The Acorn and the Oak Tree

In defense of liturgical growth and maturation, with insights from Newman, Tolkien, and other kindred spirits

The Tamme-Lauri oak — the oldest tree in Estonia. (source)

The genius of Catholicism in both theology and worship has been to add on, not to destroy; and modifications have usually taken the form of prunings. Pruning means to trim the branches already there, not to cut down the tree and plant a new one. A confidence in the guidance of the Church by the Holy Spirit should extend to all that the piety of Catholics has cultivated over the ages, particularly when it touches on the sacred mysteries.¹

Insufficient attention has been paid to the principle that as things develop, they will change less and less. This makes sense: if a community long reflects on its wisdom and develops tried-and-true ways of conveying it, the sane thing is to keep using those ways. There’s a more obvious reason to do so in the realm of liturgy: as the mystery of Christ is drawn forth more and more, surrounded with due signs of reverence, ornamented with the beauties of art — in short, expressed in its profound essence through a panoply of accidents — there will be less and less need for development; the Church will have emerged into her own liturgical pleroma, even as Jesus promised when saying that the Spirit of truth would lead her into the fullness of truth.

We have a lot to learn from the churches of the Christian East in this respect. The anaphoras of their liturgy fall somewhat later in time than the kernel of our Roman Canon, but in regard to the liturgy as a whole, they reached the judgment sooner than we did that the era of development was over; the spirit of reverence for received forms overtook the inclination to elaborate. Besides, the Eastern liturgical rites couldn’t get much more elaborate without become totally unmanageable: they are already nearly at the breaking point of what’s doable by human beings who have to eat and sleep!

In the West, given the “noble simplicity” of our rites (I mean, of course, our traditional rites), it was understandable that a slow, organic process of development would continue for many more centuries. Nevertheless, by the High Middle Ages a certain fullness existed in the Roman rite and in kindred Western rites and usages that demanded to be preserved with love, exactly as with the Eastern rites. In 1570, St. Pius V confirmed, codified, even canonized the Roman rite, not altering the millennial core of that tradition in any way. (Any time you hear someone talk about “the Mass reformed by Trent/Pius V,” you should send them this link.)

It is thus a highly dubious metaphor to speak of the liturgy being “frozen” or “ossified” after Trent, as modern liturgists tend to do. What if we consider it to be a living plant that, having reached maturity, is simply free to produce fruits season after season, no longer needing to be coaxed into more growth, with prunings or graftings or what have you? When an oak tree reaches maturity, it does not keep growing taller and broader; it stays at a certain size, bulks its limbs, and produces abundant acorns. Aristotle observed long ago that everything natural (i.e., everything with a nature) has a terminus of growth toward which it aims and beyond which it does not pass. This occurs “always or for the most part,” which is why we can see that it is native or inborn.² The history of liturgy presents us with an exact analogy.

Jeanne Bieruma Oosting, “The Oak” (source)

Mature better than immature

While the Church Fathers are unsurpassed in their dogmatic-moral-spiritual synthesis, the liturgy had not yet completely caught up to their vision. The great contribution of the Middle Ages was precisely to provide liturgical rites and arts — architecture, furnishings, vessels, vestments — that correspond, at last, to the depth and breadth of the Patristic theological vision. This is why Catholicism at its height will always be both ancient and medieval, never one without the other; therefore also patristic and scholastic. It is the tragedy of modern centuries that men have attempted to sunder what God has joined together: they want to have the medieval without the ancient (neo-scholasticism), or the ancient without the medieval (ressourcement, antiquarianism), or Christianity without either (modernism).

We should not be afraid to say outright: thus-and-such a practice may be defensible, may be good as far as it goes, but this practice is better. For example, in the West, receiving Communion standing may be good, but receiving kneeling is better, for it signifies our humility and our adoration, in continuity with over a thousand years of habituation to the meaning of this posture in its connection with prayer. Receiving in the hand might be allowable if certain precautions were taken and if faith in the Real Presence were strong, but receiving on the tongue is better, because it more obviously points to the special nature of the heavenly food we are receiving from the anointed hand of the priest and avoids the practical difficulties that communion in the hand brings with it.

