A Traddie Perspective

If you've never experienced this I hope you do some day, it is awesome. https://t.co/hetkcQRPhw

— Ryan Grant 🚬⛪🥃 Shameless Triumphalist (@chesterbelloc3) May 3, 2021

Multiple celebrations > concelebration.

Suffused with Latin Theology of the Presbyterate

As one would expect...

This Good Shepherd Sunday is the World Day of Prayer for Vocations. Beautiful prayer for the holiness of the clergy composed by Benedict XVI. Holy priests inspire priestly vocations! pic.twitter.com/lWb9MUBLot

— Father V (@father_rmv) April 25, 2021

A Presentation of Pure Thomistic Theology of the Presbyterate, No Doubt

Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P. will be speaking at a Vocations Symposium co-sponsored by the Thomistic Institute Angelicum titled "Toward a Fundamental Theology of the Priesthood" taking place at the Vatican next spring (2022).

Learn more and register here: https://t.co/Fqij79eYD0

— Thomistic Institute (@ThomisticInst) April 14, 2021

A Controversial Book for Latins

New arrival today from @undpress! Article in “Married Priests in the Catholic Church.” pic.twitter.com/EHlXLrznQQ

— Fr Alexander Laschuk (@byzkanonist) April 7, 2021

Introduction to Sacraments according to the Theology of the Syriac Orthodox Church

A Latin View on Concelebration

Two from Fr. Hunwicke:
Pope Innocent III on Concelebration

Vandalism in S Peter's, and S Thomas on Concelebration

S Thomas Aquinas, as his custom was, covers pretty well most of the problems of late C20 Christianity, and does so in a neat formulaic way. First, he crisply formulates an erroneous opinion; then disposes of it with Respondeo.

So first he states a propositio sometimes advanced in neo-traditionalist circles: That many priests cannot consecrate one and the same Host. He disposes of this - he was a good Catholic - by pointing to what the Church does. "According to the custom of a number of Churches the newly ordained concelebrate". The problem of rogue concelebrants Jumping The Gun he disposes of in exactly the same way as Pope Innocent III (see previous post) had done: "And it is not true that by this the consecration over the same Host is doubled; since, as Innocent III says, the intention of all must be referred (ferri) to the same instant of Consecration".

Having disposed of that little technical difficulty, he justifies the practice in itself: "Since a priest does not consecrate except in the persona of Christ, and the many are one in Christ, therefore it does not matter whether this Sacrament is consecrated through one or through many".

There is no doubt that the practice of Concelebration has become unseemly since the Council. Those of us who are hermeneutic-of-continuity traditionalists will do well to rethink the way we use Concelebration. But the fashion in some circles of ridiculing all use of Concelebration, and of even denying that what the newly ordained do with their Bishop really is true Concelebration, is ill-informed and gives 'traditionalism' a bad name. We must avoid the temptation (as we defend our Holy Faith against the latest aggressions of Bergoglianism) to propose our own narrow circumscriptions of 'Tradition'.

Understood in terms of Latin scholastic sacramental theology regarding the presbyterate and the Eucharist: in persona Christi, etc.


Update: One more...
Benedict XIV on Concelebration

Bishop Schneider on the Minor "Ministries"

Guest Article: Bishop Athanasius Schneider on the Significance of Minor Ministries in the Sacred Liturgy https://t.co/oBFzgXOQom pic.twitter.com/H7tieyG4D1

— NLM (@NLMblog) January 20, 2021

See also this exchange between Fr. Peter Stravinskas and Nicholas Senz Confusion twice confounded: On the motu proprio Spiritus Domini by Peter M.J. Stravinskas

Pope Francis and expanding lay ministries: A response to Fr. Stravinskas by Nicholas Senz

Ministry and the importance of words: A response to Nicholas Senz

Spiritus Domini, papal authority, minor orders, and ministry

Polemical?

Mysticism in the Orthodox Church
In this short video, Fr. Panayiotis explains how the Orthodox Church has preserved the Mystical aspects of Christianity, which have been mostly lost in Western Christianity.https://t.co/k7NrlhRbYj

— Trisagionfilms (@TrisagionFilms) December 30, 2020

Mysticism in the Orthodox Churchhttps://t.co/k7Nrli8NmT
"...the wise providence of God orders our affairs in many different ways and lovingly bestows on each one of us what is appropriate and profitable both for virtuous deeds and the mysteries of faith."
Gregory Palamas pic.twitter.com/EYwUJWhqbI

— Trisagionfilms (@TrisagionFilms) December 30, 2020

On Mysticism https://t.co/k7NrlhRbYj
The Lord came to send fire upon the earth, and through participation in this fire He makes divine not just the human substance which He assumed for our sake, but every person who is found worthy of communion with Him.
Palamas pic.twitter.com/FgT57GH9cL

— Trisagionfilms (@TrisagionFilms) December 30, 2020

Related:

What makes a person saintly is love.
- St Porphyrios of Kafsokalivia pic.twitter.com/yRbQX3mpTM

— Basilica.ro (EN) (@BasilicaNews) December 30, 2020

What Sort of Latin Theology of Grace Is This?

