The SNP have no mandate to pursue secession

1. The constitution is a reserved matter.

2. Thus, the Scottish electorate were not voting on the constitution.

3. Even the SNP agreed that the 2014 referendum should be a ‘once in a generation’ vote.

4. The then Prime Minister had already announced his intention to hold a UK-wide in/out EU referendum before the 2014 vote was held.

5. The current Prime Minister has the right and absolutely ought to refuse any request for a referendum.

6. According to polls support for secession is less than 50% and falling.

7. According to polls most Green Party voters do not support secession.

8. Nicola Sturgeon explicitly stated in the campaign that people who favour other SNP policies [who should have their heads examined] should vote for the party even if they oppose independence which completely undermines her (anyway false) claim that these elections could provide a mandate for a second referendum.

9. It appears that a majority of voters in Scotland voted for parties who oppose independence.

 

The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

 

Oh Camellia sinensis!

Each time the kettle starts to hiss,

Oh praise Him! Alleluia!

Dihydrogen monoxide too,

Infuse their leaves the whole way through!

Oh praise Him! Oh praise Him!

Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

 

Dreadnought

Recently, I noticed a book in the possession of Aelianus, called ‘Dreadnought‘. Due to my recent Hornblower obsession (I really must get to that shoe-post-y series of trivial literature and television at some point), I was immediately intrigued. It turned out to be not about sailing ships (ba!) but about Britain and Germany, and the role of their navies, on the way towards the First World War.

Yet, when I opened the book, the passage I hit upon was extremely vivid, and Aelianus assured me it was representative for the book. This has turned out to be true so far; I am at 550 of 910 pages, and find it the perfect cross between reading a novel and reading serious stuff. In fact, it is rather like reading a novel, only that it has really happened.

It is entertaining, informative, and utterly shocking.

Shocking, because I start to realize how influenced my history teachers were by their Marxist-dominated studies, apparently.

Shocking even more because it seems to me that quite generally in Germany, East or West, the dreadfulness of the First World War is entirely shadowed by the supreme dreadfulness of the Second World War.

According to what I learnt at school, and according to what every rational person in Germany believes, the Second World War was something that would not have happened without particular (Hitler) and general madness in Germany.

The First World War, on the other hand, happened because (now this is what I learnt at school) basically every one of the protagonists had an interest in it happening (imperialism! bad, BAD, Imperialism!!), only no-one thought it would be that disastrous. Now I have only got to 1902 in the book, but from that it is quite obvious that within the more-or-less-moral concerto of diplomatic relations at the time, Germany quite certainly acted on the ‘less’ extreme of that gradient, throughout.

Though Aelinus tells me he shudders at thinking of what would have happened had there  been an aliance between Britain and Germany at that point, I still do think that double-dealing, deceitfulness and hubris were even less conductive to European (and worldwide) happiness than a realization of ‘we are basically family, and that parliamentary monarchy thing you have going over there does not seem such a bad thing, probabably rather a better thing than our obsessively military absolutist culture’ would have done. But well. We will never know in this live, probably.

I mean, if, on reading such a book, you think that the ‘resignation’ of Bismarck was a thing that would make matters worse: things must be in a really, really bad state already. Poor, poor Germany, please really do pray for us!

 

The Empire on which the sun never sets

At least, for the next several millenia, barring political complications.

I am posting this on the request of Aelianus, who must feel quite smug about this.

 

No Protestant Babies – Pope Benedict XIV to King Henry IX

Denzinger-Hünermannn 2566-2570

Brief Singulari nobis to Cardinal Henry, Duke of York, 9th February 1749

§12. … When a heretic baptizes someone, provided he uses the legitimate form and matter,… the latter is marked with the baptismal character….

§13. Next, it was also found that someone who has received valid baptism from a heretic is made a member of the Catholic Church by virtue of that [baptism]; for the personal error of the one baptizing cannot deprive him of his happiness, provided the baptizer provides the sacrament in the faith of the true Church and observes her provisions in what relates to the validity of baptism. Suarez affirms this admirably in his Fidei catholicae defensio contra errores sectae Anglicanae, book 1, chapter 24, where he proves that the person baptized becomes a member of the Catholic Church, also adding this, that if the heretic, as often happens, christens an infant unable to make an act of faith, this is no obstacle to his receiving the habit of faith at baptism.

