the first years of the English Reformation caused a schism, not a real severance as it soon would.  That day arrived in the 1540s and resulted in full rebellion, as noted.

But our point in all of this is this.  Everyone always imagines themselves holding fast to their beliefs when pressure comes.  But most people, at all times, everywhere, just go along with whatever is going on.  Most of the English Bishops in 1534 probably felt that Henry was really out on a limb, to say the least (Latimer may not have as he was on record prior to 1534 with views that would have loosely supported Henry's position), but they went along anyway.  Most of Henry's Catholic advisers no doubt did feel that he was all wet, but they wanted to keep their offices, so only the rare person like St. Thomas Moore went to the ax.  Some likely came round to Henry's views, but the question then is whether the situation revealed what they then regarded to be the truth, or that they modified their definition of the truth to fit the situation.

Many well off English Catholics did in fact refuse to ascent and indeed Catholic noble families remained all the way until the rights of the Church were ultimate restored two centuries later.  Some notable dissenters, once the order was imposed that all had to attend the services of the Established Church went, but sat in the back, kept their hats on, and refused to stand or kneel at the appropriate times, a really bold move frankly in a country in which being a Catholic could cost you your life.  But most people just blinded themselves to the dispute in and in a generation or two their descendants no longer recalled or even know that their grandparents hadn't agreed with what occurred.

The other day I was at an event at which a speaker stated an opinion several times that's radically different from what the majority of Americans believed even a short time ago.  Most people wouldn't have gotten all up in arms about it at the time, but they wouldn't have accorded it as being their opinion in an endorsed fashion either.  Probably a very high percentage of Americans still do not, and maybe a majority, if in a place where no criticism could be personally directed at them, do  not currently.  But because of the shifting wind, its no longer the case that people will debate the topic outside of their own immediate circles so the speaker obtained the support of applause, with only a few souls taking the old "hat on in church" approach demonstrating their view by declining the applause.

That's the way people work in general.  When big shifts come, and we look back at the historical record and imagine ourselves standing up and saying "No", "Nein", "Nyet" or whatever, we're largely fooling ourselves.  Most just think those things, like the protagonist in Brecht's Maßnahmen gegen die Gewalt and only get around to "No!" when its safe, if ever.


And that's why the Feast Day of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales is worth noting and honoring for everyone.  A few, albeit very few, actually will say No.

It's not a "national landmark", it's a Cathedral

And hence its much more important.

I keep seeing references to Notre Dame de Paris as a "landmark" or a "national treasure", or all sorts of other similar terms.  All of which are in fact true.

And all of which miss the point.  Notre Dame de Paris is a Catholic Cathedral, and that's not only what it is, its why it is, and why its a national treasure and all of those other things.  It's status as a Catholic Cathedral defines everything about it.  Everything.

France is sometimes referred to as the "eldest daughter of the Church", referring to the very early conversion of the French people to Christianity.  The claim is associated with a claim that France was the first wholly Christian nation, but that claim is pretty debatable.  Actually, Armenia holds a better claim to that title.  But France became a Christian nation very early.

And by Christian nation, we mean a Catholic nation.  Irrespective of fanciful claims to the contrary that were fabricated during the Reformation, there's no doubt whatsoever that the early church was, "one Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church".  That's not a matter of religious faith, that's a matter of historic fact.  Christians of other denominations can't honestly deny that, and if they're honest with themselves, they have to explain it in some historically cogent fashion, excluding such clearly false claims such as a different nature of the early church or some secret great apostasy.  As the sage Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts".

France is also a country that saw radical early anti clericalism and extreme secularization, which is party of its problematic historical legacy.  That plays into the history of Notre Dame de Paris as well.  Four churches have stood on the spot where the damaged Cathedral now stands prior to the commencement of its construction.  In 1548 French Huguenots, a Protestant sect, destroyed some of its statutes, taking the extreme iconoclast position that pops up in Christianity, and indeed in other religions, from time to time.  It was heavily rebuilt over the years to reflect changes in architectural style.  An enormous statute of St. Christopher dating from 1413 was destroyed in 1786.  A spire that had been added on earlier was removed in the 18th Century, and then a new one reinstalled in the 19th.  During the French Revolution it was seized and defamed into a Cult of Reason, and the statutes of twenty eight Biblical kings beheaded on the mistaken ignorant belief that they represented French kings.

Indeed the unfortunate legacy of the unfortunate French Revolution, the model for modern revolutions in the fact that it it became wildly debased and turned into a massive, if still celebrated, failure, lingers on in that the Cathedral is property of the French state.  After the French Revolution, France has had an uneasy relationship with everything, including itself, and as part of that, with its Faith.  France became wildly anticlerical during the Revolution, but it remains Catholic still.

And it will continue to be.  Unlike Ireland or Quebec, which really don't exist without the Church, there is a France that can be discussed without discussing the Church, but like everything European, or at least worth celebrating in Europe, it's not only difficult to do, but largely discussing something that's much diminished without the Church.

There's no doubt that Europe has been struggling with itself since some date in the 20th Century, or perhaps some date in the 19th, and part of that has been an increase in worldliness and misdirection, and a perceived decrease in Faith.  That decrease, however, may in fact be a bit of an illusion, or misconstrued.  It's very clearly the case that the churches born of the Reformation, generally eager to accommodate themselves to social trends of all types, are suffering much.  Catholicism may seem to be, but it may be much less than imagined.  When real events occur, the basic Catholic nature of Catholic peoples (and the Orthodox nature of Orthodox people's for that matter, strongly reasserts itself.

Which may be why the fire at Notre Dame is oddly portentous. France is a bellwether of some sort, descending into the depths, and the reviving.  On the night the Cathedral was burning, people gathered to pray.

And that's quite telling.