9/7/2015
2 More NextBlog
Fr Hunwicke's Mutual
Enrichment
Fr John Hunwicke
was for nearly three decades at
Lancing College; where he taught
Latin and Greek language and
literature, was Head of Theology,
and Assistant Chaplain. He has
served three curacies, been a Parish
Priest, and Senior Research Fellow
at Pusey House in Oxford. He is now
incardinated into the Personal
Ordinariate of our Lady of
Walsingham. The opinions expressed
on this Blog are not asserted as
being those of the Magisterium of
the Church, but as the writer's
opinions as a private individual.
Nevertheless, the writer strives,
http://liturgicalnotes.blogspot.ca/2015/06/groins-and-minds-since-fall.html
Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment: Groins and minds since the Fall
CreateBlog SignIn
22 June 2015
Groins and minds since the Fall
The Elephant in the Room during all this endless talk about the Synod's
Agenda, is, surely: Has Human Nature changed? Did humans never, before
today, suffer from sexual temptation? Are Fornication, Adultery, Sodomy,
problems only of our own unique and spectacularly sui generis age? What
did the New Testament writers mean when they talked about porneia,
moikheia, malakia? Is there something crashingly new about the capacity
or incapacity of modern human beings (whether with or without Grace) to
resist temptation? What is supposed to be so different about our groins
and minds compared with the groins and minds of every other human
generation since the Fall? What has so privileged us that we are
(apparently) free to claim exemption from the Divine Commands, entolai,
which were considered to bind former generations since the dawn of
history?
What is different about our age; what does set it apart from all
previous ages?
Not, surely, human sexual organs or the human minds which have to cope
with them. The only change is the spread of the curse, the heresy, of
thinking that humans have a Right to Autonomy, free from obligations to
God or even to the age-old genetic and social inheritance of our long
history as a species; "free", in S Paul's terrifying phrase, "from
Righteousness". In other words, the amoral individualistic wickedness of
the Enlightenment Chicken is at last come home to roost and to befoul its
roosting place.
If you will allow me yet again to belabour you with the Anglican
Patrimony, I will remind you of C S Lewis's fictional snapshot (1945) of an
atheist 'freethinker', a Professor Churchwood, "an old dear. All his lectures
were devoted to proving the impossibility of ethics, though in private life
he'd walked ten miles rather than leave a penny debt unpaid. But all the
same ... was there a single doctrine practised at Belbury* which hadn't
been preached by some lecturer at Edgestow? Oh, of course, they never
thought that anyone would act on their theories! No one was more
astonished than they when what they'd been talking about for years
suddenly took on reality. But it was their own child coming back to them:
grown up and unrecognisable, but their own. ... Trahison des clercs. None
of us is quite innocent." (This theme, surely, is what That Hideous
Strength is all about.)
And try putting that together with blessed Edward Bouverie Pusey's
perceptive and prophetic analysis in the 1830s (unpublished Papers in the
archives of Pusey House): We must bend our minds and conform them to
the teaching of Holy Scripture, or men will end in bending Holy
1/7
9/7/2015
hopes, and prays that the views he
expresses are conformable with and
supportive of the Magisterium.
Nothing on this site is to be taken as
representing the views of the
Ordinariate of our Lady of
Walsingham, of its Ordinary, or of
any part of it.
Archive
2015 (308)
September (7)
August (27)
July (34)
June (43)
Rainbow Houses and Fashions
The English Missal (2)
The English Missal (1)
Note
The Feast of Our Lady of Perpetual
Succour
Catholic Ecumenism
Mass in Greek at S Denys
To Arms, to Arms
"Science says", does it?
ENCAENIA ... et alia ...
Instrumentum Laboris (VIS)
Blessed Paul VI
English Public Schools
Groins and minds since the Fall
Respect for canonical superiors
POST TRINITATEM
Encyclicals
Departed Worlds??? (3)
The Battle of Waterloo
Mutual Enrichment
Departed Worlds??? (2)
Mutual Enrichment: it's happening!
Departed Worlds??? (1)
ORDINARIATE FESTIVAL (4): More on
our Rite
Pope Francis to turn Tridentine?!?
The Date of Eas...
Why the worship of the Ordinariate
matters to ever...
"Anglicanism united not absorbed"
GOD'S FINAL WORD IS CALLED JESUS
Sacred Heart Sermon
Encyclicals
White Rose Day
The Primatial See of Malines
First Blessings
A Penance for Frivolity
Reminder
The Cult of the Blessed Sacrament
(3)
The Cult of the Blessed Sacrament
(2)
June 4 1415 ... the Conciliar
depositions and abdi...
The new Evangelisation
http://liturgicalnotes.blogspot.ca/2015/06/groins-and-minds-since-fall.html
Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment: Groins and minds since the Fall
Scripture to their own minds, and when it will not bend, will part with
it. For a time a person or a generation may go on with this discrepancy
unsettled; and a person of strong faith will go on to the end
undisturbed, satisfied on this or any other point, that there is some
way of settling it, though he knows not of it, yet ... for a Church,
wherein men of every sort are gathered, it is a dangerous state to take
a direction in any respect varying from Holy Scripture."