In general, a mature practice of the Church is better than an immature one. Let us admit for the sake of argument that Communion in the hand was practiced in the early Church, at least in some places. So what? The Church herself deepens her understanding of the mysteries, and over time her reverence for them develops new expressions — that is the main engine propelling liturgical development. We might recall the words of St. Paul: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But, when I became a man, I put away the things of a child” (1 Cor 13:11). This is not to say that the apostles had an inferior grasp of the mysteries as such; quite the contrary. But it is to say that the earliest phase liturgically is less developed and refined, and that is just as we might expect it. In the same way, Christ did not give us the Summa theologiae or even the decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. We needed to work at it, and He wanted us to.

Am I claiming, then, that the Last Supper was an inadequate expression of faith in and reverence for the Eucharist?³ No. It was adequate to the moment when Our Lord wished to introduce this great mystery in the context of the Hebrew ritual, and on the eve of His Passion. But the manner in which the sacrament was to be given as the Christian Church grew rightly claimed a fuller expression as time went on — a more distinctively Christian expression, as the implications of divine revelation sank in.

Put it this way: what would be inadequate is for the peculiar circumstances of the beginning to be insisted on forever afterwards as the norm, when a beginning is meant to be the germ of a rich development. The acorn is not inadequate to producing a tree, but it would be absurd to insist that it remain an acorn in order to be truly itself. The acorn exists in order to produce a tree.

Many authors have used this analogy of the acorn and the oak (or, more generally, of the seed and the mature specimen). Let’s look at four of them who appealed to it when arguing the absurdity of what they were seeing in Protestantism or in the modernizing Church of their times.

photo by Katelyn Greer (source); notice the tiny snail on the acorn

J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugh Ross Williamson

The most magnificent passage comes (not surprisingly) in a letter written by J.R.R. Tolkien to his son Michael in 1968:

The ‘protestant’ search backwards for ‘simplicity’ and directness — which, of course, though it contains some good or at least intelligible motives, is mistaken and indeed vain. Because ‘primitive Christianity’ is now and in spite of all ‘research’ will ever remain largely unknown; because ‘primitiveness’ is no guarantee of value, and is and was in great part a reflection of ignorance. Grave abuses were as much an element in Christian ‘liturgical’ behaviour from the beginning as now. (St Paul’s strictures on eucharistic behaviour are sufficient to show this!)

Still more because ‘my church’ was not intended by Our Lord to be static or remain in perpetual childhood; but to be a living organism (likened to a plant), which develops and changes in externals by the interaction of its bequeathed divine life and history — the particular circumstances of the world into which it is set. There is no resemblance between the ‘mustard-seed’ and the full-grown tree. For those living in the days of its branching growth the Tree is the thing, for the history of a living thing is part of its life, and the history of a divine thing is sacred. The wise may know that it began with a seed, but it is vain to try and dig it up, for it no longer exists, and the virtue and powers that it had now reside in the Tree.

Very good: but in husbandry the authorities, the keepers of the Tree, must look after it, according to such wisdom as they possess, prune it, remove cankers, rid it of parasites, and so forth. (With trepidation, knowing how little their knowledge of growth is!) But they will certainly do harm, if they are obsessed with the desire of going back to the seed or even to the first youth of the plant when it was (as they imagine) pretty and unafflicted by evils.⁴

The way Tolkien so strongly connects this acorn-hugging mentality to Protestantism can only be disturbing to us when we recall that the arguments Catholic liturgical reformers hurled against medieval and Baroque liturgy are generally indistinguishable from the arguments made by Protestants about how the Church quickly went off the rails after Christ or after Constantine and fell into corruption, superstition, priestcraft, and so forth, and needed to be purified by cleaving once again to the “evangelical purity” of the early Church.⁵

The respected historian and convert Hugh Ross Williamson, citing Karl Adam, develops this point well:

As Karl Adam puts it in The Spirit of Catholicism: “Catholicism cannot be identified simply and wholly with primitive Christianity, in the same way that a great oak cannot be identified with the tiny acorn. There is no mechanical identity, but an organic identity. The Gospel of Christ would have been no living Gospel if it had remained for ever the tiny seed of A. D. 33 and had not struck root and grown up into a tree.” But this was the one thing that the sixteenth-century Protestants could not admit and, to counter it, they used, if they did not actually invent, that absurd theory of history which one historian has actually called “Hunt the Acorn.” That is to say, when you see a magnificent oak, you start to search for an acorn similar to that from which it grew and say: “Don’t pay any attention to the tree, because this is what it ought to be like.”⁶

But why could we not equally say, or indeed with greater plausibility, that the first celebration of Mass was in some ways immature as compared with the richness of symbolism, the fullness of ceremonial, and the grandeur of celebration that were meant to unfold over time under the guidance of the Holy Spirit? Was Jesus talking only about doctrine when He said: “He will lead you into all truth” (John 16:13)? No, of course not: this was a statement about organic development of the liturgy as well. Christ came to plant an all-powerful and incorruptible seed in souls and in the world: and sure enough, this seed bore fruit.

