Uriah Heep Teaches Umbleness

“I am well aware that I am the umblest person going”.

Rara avis, a blog post consisting almost exclusively of an excerpt of a great piece of British literature. 

In the hope that it might be of inspiration.

Mundabor

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“But, seeing a light in the little round office, and immediately feeling myself attracted towards Uriah Heep, who had a sort of fascination for me, I went in there instead. I found Uriah reading a great fat book, with such demonstrative attention, that his lank forefinger followed up every line as he read, and made clammy tracks along the page (or so I fully believed) like a snail.

‘You are working late tonight, Uriah,’ says I.

‘Yes, Master Copperfield,’ says Uriah.

As I was getting on the stool opposite, to talk to him more conveniently, I observed that he had not such a thing as a smile about him, and that he could only widen his mouth and make two hard creases down his cheeks, one on each side, to stand for one.

‘I am not doing office-work, Master Copperfield,’ said Uriah.

‘What work, then?’ I asked.

‘I am improving my legal knowledge, Master Copperfield,’ said Uriah. ‘I am going through Tidd’s Practice. Oh, what a writer Mr. Tidd is, Master Copperfield!’

My stool was such a tower of observation, that as I watched him reading on again, after this rapturous exclamation, and following up the lines with his forefinger, I observed that his nostrils, which were thin and pointed, with sharp dints in them, had a singular and most uncomfortable way of expanding and contracting themselves – that they seemed to twinkle instead of his eyes, which hardly ever twinkled at all.

‘I suppose you are quite a great lawyer?’ I said, after looking at him for some time.

‘Me, Master Copperfield?’ said Uriah. ‘Oh, no! I’m a very umble person.’

It was no fancy of mine about his hands, I observed; for he frequently ground the palms against each other as if to squeeze them dry and warm, besides often wiping them, in a stealthy way, on his pocket-handkerchief.

‘I am well aware that I am the umblest person going,’ said Uriah Heep, modestly; ‘let the other be where he may. My mother is likewise a very umble person. We live in a numble abode, Master Copperfield, but have much to be thankful for. My father’s former calling was umble. He was a sexton.’

‘What is he now?’ I asked.

‘He is a partaker of glory at present, Master Copperfield,’ said Uriah Heep. ‘But we have much to be thankful for. How much have I to be thankful for in living with Mr. Wickfield!’

I asked Uriah if he had been with Mr. Wickfield long?

‘I have been with him, going on four year, Master Copperfield,’ said Uriah; shutting up his book, after carefully marking the place where he had left off. ‘Since a year after my father’s death. How much have I to be thankful for, in that! How much have I to be thankful for, in Mr. Wickfield’s kind intention to give me my articles, which would otherwise not lay within the umble means of mother and self!’

‘Then, when your articled time is over, you’ll be a regular lawyer, I suppose?’ said I.

‘With the blessing of Providence, Master Copperfield,’ returned Uriah.

‘Perhaps you’ll be a partner in Mr. Wickfield’s business, one of these days,’ I said, to make myself agreeable; ‘and it will be Wickfield and Heep, or Heep late Wickfield.’

‘Oh no, Master Copperfield,’ returned Uriah, shaking his head, ‘I am much too umble for that!’

He certainly did look uncommonly like the carved face on the beam outside my window, as he sat, in his humility, eyeing me sideways, with his mouth widened, and the creases in his cheeks.

‘Mr. Wickfield is a most excellent man, Master Copperfield,’ said Uriah. ‘If you have known him long, you know it, I am sure, much better than I can inform you.’

I replied that I was certain he was; but that I had not known him long myself, though he was a friend of my aunt’s.

‘Oh, indeed, Master Copperfield,’ said Uriah. ‘Your aunt is a sweet lady, Master Copperfield!’

He had a way of writhing when he wanted to express enthusiasm, which was very ugly; and which diverted my attention from the compliment he had paid my relation, to the snaky twistings of his throat and body.

‘A sweet lady, Master Copperfield!’ said Uriah Heep. ‘She has a great admiration for Miss Agnes, Master Copperfield, I believe?’

I said, ‘Yes,’ boldly; not that I knew anything about it, Heaven forgive me!

