Catholics From England

"While still a young man, John Courteney Boot had, as his publisher proclaimed, "achieved an assured and enviable position in contemporary letters.""

"Was anyone hurt?" "No one I am thankful to say," said Mrs. Beaver, "except two housemaids who lost their heads and jumped through a glass roof into the paved court."

"You see my adjutant made rather a silly mistake. He hadn't had much truck with boots before and the silly fellow thought they were extra rations. My men ate the whole bag of tricks last night."

"We, Seth, Emperor of Azania, Chief of Chiefs of Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda and Tyrant of the Seas, Bachelor of the Arts of Oxford University, being in this the twenty-fourth year of our life, summoned by the wisdom of Almighty God and the unanimous voice of our people to the throne of our ancestors, do hereby proclaim. . ." Seth paused in his dictation and gazed out across the harbour where in the fresh breeze of early morning the last dhow was setting sail for the open sea. "Rats," he said; "stinking curs. They are all running away."

"All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day."

"A copy of Dante's Purgatorio excited his especial disgust."French, eh?" he said. "I guessed as much, and pretty dirty too, I shouldn't wonder. Now just you wait while I look up these here books"—how he said it!—"in my list. Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.""

"Mrs. Ape's famous hymn, There ain't no flies on the Lamb of God."

"Creative Endeavour lost her wings, Mrs. Ape."

"Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums who find prison so soul-destroying."

"I haven't been to sleep for over a year. That's why I go to bed early. One needs more rest if one doesn't sleep."

"I expect you'll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That's what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour."

"I came to the conclusion many years ago that almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression."

"Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic."

"That's the public-school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down."

"There is a species of person called a 'Modern Churchman' who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief"

"And the only interest about him arises from the unusual series of events of which his shadow was witness."

"I don't believe that people would ever fall in love or want to be married if they hadn't been told about it. It's like abroad: no one would want to go there if they hadn't been told it existed."

"What is this impulse of two people to build their beastly home? It's you & me, unborn, asserting our presence. All we are is a manifestation of the impulse to family life, and if by chance we have escaped the itch ourselves, Nature forces it upon us another way. (Part One, Chapter XII)"

"It's the seed of life we carry about with us like our skeletons, each one of us unconsciously pregnant with desirable villa residences. There's no escape. As individuals we simply do not exist. We are just potential home builders, beavers, and ants. How do we come into being? What is birth? (Part One, Chapter XII)"

"They should have told me that at the end of that gay journey and flower-strewn path were the hideous lights of home and the voices of children."

"Chokey thinks religion is just divine."

"There will be a prize of half a crown for the longest essay, irrespective of any possible merit."

""We class schools, you see, into four grades: Leading School, First-rate School, Good School, and School. Frankly," said Mr Levy, "School is pretty bad..." (Part One, Chapter One)"

"I'm one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation."

"'But what am I to teach them?' said Paul in sudden panic."

"'I couldn't understand why God had made the world at all...' I asked my bishop; he didn't know. He said that he didn't think the point arose as far as my practical duties as a parish priest were concerned..' ( Mr Prendergast, Part One , Chapter IV)"

"Augustus Fagan, Esquire, Ph.D., Llanabba Castle, N.Wales, requires immediately junior assistant to teach Classics and English to University Standard with subsidiary Mathematics, German and French. Experience essential;first-class games essential..."

"Mr. Sniggs, the Junior Dean, and Mr. Postlethwaite, the Domestic Bursar, sat alone in Mr. Sniggs's room overlooking the garden quad at Scone College."

"Please bear in mind throughout that IT IS MEANT TO BE FUNNY."

"There is a great deal to be said for the Arts. For one thing they offer the only career in which commercial failure is not necessarily discreditable."

"We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them -- a diminishing number in my case."

"Punctuality is the virtue of the bored."

"Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else."

"I put the words down and push them a bit."