“Northern Red Oak Acorns and Tree” by Mark Moffett

St. John Henry Newman and Thomas Howard

That John 16:13 refers only to doctrine is a typical conservative Catholic move, for they tend to equate Catholicism with a certain set of doctrines. However, none other than John Henry Newman recognizes that Our Lord was indeed referring to more than this:

It appears then that there has been a certain general type of Christi­anity in every age, by which it is known at first sight, differing from itself only as what is young differs from what is mature, or as found in Europe or in America, so that it is named at once and without hesitation, as forms of nature are recognized by experts in physical science; or as some work of literature or art is assigned to its right author by the critic, difficult as may be the analysis of that specific impression by which he is enabled to do so. And it appears that this type has remained entire from first to last, in spite of that process of development which seems to be attributed by all parties, for good or bad, to the doctrines, rites, and usages in which Christianity consists; or, in other words, that the changes which have taken place in Christianity have not been such as to destroy that type, — that is, that they are not corruptions, because they are consistent with that type.⁷

Newman draws out this point more fully in a sermon:

When the last Apostle had been taken to his throne above, and the oracle of inspiration was for ever closed, when the faithful were left to that ordinary government which was intended to supersede the special season of miraculous action, then arose before their eyes in its normal shape and its full proportions that majestic Temple, of which the plans had been drawn out from the first by our Lord Himself amid His elect Disciples. Then was it that the Hierarchy came out in visible glory, and sat down on their ordained seats in the congregation of the faithful. Then followed in due course the holy periodical assemblies [the Councils], and the solemn rites of worship and the honour of sacred places, and the decoration of material structures; one appointment after another, realizing in act and deed the great idea which had been imparted to the Church since the day of Pentecost.⁸

The American writer Thomas Howard — author of the modern classics Evangelical Is Not Enough, Chance or the Dance, and Narnia and Beyond — has this to say on our topic:

Earnest Christian believers often speak of “going back to the Book of Acts”, or of taking their cues from the New Testament alone, as though they were saying something trenchant. What they miss, of course, is that the infant Church did not take her cues from the New Testament (there was none), and secondly, that in this New Testament you can’t find a blueprint for Christian worship (Acts 2:42 lists four ingredients of their meetings together, but does not tell us how they arranged things). And thirdly, of course, to insist too shrilly on a rigorous adherence to the letter of Acts 2:42 is to suggest that the seed which the Holy Ghost planted was a poor seed and never grew. A Roman Catholic sees the growth of the Church, and of her worship, not as a matter of naughty medieval popes Scotch-taping accretions onto the Church’s worship until finally you get an extravaganza called a High Mass, but rather as the organic budding and flowering and fruit-bearing of a tree from a healthy seed — a tree big enough for all the birds of heaven to roost in, to borrow the Gospel phrase. So that, when you point out to a Catholic that his worship, the Mass, scarcely looks like those huddled gatherings in the Upper Room and so forth, he will be thinking of the habit that acorns have of growing into enormous oaks, which of course don’t look like acorns at all.⁹

Howard prompts us to take one step further the analogy of the liturgy to a tree. The early Christians, as a frequently persecuted minority, often had to celebrate Mass clandestinely; indeed, one of the possible origins of the minor order of “porter” is to ensure that someone is keeping track of who is coming and going, ensuring that only Christians enter. When you have to be underground or off the radar, you need your tree to be a potted plant so that it can be moved around easily. When Christianity was legalized, the tree at last could be planted into the ground, so to speak, to let it really grow and flourish as mightily as it could. The lack of stability for a tree-in-a-pot reveals why the Mass was relatively simple for several hundred years, while the stability and the spreading of roots fostered by permanent planting in the ground reveals why the Mass was then able to develop prodigiously into what it eventually became: the solemn rituals of the Middle Ages.

Artist’s rendition of liturgical reformer (source)

Antiquarianism self-destructs

Another way of seeing the problem raised by antiquarianism is to consider the difference that the passage of time, especially many centuries, can make to the meaning of a gesture that remains externally the same.

