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Batch the Sixth
In honour of the Season, herewith a selection of ( mostly ) Catholic and often Jacobite-iced, quotes:
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'On the surface, O Come All Ye Faithful seems a straight-forward enough hymn of adoration to the new-born Christ but it may, in fact, have been written as a coded rallying cry to Jacobites to prepare for the 1745 rebellion. Its author, John Francis Wade, was a fervent supporter of the Stuart cause who spent much of his life as plain-chant scribe at the English Catholic college in Douai, France. Half-hidden Jacobite images, including the Stuart cypher and Scottish thistles, appear on what is thought to be the manuscript on which he first wrote out the original Latin version of the carol, Adeste Fidelis, in 1743. Wade's call to the "faithful" may have had a double meaning and been intended to alert the supporters of the "King over the Water" to Bonnie Prince Charlie's impending arrival in Britain.'
Unsourced press clipping. 1990s ?
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'This book is about a supreme event in English history,, the Reformation. Its theme could be summarised thus: on the whole, English men and women did not want the Reformation and most of them were slow to accept it when it came.' 'The
Reformation and the English People'. J
J Scarisbrick. 1984.
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Preliminary
context: St Edmund Campion (1540 -
81) English Catholic martyr, when
asked at his trial what he had to say to save his life: 'In condemning us you condemn all your own ancestors - all the ancient priests, bishops and kings - all that was once the glory of England, the island of saints, and the most devoted child of the See of Peter. For what have we taught, however you may qualify it with the odious name of treason, that they did not uniformly teach ? To be condemned with these lights - not of England only, but of the world - by their degenerate descendants, is both gladness and glory to us. God
lives: posterity will live. Their
judgement is not so liable to corruption as that of those who are now going to
sentence us to death.' ******
'I have come to see very clearly indeed that the Reformation was in England and Scotland the work neither of God nor of the people, its real authors being, in the former country, a lustful and tyrannical King, and in the latter a pack of greedy, time-serving and unpatriotic nobles. I am also convinced myself that were I personally to continue to remain outside the Catholic and Roman Church, I should be making myself an accomplice after the fact in a great national crime.' John Patrick Crichton-Stuart, Third Marquess of Bute. 1847 - 1900. [ Bute was an interesting chap, a semi reclusive scholar-magnate and philanthropist. He commissioned the curious gothic fairy-tale 'Castell Coch' which adorns the hills above Cardiff. For a laugh. ]
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'Taken together, they comprise the whole implicit project of his [ J. R. R. Tolkien's ] literary mythology, and a remedy for pathological modernity in a nutshell: namely, the resacralization ( or re-enchantment ) of experienced and living nature, including human nature, in the local cultural idiom.'
'Defending Middle-Earth - Tolkien, Myth & Modernity'. Patrick Curry. Floris. 1997. Page 29.
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Preliminary context: J. R. R. Tolkien writing to a Jesuit friend concerning charges of irreligion against his writing.
'Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work, unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision ... for the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.'
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'Why did [ Cardinal Henry Edward ] Manning [ 1808 - 1892 ], like other Victorian philanthropists and do-gooders, labour so tirelessly for better housing and work conditions among the poor, for hospitals, public health, education ? It was because he believed that a little over 1800 years previous, the Incarnate God had walked the earth, and told the human race how to live. Manning further believed that this Incarnate God, born in a stable, and preaching good news to the poor, had after his miraculous resurrection from the dead, established on earth an institution which would not merely carry out his commandments but embody his very self, and that this institution was the Roman Catholic Church, which embodied Christ, not merely in the miraculous sacrament of the Altar, but also in her teachings; and that central to the teaching office of the church was the Papacy, the infallibly guided, truth-bearing line which stretched from St. Peter to Leo XIII.
Unsourced press clipping. 1980s ?
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'Antiquity is better than modern times because it did not know Christianity or syphilis.' Adolf Hitler ( allegedly ). 1889 - 1945.
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'If
I had to summarise why the story of Christianity is so thrilling, it is to do
with the extraordinary mixture of the eternal with the historical, the
geographical and the human.
The claims made by any great religion are absolute, but that religion
appears in a time and a place and through people.
Christianity, through the doctrine that God became man in Jesus, puts
this strange, dangerous mixture at its core. The
lines of T. S. Eliot come to mind:
'From
where the western seas gnaw at the
coast of Iona, To
the death in the desert, the prayer in forgotten places by the broken
imperial column, From
such ground springs that which forever renews the earth Though
it is forever denied.'
The
history of Christianity is the tale of our time and of all time.'
Charles Moore ( 1956 - ), then Editor of the Daily Telegraph, 23/04/99 ( St George's Day - coincidentally ? ) ****** '
... the vast emptiness of the desert seemed to be more than ordinarily full of
meaning.
it made the silly fussiness of civilisation seem trivial.
These [ Bedouin ] tribesmen lived such simple lives, confined to
so few elemental things.
Their possessions were camels, sheep and a tent.
Their food flour, rice and dates.
Their clothes a shirt and a cloak.
They were daily confronted by life and death, plain and undisguised.
No wonder that such conditions bred in them the simplest of religions -
one God, almighty, conquering, Merciful.
the desert indeed had the same effect on me.' Sir
John Glubb, 1897 - 1986. A.k.a
'Glubb Pasha', commander of the Arab Legion 1936 - 1956.
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'Wine
is visible proof that God loves you and wants you to be happy' Ernest
Hemingway. 1899 - 1961.
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