§14. Lastly, we have established that, if they reach the age at which they can distinguish right from wrong for themselves and then adhere to the errors of the one who baptized them, persons who were baptized by heretics are rejected from the unity of the Church and are deprived of all those benefits that those remaining in the unity of the Church enjoy, but they are not freed from her authority and laws, as Gonzales wisely explains in the section ‘Sicut’, no. 12, concerning heretics.

§15. We see this in the case of fugitives and traitors whom the civil laws completely exclude from the privileges of faithful subjects. Similarly, the laws of the Church do not grant clerical privileges to those clerics who disobey the commandments of the sacred canons. But nobody thinks that traitors or clerics who violate the sacred canons are not subject to the authority of their princes or prelates.

§16. These example too, unless we are mistaken, are relevant to the question; for just like them, so too heretics are subject to the Church and are bound by the ecclesiastical laws.

 

Agatha’s agony – and Britannia’s

It was perhaps appropriate that the same-sex ‘marriage’ bill should have been passed by the House of Commons on the feast of St Agatha. According to her, admittedly late, acta, St Agatha was tortured by having her breasts cut off; praying later in her prison, she was favoured by a heavenly apparition of a man. The man explained that he was the apostle Peter, consoled her for her sufferings and healed her wounded body.

We speak of a country as the mother of her people. Marriage is the institution by which she nourishes those who are born to her, so that they may grow up strong and healthy. One of the properties of marriage, its indissolubility, had long been denied by our divorce laws. But now it is not simply a property, but the very essence itself that is denied. By formally denying the essence of marriage Parliament has as it were cut off from our motherland the maternal organs by which she may nurse her young. Who can heal her now? Only Peter.

 

New Provincial of Capuchins in Britain

Is br Paul Coleman. He hath a blog. See that Eucharistic flash mob? That was him, that was.

 

Newcastle upon Tyne – Capital of Scotland 1138-57

I came across this claim in a local history written in 1924: Newcastle-upon-Tyne by F. J. C. Hearshaw. In the year 1138 Newcastle was occupied by King David I of Scotland (Feast Day May 24th) it did not return to the Kingdom of England until 1157. The New Castle on the ruins of the Roman fortress of Pons Aelius had been built in 1080 by Robert II of Normandy eldest son of William the Conqueror and hero of the First Crusade. David’s family already had associations with Newcastle because his Grandmother and Aunt fled there after the death of Malcolm III and St Margaret in 1093. Malcolm III was killed at Alnwick with his eldest son on the way back from a campaign in Northumbria during which he had attended the foundation of the new Cathedral Church at Durham. Hearshaw continues…
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“Queen Margaret of Scotland (sister of Edgar Atheling) survived this double loss only four days, and Scotland became the prey of civil war and anarchy. In these circumstances Margaret’s aged mother, Agatha, and her sister Christina, fled to England, their native land, sought shelter in Newcastle, and there ‘were espoused to Christ’ in the newly founded Nunnery of St Bartholomew, first of Newcastle’s religious houses.”
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This Nunnery was destroyed at the Reformation. The indoor Granger Market and Nun Street mark the land where it once stood. Now Hearshaw is certainly wrong about England being “their native land” as neither of them can have been born there. In fact the place of Agatha’s birth and how she fits into the great extended family of saints surrounding St Stephen of Hungary and St Henry the Emperor is a great historical mystery. Agatha lived out her remaining years as a nun in Newcastle but her daughter did not stay in Newcastle. Christina went on to be the Abbess of Romsey where she educated Malcolm and Margaret’s daughter Edith (later renamed Matilda) by whose marriage to Henry I the royal line of Wessex was united to that of Normandy. This union was later threatened by the survival of only one child of Henry I, his daughter Matilda. Although the Barons agreed to accept her as heir before Henry I’s death, when the King actually died most rallied to her cousin Stephen (famous coward of the First Crusade) sparking a protracted civil war. This helped to provide a pretext for expansion southward by David I (son of Malcolm III and uncle of Matilda)…