It is impossible to re-create an earlier historical moment in a later moment as if nothing had intervened between the two points. What it looks like and feels like to be in one moment of history (let us say, AD 200) and what it looks like to be in another (let us say, AD 2000) are irreducibly distinct and different. They cannot be interchanged, such that a man from the year 2000 could do what a man in the year 200 did, in just the same way and with just the same understanding. The reason is that the entire context in which the action occurs has changed, and therefore the meaning of the action has also changed — the larger the gap in time, the bigger the change in context.

To take an example, the ancient Christian practice of receiving Holy Communion in the hand did not mean the same thing back then as receiving in the hand does today, since today’s practice comes after over a millennium’s dominance of a different practice (namely, receiving on the tongue, kneeling) — and therefore the “revival” amounts to a rejection of what is signified in the later but long-lasting custom.

Moreover, the antiquarians are liars, because they never tell you that the ancient Christians received in a very particular way: the right hand was placed over the left hand (no one would ever have received the Lord in his left hand!), and when the host was placed in the right hand, one bowed profoundly in adoration and ate it with one’s mouth, licking up any fragments — one did not pick it up as the priest does and actively put it in one’s mouth. Put simply, one used the right hand as a paten, and consumed the sacred species from the palm of the hand.

All the same, the ancient Church soon discovered that the use of the hand, even taking the greatest care, suffered from grave inconveniences (as we moderns have rediscovered), and so, rapidly enough, the ancient practice was totally replaced in the West by receiving Communion on the tongue while kneeling in adoration. This development came about for many reasons: to guarantee that the sacred species could be received without fragmentation or loss of particles; to bestow greater adoration, in a deeper spirit of reverence and formality; and to pay legitimate respect to the anointed hands of the priest.

Hence, given such a development, which in every way is an advance in understanding and piety, we cannot innocently revive the ancient practice today; rather, all we can do is introduce a novel practice that breaks from the organic development and (nota bene!) even from the very motivations behind the ancient practice it claims to imitate. For even a practice that is materially similar to an ancient practice may end up being formally contrary to it, precisely by ignoring the intervening history, theology, and piety. Put simply: were he to return to earth today, St. Cyril of Jerusalem would find himself far more at home at a traditional Latin Mass than at the Novus Ordo of Cardinal Cupich.

Let us say that early Christians showed their reverence by standing, rather than kneeling, as indeed Eastern Christians still do; so what? After over 1,000 years of Latin-rite Catholics kneeling to express their reverence, standing at communion no longer signifies reverence for us in the same way as it does for the Greeks. In certain circumstances, standing may even signify indifference to or contempt for the sacred. That is how it comes across in today’s Novus Ordo parishes: the standing posture means, we are too grown up, too cool, too modern, to kneel, for God’s sake; we’ll take this bread in our hands and feed ourselves, thanks very much. It’s a hellish contradiction to what ought to be the case.

Photo by e fedorzyn (source)

The difference between antiquity and tradition

There are countless examples in the liturgical reform of this attempt to play a frivolous children’s game, pretending that we have a time-machine and can travel back to AD 100 or 200, and cancel out or ignore everything in between. About such endeavors, Louis Bouyer rightly commented: “We must not try to provide an artificial congregation to take part in an antiquarian liturgy, but rather to prepare the actual congregations of the Church today to take part in the truly traditional liturgy rightly understood.”¹⁰

What is the distinction Bouyer has in mind? S.D. Wright puts his finger on why antiquarianism is opposed to the reality of tradition. Tradition means what has been handed down:

A mere appeal to what was in use in antiquity is not necessarily legitimate — and when it entails the rejection of what has been received, it cannot be called “traditional.” Something similar applies, as a matter of reason, to liturgical customs and disciplines which have fallen into desuetude — such as communion under both kinds in the Latin rite…. Tradition is “what has been received” — not the many possible practices that may be restored from antiquity, at the expense of what is actually traditional.¹¹

Evelyn Waugh observed as early as 1962:

The new fashion is for something bright and loud and practical. It has been set by a strange alliance between archeologists absorbed in their speculations on the rites of the second century, and modernists who wish to give the Church the character of our own deplorable epoch. In combination they call themselves “liturgists.”¹²

That, indeed, is the perfect definition of a liturgist: the one who believes that, by some truly bizarre coincidence, what Christians were doing in the second century is exactly what twentieth- or twenty-first-century man needs to be doing, and that much of what lies in between was a giant detour, not to say a falling away from the will of Christ.

