Never for Any Reason Whatsoever.

Fr H illustrates the utter impiety of the post-Conciliar 'reforms', even to dispersing libraries.

From Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment

I find the following tale rather thought-provoking.

I have a Sarum Portiforium (ed. C Seager, 1843) which has this bookplate: 

Virtue and Cahill Library.

The Founders of this library earnestly request their successors in the See of Portsmouth to keep this library intact and never to sell or dispose of any book for any reason whatsoever.

No 8720 

John Virtue (or Vertue), 1826-1900, was the first Catholic Bishop of Portsmouth (consecrated 1882); John Cahill was the second Bishop, from 1900 until his death in 1910.

I presume that two episcopal coats of arms on the bookplate are those of the two bishops; and that the Library may have been founded for the edification of their Diocesan Clergy. The number suggests that the Library was not a small one.

Clearly, their Lordships, admirable pontiffs, knew full well the dangers, given episcopal frailty and infirmity of purpose, of the Library being got rid of, and formulated these words  ... in so far as could be possible ... so as to exclude that possibility.

Sed frustra!!

I wonder when the book (and the Library?) went wandering. Pencilled inside its front is "£10.50"; which must date from after the decimalisation of our currency in the early 1970s. (It came to me from the library of a great priest and mighty bibliophile, Fr Michael Melrose, [Anglican] pp of S Giles, Reading.)

The disorders which followed the Council must have led to the disregard of a large number of earlier injunctions which included such phrases as Never for any reason whatsoever.

I hesitate to thrust my own drearily predictable views into the defenceless mouths of departed others; but, surely, the original addition of this volume to the Portsmouth Library must in some way hint at a willingness to envisage users of that library being ... shall we say ... not entirely protected from the infections of an earlier liturgical culture. 

And, apparently, the person responsible for the eventual dumping of that Library or part of it (the bookseller who was happy to sell this breviary on for £10.50 cannot himself have paid a Cardinal's Ransom for it) did not share the same hermeneutic, or assumption, of continuity.

I wonder if any of the Virtue and Cahill Library did survive ... even its catalogue would be an interesting historical relic of the clerical culture which was so swiftly, ruthlessly, and comprehensively obliterated by the gauleiters of the 1970s.

UPDATE on a LIBRARY

A jolly good thread on my earlier piece! Apparently it was the Worlock who flogged off the Library, so as to get the cash for the very expensive removal of the 'ornate'  baldacchino in his Cathedral. 

'Theodericus' Worlock was bishop of Portsmouth from 1965 until 1976.

CAPD