And finally, from Dorothy Leigh Sayers, an Anglican scholar whose genius
is insufficiently recognised or remembered, in a paper she read at Oxford
in 1947: "Right down to the nineteenth century, our public affairs were
mostly managed, and our books and journals were for the most part
written, by people brought up in homes, and trained in places, where [the
Scholastic] tradition was still alive in the memory and almost in the blood.
Just so, many people today who are atheist or agnostic in religion, are
governed in their conduct by a code of Christian ethics which is so rooted
that it never occurs to them to question it. But one cannot live on capital
for ever. However firmly a tradition is rooted, if it is never watered,
though it dies hard, yet in the end it dies."
That is precisely where we are now.
*The first syllable ('Bel' is, I presume, a LXX/Vg transcription of Ba'al)
indicates the significance of this fictional placename.
Posted by Fr John Hunwicke at 10:17
14 comments:
Joshua said...
I do hope, Father, that you will accompany, as his peritus, a
bishop to the Synod - if Papa Francesco hasn't invited you to
attend himself.
If nothing else, we could expect some intriguing blog posts.
22 June, 2015
Elizabeth @ The Garden Window said...
Why, oh why are these Pusey papers unpublished?
This quotation is a gem and his voice needs to be heard.
22 June, 2015
David Chislett said...
What a great Post, Father, one that could well be expanded,
published and distribute widely.
22 June, 2015
Liam Ronan said...
But you can't make people listen. They have to come round
in their own time, wondering what happened and why the
world blew up around them. It can't last.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
2/7
9/7/2015 Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment: Groins and minds since the Fall
The Cult of the Blessed Sacrament God bless you, Father. Your musings and references put me
(1)
in mind of one of Bradbury's 'living books' enduring in an age
AVANTI!
The Irish Referendum
when all books, doctrinal and otherwise, are being put to
All the way from Waterford the torch.
May (39)
April (37) 22 June, 2015
March (38)
RichardT said...
February (35)
January (48)
Father, is the problem not even worse?
2014 (375)
2013 (52)
It seems that people indeed wish to do as they will, but
2012 (4)
rather than merely wishing to be "free from Righteousness",
2011 (162) they demand to be regarded as Righteous whatever they do.
2010 (429)
2009 (443) "I do this, I am a Righteous person, therefore this must be
2008 (177) Righteous", or so the logic seems to go. Hence the desire to
2007 (9) change teaching, not to enable sin to happen (it seems to
2002 (2) happen anyway), but to deny that it is sinful.
2001 (8)
The difference from the past seems to be not in our groins
but in our loss of the concept that we are all sinners and can
Popular Posts all be forgiven.
Christine Mohrmann (3) 22 June, 2015
The ancient Romans were very
legalistically minded. When they B flat said...
prayed to the Gods, they did their best
to ensure that they covered Dear Father,
everything... The point you make is crucial, in my very limited worldview.
Professor Roberto de Mattei and Papal I have been seething in impotent anger for years because of
authority it. The insolent separate themselves qualitatively from their
Writing in the aftermath of "the forebears - have we then, somehow evolved the image of
Synod", Professor Roberto de Mattei,
perhaps the greatest Church historian
God into something different? The psalms no longer apply as
of our time, wrote &qu... authentic prayer to God for us; sin is not our problem, hell is
Excommunications all round! Bells, a myth; Christ's Incarnation was into a different humanity;
Books, and Candles galore!!! ancient rites and the Sacraments are no longer desirable
In the Daily Telegraph of November 4 means of Divine Grace for the new humanity. The list of
this year appeared a very jolly story possible railing against the Eternal Wisdom and providence
about an Austrian woman who had of God grows longer in the inhuman mind of the idolatrous
incurred excommunication for purp... Modernist.
Three Maniacs and why you need to
read this blog EVERY DAY
How prescient was LeoXIII in ordering his supplicatory
prayers which were cut off prematurely. This inimical spirit
I have a problem. Some people do not
read my blog EVERY DAY. Dear dear!
you describe so well, prevailed for more than half a century
This became apparent recently when I in liturgical circles, and have managed to cut off the
wrote about the 'reform&#... innocent People of God from their way of life in Him.
New Sins Who will save us from this slow death unless He come
In Mgr Ronald Knox's brilliant quickly?
collection of Essays in Satire , there is
a piece about a 'Professor' who invents 22 June, 2015
a new sin. Now,...
Pope or Tradition? EveAdamAndTheKids said...
There is an apocryphal tale that B Pius
IX once said Io sono la Tradizzione. I The reverse side of the autonomy coin is that we are to
thought of that the other day when I respect the autonomy of others, and the resulting guiding
read a report that Cardi... moral principle, which is undeniably deeply inculcated in the
June 4 1415 ... the Conciliar
depositions and abdications, six
modern world, is the need to balance our individual
hundred years on. autonomy with the autonomies of others.