As if any aspect of the Saving Mystery Who is our Lord Jesus Christ could be separated from Him?

Christmas, and the other Feast Days of the Church, participate in the power of the keys.
That is to say, the Church’s calendar binds on earth and in heaven in such a way that the grace of the event designated arrives by God’s will, and renews those who wait upon it.

— Amigo de Frodo (@bpdflores) December 23, 2020

The Source of the Tweet May be Probelmatic

But the thesis on"Western Church history" is interesting. Is St. Augustine the primary Latin source for its "ontology of Holy Orders"? And is Latin "theology of the priesthood" based upon St. Augustine solely, or are there other Latin fathers who are sources for it?

Cassian bought the mystical theology of the Egyptian Desert as described by Evagrius of Pontus to southern France. He adapted this desert mysticism to appeal to Latin Europeans. Reforming old monasteries and building new ones. Thus beginning the Gothic revolution. pic.twitter.com/oURBEgWWGs

— OZAbbey (@9AbbeyOZ) December 19, 2020

Cassian's master was Evagrius of Pontus d399CE. Over 15 years Evagrius had interviewed & documented the greatest of the Egyptian-desert mystics. He was meticulous & thorough. A brilliant psychologist. He cataloged 9 Logosmoi, which became Cassian's 8 passions & Gregory's 7 vices. pic.twitter.com/wIMQ8EHrI3

— OZAbbey (@9AbbeyOZ) December 19, 2020

Related:

John Cassian and Augustine on Peter and on the pope via /r/Christianity https://t.co/bLf6gJXSqX

— reddit_christianity (@rd_christianity) March 13, 2018

I Could Guess the Author from the Title Alone

NLM: In Defense of Allegorical Interpretation of the Liturgy by PETER KWASNIEWSKI

In Defense of Allegorical Interpretation of the Liturgy https://t.co/1vtyyZUanD pic.twitter.com/QZXaEAxadA

— NLM (@NLMblog) October 19, 2020

Related:

The Divine Office as a Mirror of the Mass https://t.co/6hX9HYRz4R pic.twitter.com/UvSwl2aa7W

— NLM (@NLMblog) October 22, 2020

Gregory DiPippo

A Latin Essay on the Presbyterate

Crisis: What You Can Do to Help Our Priests by Fr. Peter M. Stravinskas

The priesthood of Jesus Christ, in which every Christian priest shares, is the source of holiness in the Church and the impetus for all evangelization. Through the ministry of the priest, Christ’s lay faithful are nourished with the Word of Life and the Bread of Life; their sanctification makes possible the sanctification of the world.

and

The reverence and respect of the Catholic faithful for their clergy is directed, then, not toward the man himself but toward Christ who is the Priest of the new eternal covenant and toward the priesthood any man derives from Him and shares with Him.

Latin notions of the presbyterate (and its conflation with the priesthood of Christ) and sacrifice, and some clericalism probably are sufficient to explain the resistance to the "priesthood of the faithful" as being "Protestant."

Oops

While the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said baptisms administered according to the “We baptize” formula are invalid, another Vatican congregation had previously given advice to the contrary.https://t.co/nilZ8qZVCw

— JD Flynn (@jdflynn) September 16, 2020

A Dominican on the Seven Sacraments

Possibly the best summary of the 7 sacraments. A great video to share with friends and defend the Church’s tradition.https://t.co/v3lxHEPmG2 pic.twitter.com/simhtd1zGK

— OPWest (@opwest) August 30, 2020

Fallen Failsafes and a Revolutionary Modern Priesthood by Clare McGrath-Merkle

My sincerest thanks to The Regensburg Forum and Dr. Matthew Gaetano for publishing my latest article on the priesthood. https://t.co/U1mKHIWmo9

— Clare McGrath-Merkle, OCDS, DPhil (@Onceandfuturepr) August 23, 2020

Regensburg Forum

Yelle penned an important monograph on the history of the theological debates surrounding the core error underlying Bérulle’s spiritual theology of priesthood: the notion of the holiness of Christ, in which Christ’s human nature is considered to have been made holy by the grace of union with the Word—a mistaken understanding of the communication of idioms. In line with Chalcedon, the properties of Christ’s human nature remained unimpaired, since the hypostatic union changed nothing. If His human nature had been made holy by the grace of union, it would have necessarily changed. Christ, rather, needed habitual grace for His human nature to be raised to the supernatural order.