"Easter used to mean so much to me. Before Pope John and his Council – they destroyed the beauty of the liturgy. I have not yet soaked myself in petrol and gone up in flames, but I now cling to the Faith doggedly without joy. Church going is a pure duty parade. I shall not live to see it restored. It is worse in many countries."

"I have become very old in the last two years. Not diseased but enfeebled. There is nowhere I want to go and nothing I want to do and I am conscious of being an utter bore. The Vatican Council has knocked the guts out of me."

"A year in which the process of transforming the liturgy has followed a planned course. Protests avail nothing... More than the aesthetic changes which rob the Church of poetry, mystery and dignity, there are suggested changes in Faith and morals which alarm me. A kind of anti-clericalism is abroad which seeks to reduce the priest's unique sacramental position. The Mass is written of as a "social meal" in which the "people of God" perform the consecration. Pray God I will never apostatize but I can only now go to church as an act of duty and obedience."

"I find the new liturgy a temptation against Faith, Hope and Charity but I shall never, pray God, apostatise."

"Nice to go to Rome. They are destroying all that was superficially attractive about my Church. It is a great sorrow to me and for once undeserved. If you see Cardinal Bea spit in his eye."

"[M]y friends and I are totally at a loss to understand the new form of the Mass... Every attendance at Mass leaves me without comfort or edification. I shall never, pray God, apostatize but church-going is now a bitter trial."

"Finally, a word about liturgy. It is natural to the Germans to make a row. The torchlight, vociferous assemblies of the Hitler Youth expressed a national passion. It is well that this should be canalized into the life of the Church. But it is essentially un-English. We seek no "Sieg Heils". We pray in silence. "Participation" means God hearing our voices. Only He knows who is "participating" at Mass. I believe, to compare small things with great, that I "participate" in a work of art when I study it and love it silently. No need to shout. Anyone who has taken part in a play knows that he can rant on the stage with his mind elsewhere. If the Germans want to be noisy, let them. But why should they disturb our devotions?"

"Father Sheerin suggests that Catholic conservatism is the product of the defensive policy necessary in the last century against the nationalistic-masonic secularism of the time. I would ask him to consider that the function of the Church in every age has been conservative—to transmit undiminished and uncontaminated the creed inherited from its predecessors."

"The distinction between Catholicism and Romanità has already been stressed in the American journal Commonweal. Of course it is possible to have Faith without Romanità and to have Romanità without the Faith, but as a matter of recorded history the two have kept very close. "Peter has spoken" remains the guarantee of orthodoxy."

"George Orwell wrote in 1942 at the height of his revulsion from what he regarded as the feeble hypocrisy of English socialist journalism. If he were alive today he would no doubt derive much ironic amusement from the changed position in popular esteem of the Boers in this half-century from that of the gallant little people fighting for their homesteads and way of life to that of the villains of apartheid."

"I go to Rome for Easter (Grand Hotel) to avoid the horrors of the English liturgy."

"When I first came into the Church I was drawn, not by splendid ceremonies but by the spectacle of the priest as a craftsman. He had an important job to do which none but he was qualified for. He and his apprentice stumped up to the altar with their tools and set to work without a glance to those behind them, still less with any intention to make a personal impression on them. "Participate" – the cant word – does not mean to make a row as the Germans suppose. One participates in a work of art when one studies it with reverence and understanding."

"A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.""

"The Eastern Uniate Churches retain ancient habits of worship which are dear to them, and liturgies which in many cases are unintelligible to the faithful. Is not the time to seek similar privileges for Roman Catholics? Will you promote an appeal to the Holy See for the establishment of a Uniate Latin Church which shall observe all the rites as they existed in the reign of Pius IX?"

"I think it great cheek of the Germans to try & teach the rest of the world anything about religion. They should be in perpetual sackcloth & ashes for all their enormities from Luther to Hitler."

"One can write, think and pray exclusively of others; dreams are all egocentric."