‘I hope you have, too, Master Copperfield,’ said Uriah. ‘But I am sure you must have.’

‘Everybody must have,’ I returned.

‘Oh, thank you, Master Copperfield,’ said Uriah Heep, ‘for that remark! It is so true! Umble as I am, I know it is so true! Oh, thank you, Master Copperfield!’ He writhed himself quite off his stool in the excitement of his feelings, and, being off, began to make arrangements for going home.

‘Mother will be expecting me,’ he said, referring to a pale, inexpressive-faced watch in his pocket, ‘and getting uneasy; for though we are very umble, Master Copperfield, we are much attached to one another. If you would come and see us, any afternoon, and take a cup of tea at our lowly dwelling, mother would be as proud of your company as I should be.’

I said I should be glad to come.

‘Thank you, Master Copperfield,’ returned Uriah, putting his book away upon the shelf – ‘I suppose you stop here, some time, Master Copperfield?’

I said I was going to be brought up there, I believed, as long as I remained at school.

‘Oh, indeed!’ exclaimed Uriah. ‘I should think YOU would come into the business at last, Master Copperfield!’

I protested that I had no views of that sort, and that no such scheme was entertained in my behalf by anybody; but Uriah insisted on blandly replying to all my assurances, ‘Oh, yes, Master Copperfield, I should think you would, indeed!’ and, ‘Oh, indeed, Master Copperfield, I should think you would, certainly!’ over and over again. Being, at last, ready to leave the office for the night, he asked me if it would suit my convenience to have the light put out; and on my answering ‘Yes,’ instantly extinguished it. After shaking hands with me – his hand felt like a fish, in the dark – he opened the door into the street a very little, and crept out, and shut it, leaving me to grope my way back into the house: which cost me some trouble and a fall over his stool. This was the proximate cause, I suppose, of my dreaming about him, for what appeared to me to be half the night; and dreaming, among other things, that he had launched Mr. Peggotty’s house on a piratical expedition, with a black flag at the masthead, bearing the inscription ‘Tidd’s Practice’, under which diabolical ensign he was carrying me and little Em’ly to the Spanish Main, to be drowned.”

Charles Dickens, “David Copperfield”, Chapter XVI.

Rehab

Here, the Bishop of Rome is seen, in an obvious state of shock, pronouncing the words “no,no,no!”

I receive from a reader, servodeprata (welcome, by the way!) a link from the “Catholic News Service”  (the source is, therefore, above suspicion). 

The link contains the following pearl of wisdom from our Bishop of Rome:

“Do you need to convince the other to become Catholic? No, no, no! Go out and meet him, he is your brother. This is enough. Go out and help him and Jesus will do the rest”.

For the first time in the history of Catholicism, evangelisation is made without evangelisation. Actually, there could be no need for evangelisation at all.

In pure Francis style, this confused but so well-sounding piece of nonsense could mean one of two:

1. You don’t need to evangelise: Jesus will evangelise for you, when he sees that your meet-o-meter and help-o-meter has reached a high enough level, and he will then care for the conversion of the poor infidel. 

2. You don’t need to evangelise because there is nothing like an “infidel”: people “go out”, “meet” as “brothers”, “love”, and “help”; this is all that is required.

I will abstain from any comment because I already had to make a big effort to edit what I had written above in a very soft “piece of nonsense”, and would like not to exceed certain boundaries.

I so much hope that this disgraceful papacy may go to an end soon, and be followed by a better one; a judicious heart attack, or something of the sort, persuading him to step aside and go back to the favelas. 

Alas, we are being punished.

Still, one must try to see this tragedy of a pontificate with a bit of humour if he can, at least to safeguard his liver. As I read – and re-read, incredulous – the “no,no,no!”, inclusive of exclamation point, I was reminded of the late singer and of the famous song, and couldn’t avoid imagining Francis saying to Monsignor Ricca “they tried to make me go to rehab, but I said no, no, no!” after three or four Cardinals tried to persuade him it’s time to lock himself in a monastery and learn some Catholicism. 

A Catholic rehab is truly what the man needs.