This error in the understanding of the humanity of Christ (a central meditation for Bérulle’s Oratorians) served as the basis for the holiness and sacerdotal power of Bérulle’s priest. Just as the grace of union made Christ holy and a mediator of religion for Bérulle, so, too, the priest, through the grace of union with Christ, was made mediator of redemption and capable of sacrifice. In this schema, the priest became a mediator in the order of being, a distinction reserved to Christ alone.

Decades after Yelle’s critique, Jacques Maritain best explicated this error and the ongoing influence of some of Bérulle’s key philosophical ideals in his article on the French School, only translated into English in 1997, in a collection of his works. In it, Maritain questioned how it was possible that a great number of churchmen still remained under the French School’s influence despite holding different doctrinal positions. Maritain wrote that the spirituality of French School priests “must consist above all in losing their own subsistence in order to live solely in the Person of Christ, who never ceases to draw them into the unity of the divine Person” (427).

Maritain insisted that Bérulle was seriously mistaken in taking the step from affirming the perfection to which a priest is called, to affirming a perfection of his state of life, making the priest the source of all sanctity in the Church. He quoted Dupuy’s important work on Bérulle and the priesthood, “He [the priest] cannot be defined as a superchristian. For he is not just that. But it is urgent that he be at least that” (190). Dupuy continued, “The priest is united to Christ more than as an instrument, he is conjoined to Him, he is not only in His hand, he is in a sense His hand itself; he is a member of Christ” (195). The basis of the superiority of Bérulle’s sacerdotal state was, as Maritain noted, “the sacerdotal anointing emanates from that of Jesus, who (and this is the thesis dearest to Bérulle) is a priest because of and as a direct consequence of the hypostatic union…” (Maritain, 428).

Maritain believed churchmen were more or less formed by this school in seminary, and were unable to perceive the effects of a vague theology that had escaped rigorous intellectual systemization and therefore any kind of critical review. The result, he noted, was the production of an ideology rather than a theology that continued in his day to have an immense influence.

Vestiges of this vague theology continue today. Impossible to treat fully in this article-length discussion, we can at least explore a few of its major errors.

An essay worth pondering; are there any connections with current Latin opinons regarding the presbyterate and the presbyter acting in persona Christi?

 

"Victim"

Therefore Christ Himself, as man, was not only priest, but also a perfect victim, being at the same time victim for sin, victim for a peace-offering, and a holocaust."

Summa Theologiae IIIa Q. 22, a. 2https://t.co/qsGhNAFVpo

— Thomistic Institute (@ThomisticInst) August 20, 2020

Etymoline:

victim (n.)

late 15c., "living creature killed and offered as a sacrifice to a deity or supernatural power, or in the performance of a religious rite;" from Latin victima "sacrificial animal; person or animal killed as a sacrifice," a word of uncertain origin. Perhaps related to vicis "turn, occasion" (as in vicarious), if the notion is an "exchange" with the gods. Perhaps distantly connected to Old English wig "idol," Gothic weihs "holy," German weihen "consecrate" (compare Weihnachten "Christmas") on notion of "a consecrated animal."
Sense of "person who is hurt, tortured, or killed by another" is recorded from 1650s; meaning "person oppressed by some power or situation, person ruined or greatly injured or made to suffer in the pursuit of an object, or for the gratification of a passion or infatuation, or from disease or disaster" is from 1718. Weaker sense of "person taken advantage of, one who is cheated or duped" is recorded from 1781.

WordSense.EU
Wiktionary

U. Pitt Keywords Project:

Keyword: Victim

Victim is an important word because it links often traumatic personal or group experiences in contemporary societies to frameworks that understand such experiences and respond to them through public policy, political advocacy, and in wider public debate. The etymology of victim is straightforward: the word comes from Latin victima. Its first sense is that of a sacrificial offering, and this strong sense is made stronger by the identification of the sacrificial offering and thus the victim as Christ. By C17, however, it has developed the more general meaning “a person who is put to death or subjected to torture by another; one who suffers severely in body or property through cruel or oppressive treatment.” These strong meanings developed into a general sense of a passive recipient of misfortune. While in earlier uses such misfortune has been regarded as individual or random, there has been a concerted attempt in recent years to use the word as a route to political empowerment as the status of victim becomes structural. Governments have also chosen to endow victims with an active role in addressing their misfortune; this is most evident in some criminal justice systems, where the issue then arises of whether such victims have been given a power to override not only the rights of offenders but also the ability of the state itself to administer justice.

Weigel on Eucharistic Offering (or Sacrifice)

CWR Dispatch: Rediscovering Eucharistic Amazement by George Weigel
If Christ is not the principal actor in the celebration of the Eucharist, then the Mass is a social ritual, the community’s celebration of itself.