>
“In 1137 a muster of local troops at Newcastle prevented David from pressing his attack far to the south. In 1138, however, his host reached Northallerton in Yorkshire; but there it met with a heavy defeat at the hands of the militia of Yorkshire in the famous ‘Battle of the Standard.’ Nevertheless, though this English victory saved Yorkshire from Scottish occupation, it did nothing to relieve Northumberland, nearly all of whose castles were by this time in David’s possession. The hopeless Stephen, distracted by civil war and debilitated by baronial treachery, felt constrained to make peace on his adversary’s terms. Hence by the Treaty of Durham (1139), the much coveted Earldom of Northumberland was revived and conferred upon Henry, David’s eldest son and heir. Newcastle was not included in this grant. In spite of that fact, however, the Scots took possession of it and held it for some eighteen years.
The Scottish occupation was a notable episode in the history of the town. It was quite clear that David regarded Northumberland as permanently incorporated into his kingdom, and many things indicate that Newcastle was soon in fair way to supersede Edinburgh as his capital and seat of government. He himself was much in the town; he showed it peculiar favour; he issued his laws therefrom; he adopted its customs as models for the four Scottish boroughs of Edinburgh, Stirling, Roxburgh and Berwick (hence the inclusion of the customs of Newcastle in the Scottish Statute Books); he caused, it is supposed, the old English church near the White Cross to be refounded and rededicated to the Scottish St Andrew; he refounded the nunnery of which his grandmother and his aunt had been inmates. From Newcastle he extended his wide authority over Northern England. Before the end of 1141 (when the cause of Stephen appeared to be ruined and that of Matilda triumphant) he had secured Carlisle, and had made himself master of Cumberland, Westmorland, and a large part of Lancashire. A dependent of his moreover acquired the palatine bishopric of Durham, and the largest dreams of Scottish expansion seemed likely to be realised.
Three deaths, however – viz., those of Henry, Earl of Northumberland, in 1152; of David himself in 1153; and of Stephen in 1154 – completely changed the political situation, and prepared the way for the English recovery of Newcastle and North.”
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Of course, the Scottish Kings were rather more English than the Kings of England at this time as they represented the elder branch of the house of Wessex. Hearshaw is probably wrong about St Andrew’s as well. It is likely that it was always dedicated to the Apostle on account of the devotion to him in the region stemming from St Wilfred’s translation of relics of Andrew from Rome to Hexham in the seventh century. In fact, I am reliably informed, it is quite likely that the relics of St Andrew in Fife and the consequent dedication to Scotland to him probably stems from the theft of some or all of these relics in one of the many raids of the period or their transportation to Fife by a disgruntled deposed Abbott of Hexham. In fact, it was not until after the period discussed here that the term Scotia was used to include the region bellow the Firths of Clyde and Forth. The eastern part of this region still being seen as Northumbrian, giving rise to the surprising fact that St Cuthbert is the patron of Edinburgh and St Andrew of Newcastle.

 

Spirichewality of Newman: primacy of God, of truth, enlarging the heart

“The horizon of the primacy of God also marked profoundly Newman’s numerous publications,” the Pontiff observed.He stated that the primacy of God is translated, for Newman, “in the primacy of truth, a truth that is sought above all by disposing one’s inner self to acceptance, in an open and sincere confrontation with everyone, and which finds its culmination in the encounter with Christ.”

(from Pastor Emeritus)

Newman (it’s hard to start calling him bl. Newman, or bl. John Henry, or bl. Cardinal Newman!) was terribly sensitive, but he doesn’t fall into neuroses or navel-gazing. I read the comment above and thought “yes, that captures what gives Newman’s writings their inner steel”.

… in proportion as it is limited, either to certain seasons or to certain affections, the heart is straitened and distressed.

If it be not over bold to say it, He who is infinite can alone be its measure; He alone can answer to the mysterious assemblage of feelings and thoughts which it has within it.

(from Enlarging the Heart)

Nothing to summarise here, just posting an extract to encourage folk to go and read the whole thing.

 

 

 

New Abbess of Colwich

The endearingly scatty-sounding guest mistress blogger of Colwich Abbey is now Mother Davina. Colwich is one of three monasteries of nuns in the English Benedictine Congregation (the others are Stanbrook, the now eco-nuns, and Curzon Park, which I only came across today.)