Well this is awfully sad - and another example of the march through British institutions of people who loathe Britain, its institutions, its history, and its culture. 😞 pic.twitter.com/0xjVD8vvQE

— Marcus Walker (@WalkerMarcus) August 11, 2023

Interesting that, for a "conservative" Anglican, "Britain" and its "institutions" and "history" are more important than the public worship due to Almighty God!

Welby is a very good example of what happens when the correctly ordered relationship between Church and State is reversed. https://t.co/ksmWP9jRod

— The Two Swords (@The_Two_Swords) July 7, 2023

The chancellor has given us a budget to help women 'to get back to work'; but we want a budget that will help mothers to be with their children.

— Fr Thomas Crean OP (@crean_fr) March 16, 2023

[The Times]

Is the King of England a traditionalist?

Well, Yes and No!

Certainly he thinks of himself as a traditionalist - or at any rate trad-adjacent. And he certainly self-identifies as firmly anti-"modernist".

The problem though is that if you dig a little deeper he does indeed have some very odd ideas about what modernism actually is. Yes, it's something artificial - perhaps even "rationalist" (and, at that, not necessarily particularly rational). But what is the fundamental principle of the idea? What is the source of its power?

For what it's worth, I don't think he really understands Modernism, and that's because he doesn't realise quite how deep, dark and dangerous its roots really are. And thus his "traditionalism" isn't so much anti-Modernist as simple mystical perennialism.

And that, though it may be esoteric in and of itself, is hardly a secret. As Prince of Wales, the King was a patron of The Temenos Academy, and for a time he quite literally hosted it in the headquarter of his architecture institute (which is now The Prince's Foundation).

The connexion between the King's perennialist "traditionalism" and religious traditionalism in fact comes via people like Rama P Coomaraswamy, who was one of the first generation of Catholic trads to oppose "the changes" that followed Vatican II - and who was of course the son of Ananda K Coomaraswamy, at least one of whose works is available on the Temenos Academy's website.

All of which makes it particularly disappointing that the King's own understanding of revelation is, to put it bluntly, orthodoxly Modernist.

Revelation is not deemed possible from an empirical point of view. It comes about when a person practises great humility and achieves a mastery over the ego so that ‘the knower and the known’ effectively become one. And from this union flows an understanding of ‘the mind of God’. 

[The Prince of Wales, Harmony - A New Way of Looking at Our World, p. 13]

Because this is more or less exactly point 20 (i.e. condemned proposition) in Pope Pius X's Syllabus Condemning the Errors of the Modernists:

Revelation could be nothing else than the consciousness man acquired of his revelation to God. 

[Lamentabili Sane]

My feeling, for what it's worth, is that the new King is a very nice man. But unfortunately his "traditionalism" without an actual belief in the Revelation of Jesus Christ, in person, in our human nature, on earth, via his hypostatic union with the Father, to the Apostles, and thence to His Church by word and by scripture, is not going to count for much more than a vaguely fogeyish, Scrutonian (or even Hitchensite) "small-c conservatism".

Theology for Trads II: "Traditional" traddy bullsh*t

This is actually a pretty good example of traddy bullsh*t. Of course, it's Feeneyite (i.e. pre-Vatican II) bullsh*t rather than Lefebvrite or "sedevacantist". But the huge effort they've put into denying a perfectly orthodox theological opinion (i.e. baptism by blood) is directly comparable to sedevacantist attacks on the doctrine of the Church's indefectability, or indeed the more improbable complaints of Peter Kwasniewski about the liturgical "reforms" of the 1960s. (Bugnini is to blame for the decline in Christian marriage, supposedly.)

“Her Majesty prays that the blessing of Almighty God may rest upon your counsels.” pic.twitter.com/aoxi0JS66Z

— Andrew Cusack (@cusackandrew) May 10, 2022