Donald Jenkins

I have been reading comments from all kinds of people about the Congregation for Bishops’ announcement yesterday that the decree of July 1 1988 that had recorded the excommunication, latæ sententiæ, of the four bishops of the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) consecrated by Mgr Marcel Lefebvre three days earlier had been remitted. People’s reactions, not surprisingly, reflect their own deep-seated opinions and prejudices about a range of issues, some connected with that of the excommunication, some not.

WIthout expressing any personal opinions, I wish to point out some frequently overlooked material about the 1988 excommunication issue, especially the fact that excommunication was pronounced pursuant to a provision in canon that had only existed since 1951 and had been instituted to deal with a very different situation: the Chinese Patriotic Church set up in mainland China after the Communist takeover. Because the legal circumstances defined in 1951 with regard to the Chinese situation were not necessarily relevant in 1988, it is actually a moot point whether the traditionalist bishops were ever actually excommunicated at all in 1988.

Over the past four years, Gerard Mortier has presided over a quiet revolution in style, matched by a major shift in the audience of that venerable Parisian institution. He initially got the backs up the stuffy Parisians who traditionally make up the institution’s audience—bitchy, rude and often, it has to be said, pretty ignorant about music and ready to clap or boo—often vociferously—in blissful ignorance of the true artistic merits of what they have been watching.

Yvonne, princesse de Bourgogne, whose world première I attended last night, demonstrated the extent to which Gerard’s style is now plebiscited by Parisians. Boesmans’s elegant, though perhaps sometimes rather facile music, while resolutely contemporary, was never aggressive, utterly devoid of that aggressive dissonance that is so frequently regarded as a requirement by twentieth-century composers. It was beautifully set off by Luc Bondy’s subtle direction and the dĂ©cors by Richard Peduzzi—always a favourite of mine. Mireille Delunsch, who sung the role of La Reine Marguerite, approached it as she often does, overwhelming the part with her own personality and style rather than the reverse and, as so often, getting away with it perfectly. Sylvain Cambreling was clearly relaxed conducting one of those contemporary works in which he is far more at ease than with Mozart.

Cutting down the time spent posting an article on your blog is easy if you plan things a bit. When you post on your blog, you are actually doing three unrelated things: (1) setting out your thoughts in writing, (2) coding what you have written (using Markdown or HTML, adding links, pictures and tags) and (3) publishing your post.

A lot can be gained from separating those three tasks in time (doing them in sequence rather than switching from one to the other) and in space (choosing the online or desktop tools that suit you most for each task, and getting them to work together to minimise the effort required of you when you write and publish a new article).

In this post we will be looking at ways to get TextMate, MarsEdit or ecto and WriteRoom to work seamlessly together so that you can concentrate on each stage of producing your post without being distracted and automate most of the coding and uploading processes.

On January 18, 1979, thirty years ago today, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, the man who dreamt of, and then started building, a non-nuclear, peaceful, modern Iran, was forced into exile by his former Western allies, allowing the country to descend into chaos.

I have decided to implement Facebook Connect on this site, instead of OpenID which seems to be confusing users rather than helping them. The Facebook Connect system is still in its infancy, but the range of potential applications is breathtaking.

There were no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.

(Golda Meir, Sunday Times, June 15 1969; The Washington Post, June 16 1969)

I am sorry I wrote nothing at all in the fourth quarter of 2008. I was planning to write about Iran, South Africa, the French Constitution and the American presidential election. Other more personal issues intervened and kept me away from the blog, which doesn’t mean I didn’t keep busy on other fronts. Of course, it’s always possible to keep track of me on Twitter or, if I actually know you in real life, on Facebook.

I spent a lot of the time in 2008 travelling. I worked in South Africa initially, which was interesting. I then spent a fair amount of time criss-crossing the Atlantic, which work had not left time to do in recent years, and rediscovering my Anglospheric roots.

I will try to post regularly to this site now that things (some things anyway) have settled a bit.