Just made my first mug of Bovril. I found a jar in the larder which was bought by mistake instead of Marmite. I have drunk Bovril before at Football matches but never taken the grave step of making a mug in a domestic context. As there are no instructions on the jar itself I thought I ought to investigate the matter online before proceeding to put boiling water to gloop. Imagine my shock to discover that Bovril was invented by a British businessman as a hearty drink for the soldiers of Napoleon III during the Franco-Prussian War. So, in a certain sense its original function was to preserve the Papal States. (It was the defeat of Napoleon III at the battle of Sedan which led to Piedmont’s annexation of Rome in September 1870). Furthermore, true to its Papal origins, an advertising campaign of ‘the early twentieth century’ (Wikipedia) boasted that Bovril, like the Pope, possesses an infallible power! In the case of Bovril presumably the power is to keep you warm at football matches, as it doesn’t seem to be much use against Prussians. In the advert the Pope drinking the cup of Bovril is clearly Leo XIII. Now I feel a bit guilty that I prefer Marmite…
Laodicea 
October 25, 2007 at 9:49 pm
Let it be known that the Prussian Officer Cadet Corps subsisted primarily on black bread and coffee. If you want to win the Franco-Prussian war you can’t footle around with such trifling and babylonian comforts as Bovril.
October 25, 2007 at 10:32 pm
“The children of this world are more prudent in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light”
October 25, 2007 at 11:24 pm
Aelianus,
Thank you for posting that Bovril advert… It’s made my week.
October 26, 2007 at 12:34 am
Oooh. Okay, smoking-bad. Skelping the bairns–good. Got it!
October 26, 2007 at 5:54 am
Whoops. Attached my comment to the wrong thread. None too bright there, Seraphic!
October 28, 2007 at 10:16 pm
It’s going on my kitchen wall
(MY kitchen wall) (heh)
December 12, 2007 at 1:21 pm
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August 3, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Concerning the declaration of papal infallibility by Pope Pius IX in 1870,British statesman Lord Acton had this to say in 1887 during the pontificate of Leo XIII,
“I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of corruption by full authority. There is no worse heresy than the fact that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”
Would that Bovril were the sovereign remedy it claimed to be at the beginning of the twentieth century. That all of its original promoters are now dead is testament to its inefficacy. The elusive quest for an infallible elixir of life continues.
August 6, 2009 at 3:45 pm
Acton, like many others, seems to gravely misunderstand what the dogma of papal infallability actually contains, namely that the Holy Spirit preserves the Pope from error when he he defines a doctrine of faith or morals to be held by the universal Church.
It does by no means say that the Pope is always right – not even in matters of faith and morals; he may utter his private opinion on theological topics and be wrong in what he says. Far less does it mean that a Pope will always make the right decision in his government of the Church, and even less, that he will be a saint – infallibility does not mean impeccability.
It simply means that God guards His Church from error being taught by the magisterium. So there certainly have been Popes who have not set much of an example as shepards of their flocks, but whatever their own moral shortcomings, God still saw to it that at least they did not promulgate erroneous statements.
Nor do I see how this dogma can be particularly corrupting. Any Pope must know that when he should attempt to set himself against God and promulgate some error, God has ways to stop him doing it, and some might not be agreeable.
August 6, 2009 at 5:01 pm
I do not dispute the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church’s high ethical focus in setting parameters of belief for its faithful. Awareness of mortality brings with it a measure of divine insanity. Belief accommodates inconsistency and allows a coexistence of opposites that would be inadmissible without it. I have no quarrel with that, finding the end game of logical positivism equally repugnant. Both extremes exist for me, but I am more comfortable settling on a position somewhere in between. Given my spiritual formation in youth I will no doubt be racked for that on my death bed and perforce abandon my ghost to the mercy of whatever happens when the light of corporeal being is extinguished.
Aspects of the doctrine of papal infallibility such as consequences that flow from belief in it are logical, but the doctrine itself isn’t. To say that the that the more formally an announcement is made by a pope the more likely it is to reflect a deep eternal truth is seen by the majority of non-believers as a dangerous folly to be resisted for the same reasons the divine right of kings was resisted in times past and presidential immunity is today.
I continue to mourn my loss of faith in Bovril for the reason stated in my previous post.