This caught my attention at first glance:

How many Catholics understand that we are called to the weekly celebration of the Eucharist so that, in union with Christ the Head of the Body, we might offer ourselves to the Father along with the eucharistic Christ who is offered?

But his reporting of the recent Vatican response on the proper form for Baptism in the Roman rite is of interest too:

The question the Congregation had to answer was whether Baptism is validly conferred by saying “In the name of the father and mother, the godfather and godmother, the family, the friends, and in the name of the community, we baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” The answer was “No.” Why? Because the ancient formula, “I baptize you….” expresses the bedrock truth the Second Vatican Council inscribed in its Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy: “When anyone baptizes, it is Christ himself who baptizes.” To speak of “we” baptizing is to suggest that the Church invents the sacraments rather than her being created by the sacraments. And that, to cite an image from Father Robert Imbelli, is to decapitate the Body of Christ.

Christ is the principal actor in the sacramental drama of Baptism. Christ acts through the baptizer, to be sure. But it really is Christ who acts. Otherwise, Baptism would be merely a welcoming rite rather than the radical reconfiguration of a person to Christ as a member of his Mystical Body, the Church.

X-Ray of the Priest in a Field Hospital

A Response to Latin Trads

But still making use of a Latin notion of sacrifice.

CLJ

Confessions of a Post-'Rad Trad' Millennial: The Perfect Sacrifice https://t.co/pfcoUypne4 #wednesdaymorning #CatholicTwitter #WednesdayWisdom #Catholic #religion #theology

— Church Life Journal (@ChurchLifeND) July 1, 2020

Patrick Viscuso Reviews Kevin Schembri's Oikonomia

Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies (temporary free access)

The reviewer is a priest and canonist for GOARCH:

The Reverend Dr. Patrick Viscuso is a priest of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese and a canonist specializing in marriage and gender issues. His doctorate in historical theology from The Catholic University of American concentrated on Byzantine and Oriental canon law, patristic studies, and church history. He also holds a Master of Divinity from Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology and a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service from Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. Fr. Viscuso is the author of a large number of scholarly publications in the field of Late Byzantine Canon Law and is a specialist in marriage legislation and theology. His most recent writings focus on the relationship of marriage to ordination, purity issues, divorce, and women's superstitions in late Byzantium.

Perhaps he has written something on the Byzantine canons on marriage and divorce.

In his review of Oikonomia: Divorce and Remarriage in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition, he notes

Another point repeatedly made is that the "Orthodox tradition" invests the indissolubility of marriage with an eternal character and consequently views remarriage as a concession or expression of ecclesial oikonomia. The absence of the Eucharist and crowning during late Byzantine celebration of second and third marriages is said to imply that Orthodoxy regarded or still regards these unions as less than sacramental in some way.

However, the author fails to show any articulation of marriage as an eternal bond in Orthodox canonical or theological literature prior to the twentieth century, when this theological opinion came to be expressed at the Institut de Théologie Orthodoxe Saint-Serge. In fact, there are substantial Byzantine texts that articulate a contrary view affirming that marriage is ended by death, an example being the Scriptural commentaries of Theophylaktos, archbishop of Ohrid (b. ca. 1055-d. after 1126), specifically on Luke 20:34–36.

The assertions regarding the non-sacramental nature of second and third unions within Orthodoxy do not adequately address the facts. For instance, there was no uniform practice regarding crowning of a second or third marriage in Byzantium. Second unions were definitely crowned according to the usage of the Great Church; the presence or absence of crowning did not mean that a sacerdotal blessing of the marriage did not take place; and, since the Eucharist was not a constitutive element in the establishment of the marriage, the canonical restriction of the second and third married from the Eucharist during a period of penance did not mean that the union, as established by sacerdotal blessing, was not regarded as sacramental and incapable of sanctification.

Furthermore, in considering such questions, the absence of the Eucharist from the marriage service is completely irrelevant to its sacramental nature. As is obvious to those who have ever attended a contemporary ceremony, Orthodox marriages today are considered blessed and sacramental without the reception of the Eucharist during their celebration, even the so-called mixed marriages of Roman Catholics and Orthodox. Also, the author's emphasis on the penitential nature of second and third unions does not adequately address contemporary practice, where such penances are no longer imposed.

A dominant theologoumenon is not the same as dogma... and the opinion that marriage is eternal may not even be dominant in the various Byzantine ecclesial traditions.

So second and third "marriages" may be deemed "sacramental"? And yet a period of penance might be required. Is there a authoritative work discussing penances in the canons and their rationale?

I will have to eventually get a Byzantine textbook on marriage but probably at least one that covers a range of opinions among the various ecclesial traditions, or several textbooks. I don't think I would rely on a Greek one alone.