According to an elderly priest friend of mine who once dined with Bugnini in 1974, the Archbishop said that only three generations would be needed to part Catholics from any attachment to the Tridentine liturgy and to establish a new era. He was right. Had there been a rupture of that magnitude, such that no one remembered the old rite, a revival would have been nearly impossible, and in any case inconsequential.

In God’s Providence, Bugnini’s expectations were frustrated. The old liturgy never ceased to be celebrated by a small but ardent minority, and that minority has implausibly but gradually grown in the intervening decades, to the point where millions of Catholics across the world, in almost a hundred countries, are frequenting the old rites. Traditional Catholics stand in a living, continuous stream of worship; no one could accuse them of any “false antiquarianism.” They, rather, are the ones who never introduced any rupture.

It would not be false antiquarianism to take up again a recent and stable form of the Roman Rite. For example, Pius X’s breviary had been in use for only just over fifty years at the time it was replaced by Paul VI’s Liturgy of the Hours; and Paul VI’s book in turn has been used for only about fifty years. Compare that to the legacy of 500 or 1,000 or 1,500 years’ usage of the traditional Divine Office in its various components. To put it bluntly, the Tridentine Breviary has ten times the amount of inherent “weight” and the monastic Divine Office has thirty times more weight as forms of prayer in the Western Church than either of the intended replacements that have come along in the twentieth century (that is, Pius X’s or Paul VI’s). If you have a right before God to pray the Pius X Breviary or the Paul VI Liturgy of the Hours, a fortiori you have the right to pray any of the longstanding breviaries. Enough of this slavish mentality of waiting for the latest apparatchik or, more likely, ignoramus of the Dicastery for Divine Worship to “grant permisson” to do what has already been approved ten thousand times over by the Church in her battalions of clergy, armies of religious, and hosts of saints.

Print of oak trees by Jacob Isaacksz van Ruisdael (source)

Critical acid vs. the binding force of tradition

Just as the political-philosophical Enlightenment problematized the Bible through the so-called historical-critical method, creating obstacles for belief in the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture,¹³ so too the ecclesial-theological “Enlightenment” stretching at least from the rise of modernism in the nineteenth century through the conciliar revolution of the twentieth century problematized the Liturgy through a purported application of historical-critical method to liturgical rites.

It was said that liturgy was inescapably pluralistic, so that one could not speak of “tradition” but, at best, of “many competing traditions”; that the liturgy was most authentic “at the beginning” (namely, in a supposed apostolic table fellowship — naturally, as reconstructed by scholars); and that the Church’s worship had been corrupted over time, deviating and falling away from its original simplicity and improvisatory freedom.

From the moment Pope Paul VI lent his support to these Protestant ideas and historical-critical methods and when he later signed their bad fruits into law, he endorsed the project of modernity in the most profound way possible. The Church’s most precious possession was abandoned like an orphan child and the new construct of a skeptical, promethean, positivistic committee was put in its place. It was like wrecking a Gothic cathedral to erect a skyscraper, or bulldozing a medieval city center to make way for a strip mall with asphalt parking lots. It was, as I have suggested, comparable to questioning the authority of the Bible and replacing it with an endless maze of doubts and difficulties that only “experts” can understand, mediating the answers to the lowly laymen.

The Church cannot “redeem” this rupture and carry some purified version of it into the future, since it is anti-ecclesial at heart; she can only repent of it and abandon it in favor of reclaiming her genuine inheritance. Words from Ezekiel come to mind:

And if they be ashamed of all that they have done, make known unto them the form of the house, and the fashion thereof, and the egresses thereof, and the entrances thereof … that they may keep the whole form thereof, and all the ordinances thereof, and do them. (Ez 43:11 ASV)

The historical-critical method undermined the whole form of Scripture;¹⁴ the same method, when applied to liturgy, undermined the whole form of the Mass, the sacramental rites, the Divine Office, the blessings, everything that happens at the altar, in the choir stalls, or with holy water.

