"Don't start from the good old things but the bad new ones."

Nostalgia, remorse, reparation. These things might as well be my middle name. Like Benjamin's angel ...

From Fr. Hunwicke:

It seemed difficult to imagine, back in 1968, how anything could happen that would make one wish to fulfill one's vocation as a Priest of the Catholic and Latin Church anywhere other than in the Provinces of Canterbury and York. So much holiness was there and so much real and profound learning; so much were they part of the fabric of every English town and village; so autochthonous.

I wonder how many generations it took for those once flourishing churches around Hippo in North Africa to pass into sand and become history and memories. Sic transit ... As Blessed John Henry Newman put it, Canterbury has gone its way, and York is gone, and Durham is gone, and Winchester is gone. It was sore to part with them. We clung to the vision of past greatness, and would not believe it could come to naught; but ... And even Oxford, in a sense, is gone; the Oxford which for Newman -- and for Trollope! -- was the bastion and symbol of all that was best and most solidly enduring in Anglicanism.

Thank goodness I did not make the mistake of continuing to cling.

So, the question remains: the way forward?

Almost all of the "ways" at present imagine instead a way back. Perhaps the Brechtian maxim is apt, after all. Judaism, upon the destruction of its one temple, did not go back but forward: it reinvented Judaism. Today there is still no temple but there are ways of being Jewish.

I suspect that even you too can draw the suppressed conclusion here.

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