http://liturgicalnotes.blogspot.ca/2015/06/groins-and-minds-since-fall.html 3/7
9/7/2015
If the head master of an English public
school addressed Common Room and
listed the seventeen ways in which its
members were corrupt, and ha...
Why the worship of the Ordinariate
matters to everybody.
I reprint an old post of mine because
Cardinal Sarah, Prefect of the
Congregation for Divine Worship, has
recently expressed a hope that the...
Followers
Jointhissite
withGoogleFriendConnect
Members(372) More
Links
Holy See
New Liturgical Movement
Oxford Ordinariate Group
Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of
Walsingham
Raffaello's
Madonna di Foligno
... once graced the high altar of the
http://liturgicalnotes.blogspot.ca/2015/06/groins-and-minds-since-fall.html
Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment: Groins and minds since the Fall
The advent of easy contraception has removed a lot of the
practical considerations that a traditional moral code
addressed with respect to marriage, family, and the social
role of women, and the continued value of this code has
subsequently been brought into question. As Christians, we
need to be able to answer such questions as, "why is sex
outside of marriage wrong?", without merely retorting:
because the Church or Bible says so. Many people today have
had many sex partners before finally settling down to marry
and successfully rear their 1.8 children, or whatever the
standard is, and, they would say, "thanks very much, but
we're fine and morally responsible people and who, and why,
are you to say differently?"
I see customs change, but I do not see evidence of any
repudiation of the will to live morally. For example, many
young women would not bat an eyelid at the thought of
aborting a human embryo, but would be aghast at the idea
of smacking a child. This is because they genuinely do not
see a human embryo as a yet constituted human being, but
view a child rather differently from an adult-in-formation, as
your form master might have, and deserving of the
occasional character-forming cuff to the back of the head.
22 June, 2015
David Sullivan said...
I'm sure this has all been pointed out before but based on
this single excerpt (I simply must read the book itself), I
would hazard to guess that Churchwood = G. E. Moore,
Belbury = Cambridge, and Edgestow = Oxford.
22 June, 2015
Raider Fan said...
repetitio est mater studiorum
For quite some time the timeless moral truths were
repeatedly taught before sappers prepared by the Frankfort
School (amongst others) infiltrated the Academy and
successfully undermined the universal and objective moral
order and many who found their theories a convenient
excuse to fornicate were then left to exercise authority with
guilty consciences with predictable consequences - the guilt
was suppressed by etoh/drugs or rationalised away via the
latest social theory to come rolling down the intellectual
pike.
And while this mephitic movement, which had been slowly
building up momentum, began to achieve critical mass in the
1960s, The Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church (see
opening address to Vatican Two - said to have been written
by Montini) chose that moment to abandon discipline and
placidly endure error thinking (what were they thinking?)
that in the long run truth would prevail over the error man
would come to recognise as error on his own owing to the
4/7
9/7/2015 Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment: Groins and minds since the Fall