Just as we are seeing a generation of scholars today (mostly converts from Protestantism) who have questioned and powerfully critiqued the entire framework of the historical-critical method and have returned to an intelligently faithful reading of Scripture as a divinely-revealed unified narrative, so too we are seeing a generation of Catholics (many of them converts, so to speak, from the world of the Novus Ordo) who question and critique the presuppositions, methodology, and results of the liturgical reform and have returned to the traditional liturgy as the authentic repository of the divine-human reality of the Church running through the ages.

Rather than experiencing and understanding the traditional liturgy as an incoherent assemblage of pieces in desperate need of deconstruction and reconstruction by so-called experts, these scholars — and, indeed, many simple laymen — experience and understand this inherited liturgy as a unified whole, developed under the providential guidance of the Holy Spirit. For He is the One who, according to Newman, leads the Church into the fullness of truth in “doctrines, rites, and usages,” in “the solemn rites of worship and the honour of sacred places, and the decoration of material structures.”

Thank you for reading and may God bless you.

1. At Vatican II, Bishop Jean Van Cauwelaert of Inongo (Congo) said: “There has been talk of ‘novationes.’ When a great ‘conventus episcopalis’ like this one asks for some ‘innovatio,’ one must think that it is an indication of the Holy Spirit. We do not have the right to stifle the Spirit.… ‘Spiritus aperiat Ecclesiam omnibus populis’ [Let the Spirit open the Church to all peoples]” (as summarized by De Lubac, Notebooks, 230–31). Amazing! The Holy Spirit in one fell swoop can cancel out over 1,000 years of liturgical development that He Himself overshadowed?

2. In some rare cases, a plant or animal fails to reach this terminus or goes beyond it, in which case we speak of a “monstrosity.”

3. In any case, we should take seriously the proposal of Nicola Bux that Our Lord gave communion to His apostles on the tongue, as many great works of art depict; and perhaps they were kneeling when the magnitude of what the Lord was giving them dawned on their minds. If many persons in the New Testament spontaneously fall to their knees before Christ, why could not the apostles have done so at this climactic moment?

4. Letter no. 306, in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, revised and expanded edition, ed. Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (HarperCollins, 2023), 553–54. Robert Lazu Kmita also recently drew attention to this wonderful passage.

5. For examples of writers who espouse this view, see my articles “Surprising Convergences between an Anti-Catholic Textbook and the Liturgical Reform” and “False Antiquarianism and Liturgical Reform.”

6. Hugh Ross Williamson, The Great Betrayal: Thoughts on the Destruction of the Mass, 53. Joseph Pearce cites a slightly different version of this from elsewhere in Williamson: “The return to the ‘primitive’ is based on the curious theory of history, sometimes referred to as ‘Hunt the Acorn.’ That is to say, when you see a mighty oak you do not joy in its strength and luxuriant development. You start to search for an acorn compatible with that from which it grew and say: ‘This is what it ought to be like.’” Literary Converts: Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Unbelief (Ignatius Press, 2000), 353.

7. John Henry Newman, Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: Long­mans, Green, and Co., 1909), ch. 7, p. 323, emphasis added.

8. John Henry Newman, Sermons Preached on Various Occasions (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), Sermon 11, “Order, the Witness and Instrument of Unity,” p. 192, emphasis added.

9. The Night Is Far Spent: A Treasury of Thomas Howard, ed. Vivian W. Dudro (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), 230–31. You can find this essay online here.

10. Life and Liturgy (1956), pp. 14-15, cited by Alcuin Reid in the Introduction to Beauduin’s Liturgy, the Life of the Church.

11. Fr Bryan Houghton’s novel Judith’s Marriage shines a bright light on the difference between a Catholic who practices traditionally (Judith herself) and a revolutionary antiquarian (a priest daft about reform). As S.D. Wright observes: “The priest (and persons such as Mr Lofton) harbours quite faulty understandings of the matter, confusing what is old with what is traditional.” Read the relevant excerpt from the novel here.

12. Alcuin Reid, ed., A Bitter Trial: Evelyn Waugh and John Carmel Cardinal Heenan on the Liturgical Changes (Ignatius Press, 2011), 35.

13. See Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker, Politicizing the Bible: The Roots of Historical Criticism and the Secularization of Scripture 1300–1700 (Herder & Herder, 2013); Scott Hahn and Jeffrey L. Morrow, Modern Biblical Criticism as a Tool of Statecraft (1700–1900) (Emmaus Academic, 2020).

14. See Jeremy Holmes, Cur Deus Verba: Why the Word Became Words (Ignatius Press, 2021).