Mundabor

   

The Future Of The Novus Ordo

No video, for this time…

Read on Rorate the report of a pseudo mass in a pseudo catholic (small c is de rigueur) church in the once to 40% Catholic (now 1% mass attendance) Netherlands.

What is most shocking of this event is not only that the group is not formally excommunicated (as far as I know, they do not have to be), but the fact that in the Netherlands things are so confused that, say, an uninstructed person confusedly trying to approach the Church might confuse these clowns for real Catholics, and one wonders how very different the Catholic mass must be, at least in places.

The Netherlands have a long tradition of schismatic mentality, when not outright schism. If you have read iota unum you will certainly remember the pages devoted to the Dutch Schism, and have an idea of whose spiritual sons the current Dutch bishops are. The mess of the Sixties continues to go on, in a somewhat milder form, to this day. After my experiences in Bruges, I do not doubt over there in the Netherlands you can find everything from the halfway reverent to the outright sacrilegious. I do not see much improvement in the next years, particularly with the disgraceful papacy with which we all are being very obviously punished.

Rorate also mentions another interesting fact: the tendency to move the Novus Ordo towards the “right” by some Anglo-Saxon priests trying to mix elements of the Tradition in their Novus Ordo masses. I have myself assisted to a Novus Ordo Mass which, whilst advertised as a standard mass in English, had so many parts in Latin you could not avoid thinking the celebrating priest was paving the ground for the Traditional Mass, biding his time until he could do without incurring the wrath of Vincent “Quisling” Nichols. He’ll have to arm himself with patience, I am afraid.

Still, the freedoms allowed to a Novus Ordo celebrant – both the licit ones that are allowed, and the illicit ones that are made possible – will continue to make of a Novus Ordo an unknown entity and a known risk: in some places it will be very reverent; elsewhere it will a mess, a disgrace, a desecration or, in the worst cases, a fake; in all cases, it will be vastly inferior to the Mass of the Ages.

At some point in the future, the Church will recover sanity, and will ditch the Novus Ordo. The future generations will, methinks, consider the introduction of the new Mass (I mean the introduction itself, not the abuses; then the abuses are nothing else than the unavoidable product of the mentality that gave us the new Mass in the first place) the maddest thing the mad Sixties produced.

Unfortunately, the Sixties are, for now, still full in power, joyously driving the barque towards the shoals amidst stupid old bishops jumping around like demented idiots to the tune of some very faggoty dance master.

Mundabor

 

Padre Pio, SSPX, Novus Ordo, “Aggiornamento”

Mundabor's Blog

From the Canadian Site of the SSPX ( I wonder how long until they will be outlawed in Canada, for “hate crime”).

Padre Pio and the Novus Ordo Missae

He was a model of respect and submission towards his religious and ecclesiastical superiors, especially during the time when he was persecuted. Nonetheless, he could not remain silent over a deviation that was baneful to the Church. Even before the end of the Council, in February 1965, someone announced to him that soon he would have to celebrate the Mass according to a new rite, ad experimentum, in the vernacular, which had been devised by a conciliar liturgical commission in order to respond to the aspirations of modern man. Immediately, even before seeing the text, he wrote to Paul VI to ask him to be dispensed from the liturgical experiment, and to be able to continue to celebrate the Mass of…

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Pope Jesuit The First

Another stunning example of the shamelessness of the current Bishop of Rome is now everywhere on the Internet: Bishop Francis has made an appeal to his Brazilian bishops to do exactly what he refuses to do whenever it becomes in the least uncomfortable: protect (among others) the unborn.

Wait a moment: “Brazilian”? Isn't this the country where abortion legislation has been passed merely days ago? The country visited by him, and where the World Francis Day took place? The country he visited just in the days preceding a still possible presidential veto on the measure? The country where he met millions of people, including the above mentioned President, and never mentioned abortion?

How can anyone be in possession of such an amount of hypocrisy as to shout his silence during his visit and issue, after the fact, the pathetic fig leave of this message to the bishops?

If we only had a cowardly Bishop of Rome, it would be bad enough. But we have here one who wants to be a coward, and look good whilst he does so.

The true Jesuit.

Mundabor