church of Sancta Maria in Ara Coeli obvious consequences of the error.

on the Capitoline Hill.
There have not been a few Catholic authorities who have
intellectually fornicated with the enlightenment and their
monstrous progeny have been allowed to ransack the
remains of the once Catholic day and we have long been
abandoned ever since, in a speech to the Roman Clergy,
Pope Paul VI averred he could exercise discipline but that he
preferred to be loved.

We are now in the time of this execrable ecclesiastical

epoch when men have to realise that they have been
abandoned and that they have the duty to keep the Faith
once delivered alive in the domestic church for the Holy
Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church has quit the battle and
has increasingly surrendered nearly all of its moral turf to
the enemy.

There is not one, not one, Roman Catholic Traditionalist

alive in the Prelature whose possession of Catholic Tradition
is of sufficient strength that it could be applied as a force
against our Inertia Into Indifferentism.

We are in the midst of an historic collapse as bastion after

bastion has been razed by those who vocation it was to
strengthen them and, far more often than not, the man who
sees and points out the reality is decried as pharisaical and
one who is hurting the Faith.

Lod have mercy.

Jesus established His Hierarchal Church and the failure

began at the top and all of the rapidly declining objective
measurements of Catholic life beginning in the 1960s can not
be placed at the feet of the laymen who search for love in
the ruins of a once glorious church; and if that love can be
found in a Cave of Covadonga that is in union with the local
Bishop and Pope, hip hip hooray.

But, not a few of us find ourselves in the local Franchise of

Dead Diocese America, inc. constrained to maintain the
Bonds of Unity in Worship, Doctrine, and Authority as best
we can in our own microway of the Cross.

Raider Fan is the same age as Israel and the Holy Roman
Catholic and Apostolic Church that he was born into is
invisiblium even as Jesus was invisibilium to the world while
He was in the Tomb and because Jesus is always the Head of
His Church, he has nowhere else to go - he stands with Mary
and John at the foot of the Cross even when Peter flees out
of fear for the Jews.

And, the final and funny thing, Raider Fan would not have it
any other way for it is the will of God that he be alive at this
time in these circumstances for as Saint Vincent of Lerins
teaches, this is how God tests us to see if we love Him.

http://liturgicalnotes.blogspot.ca/2015/06/groins-and-minds-since-fall.html 5/7
9/7/2015 Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment: Groins and minds since the Fall

22 June, 2015

S Thorfinn said...

Sigrid Undset wrote something similar to the Sayers quote in

her "Reply to a Parish Priest", an essay first published in the
early 30's and included in her recently reissued Stages on the
Road. The whole "Reply" is chock-full of the good stuff -- but
here is the money quote, accented in the original:

...we have no right to assume that any part of European

tradition, cultural values, moral ideas, emotional wealth,
which has its origin in the dogmatically defined Christianity
of the Catholic Church, will continue to live a natural
life, if the people of Europe reject Christianity and refuse
to accept Gods supernatural grace. One might just as well
believe that a tree whose roots were severed should
continue to bear leaves and blossoms and fruit.

Jeff Mirus also highlighted this quote some time back, quite
usefully since I do not have the book at hand.

22 June, 2015

Jacobi said...

Fr.

Fallen Human Nature hasn't changed. In my opinion, and I

have said this many times, what has changed is that
Reforming heretics in the Church have changed the basic
understanding of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, from one of
commemoration and re-enactment of that Sacrifice by the
Ordained Priest acting "in persona Christi" into a protestant-
style communion service of bread and wine. A denial of the
Real Presence, and lets face it, a denial of sin.

We truly have, as Malcolm Muggeridge said back in the

seventies, a new Reformation on our hands.

We must get back to the idea of receiving Holy Communion

not routinely, or out of vain glory or for a desire for human
respect by sodomists or adulterers, contraceptors and
others, but only when free from mortal sin and in a state of
grace.

22 June, 2015

Thomas said...

Exactly so Father. A member of my own family who has been

a proselytising atheist for some years told me recently that
they were shocked by the moral (or rather immoral)
attitudes of their children on some issues. I reminded them
that the same children had grown up being told that there
are no absolutes, nothing higher than their own minds and
opinions, no ultimate meaning to life. So while I shared their
sadness, I was neither shocked or surprised. (I was told I was

http://liturgicalnotes.blogspot.ca/2015/06/groins-and-minds-since-fall.html 6/7
9/7/2015 Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment: Groins and minds since the Fall

being "unhelpful"). Revolutionaries always seem to think that

their revolution will only go as far as they intend or imagine.
But the culture of perpetual revolution ("pushing the
boundaries", "breaking the taboos") means that one
generation starts where the previous one leaves off and over
time things always play out to their logical conclusion.

23 June, 2015

Marcus Josephus said...

Dear Father, An excellent post! You have stimulated my

interest in Pusey. Is ther unpublished works of his that
should see the light of day? If so are there any plans to bring
them forward?

23 June, 2015

Melinda said...

Exactly. It was obviously easier to be celibate and pure, or

married and chaste in the Roman Empire of Tiberius,
Caligula, Nero, et al. No temptations or cultural struggles for
Christians there.

23 June, 2015

Post a Comment

Newer Post Home Older Post

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

http://liturgicalnotes.blogspot.ca/2015/06/groins-and-minds-since-fall.html 7/7