BY NOW THE denizens of this little corner of the web are surely aware of Krummau, the splendid castle and town that towers above the banks of the Moldau river in Bohemia. I was never particularly interested in Bohemia until Fr. Emerson came up to St Andrews and gave a talk on the Hapsburgs. Unfortunately, this was before they began to record the talks (and offer them online) as it was an excellent brief lecture that I’d love to revisit. Now Bohemia is one of my passions, in addition to an increasingly large burden of passions (Scotland, New York, Argentina, the Netherlands, South Africa, France, Hungary, Transylvania, Canada, Scandinavia, … ). The architecture is superb and varied, and of course the Duke of Krummau is none other than a certain Prague pol. The complex is no longer in the Schwarzenberg family, but is instead now the State Castle of Český Krumlov.

The Chapel of Saint George in the Castle once contained the skull and bones of Pope St. Callixtus I. The remains were obtained by the Emperor Charles IV, who gave them to the Rosenberg family who built the castle, from whom they (and the castle itself) passed to the Schwarzenbergs, only to be lost after 1614. Nonetheless, the skull of an unknown North African martyr came here in 1663, and tradition donated to the unknown saint the name of Callixtus also.

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I can’t remember who it was that, watching the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain, said never in his right mind did he expect that within just a decade Washington would be the chief propagator of worldwide revolution and the Kremlin would be a relatively conservative power, guarding jealously its local sphere of influence. What could add more of a dash of the absurd (and yet, eminently sensible) than the Russian government, facing the worst crisis of population decline of any major power, promoting larger families with a poster campaign quoting the conservative American philosopher George Santayana.

I‘m sure I’m not the only one whose information-gathering habits have changed for the worse since Le Figaro started charging for access to their online digital version. I much prefer flipping through digital “e-paper” versions to trying to sort through a newspaper’s actual website. When you flip through a laid-out newspaper, you get an overall picture of news and information as the editors have sought to present it to you. On websites, it’s all too easy to ignore all but that which you click on. I was about to complain that Le Figaro‘s change means I will no longer be able to stumble upon interesting articles on Romanian restitution cases and a bold Hungarian countess, but in truth those were from the days when I tended to pick up the actual printed edition rather than flip through it online.

A surprisingly handsome newspaper, especially considering it is owned by (and, indeed, was founded by) Rupert Murdoch. Reminds me of The Scotsman in its broadsheet days.

“He looked up from Scottish Field and all the colour, all the warmth of the world of those pages seemed to drain away.” So writes Alexander McCall Smith in The World According to Bertie, in which the eponymous minor’s enforced visits to the child psychiatrist at the command of his overbearing mother are made at least somewhat bearable by the freedom to flip through the pages of the magazine. Scottish Field is an institution, a staple of doctors’ waiting rooms and bed-and-breakfast sideboards, as well as acting as a Caledonian companion to Country Life and The Field (both of which are produced south of the Tweed, a world away). Your humble & obedient scribe even once graced the high-and-mighty social pages of Scottish Field, beside Lt. Col. Bogle and His Eminence the Cardinal Archbishop of St Andrews & Edinburgh.

Scottish Field recently underwent a bit of a redesign, which included a typographical change to its old-fashioned nameplate (often called a banner or, erroneously, the masthead). (more…)

This year’s summer issue of The Walrus featured a cover from the cartoonist Joost Swarte, which occasioned a post about the Dutch ligne-clairist on the magazine’s blog. Mijnheer Swarte actually invented the term ligne-claire (or klare lijn) to describe the Tintin-esque school of bandes-dessinees, and has collaborated with the noted Peter van Dongen on the latter’s Rampokan series depicting the late years of the Dutch East Indies before it became Indonesia. Swarte’s work has also featured in The New Yorker, our “local” weekly which partly inspired the Canadian Walrus. Jumping from the printed page to brick and mortars, the new Musée Hergé in Louvain-le-Neuve was actually designed by Swarte. His previous architectural work includes a theatre building in his home town of Haarlem in North Holland. (more…)

THE HOLY FATHER, Pope Benedict XVI, recently travelled to the Czech Republic in a journey he described as “both a pilgrimage and a mission.” The ancient land of Bohemia was once at the very center of Christian civilization. It was from here that the brother saints Cyril and Methodius launched their mission to convert the Slavic world. From Prague, the realms of the Přemyslid and then Luxembourg dynasties were ruled, followed by the most illustrious house of Hapsburg. Oh to have been in Prague under the reign of the Emperor Rudolf II! With his mysterious court of astrologers and magicians and his cabinet of curiosities. With Arcimboldo, Spranger, Heintz, and Hans von Aachen putting paint to canvas, Giambologna and de Vries sculpting, while Kepler and Tycho Brahe searched the night skies. Centuries later, long after the nucleus of Hapsburg power had moved to Vienna, it was to Prague that the Emperor Ferdinand came following his abdication and remained until his death in 1875.

But of course there is the other Prague — the city of heresy, rebellion, and warfare. (more…)

Willem Jacobus Eijk, Primate of the Netherlands

THE ANCIENT FORM of the Roman rite has returned to weekly use in Utrecht, the primatial see of the Netherlands. Under the guidance of Wim Eijk, Archbishop of Utrecht, the Church of St. Willibrord has introduced a weekly Tridentine liturgy each Sunday at 5:30 pm, to complement the 10:30 am Mass in Latin in the Ordinary Form. (Previously the old rite was offered only once monthly). The Extraordinary Form will be offered by Fr. A. Komorowski & Fr. M. Kromann Knudsen, both of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter (FSSP, or Priesterbroederschap Sint Petrus in Dutch). St. Willibrord’s is a brilliant example of the nineteenth-century revival of gothic architecture, and the concurrent revival of Dutch Catholicism. Yet the parish was also emblematic of the Dutch church’s implosion in the 1960s & 70s. This beautiful, polychromatic monument to God was deconsecrated in 1967, and the diocese planned on demolishing the building. It was later sold, however, and occupied by an Assumptionist priest who continued saying the older form of mass. Joseph Luns, sometime NATO secretary-general and Dutch foreign minister, was a supporter of the apostolate at St. Willibrord’s.

The recently installed archbishop was keen to regularize the former parish’s situation, and erected it as a non-territorial parish under the auspices of the Vereniging voor Latijnse Liturgie (Association for Latin Liturgy) which promotes Latin in both the ordinary & extraordinary forms of the liturgy. The parish newsletter now proclaims that, at St. Willibrord’s, “all masses are once again celebrated ‘ad orientem'”, and both Sunday masses are accompanied by Gregorian chant. The church also revived, starting in 2002, the Procession of the Relics of St. Willibrord, which is held during the annual festival that opens the cultural season in Utrecht, in order to expose the tradition to a wider audience. (more…)

This place opened up in Stellenbosch just before I left South Africa, but I never had the chance to check it out. I like to look of the place, even though the colours are a bit too subdued for my taste. (more…)

“We didn’t know quite how to take this, but we sat there entranced.”

ONE OF THE markedly few deficiencies of the English language is coming up with a word to describe Richard Demarco. The Scottish press have generally settled upon “impresario” but even that somewhat-ambiguous word fails to do the man justice. Ricky was born in Edinburgh in 1930, grew up in Portobello, and remembers the day when his mother held him back from school because Italy — from whence he stock came — had just declared war on Great Britain. He’s attended every Edinburgh Festival since the very first one began in 1947 — as the founders put it, to “provide a platform for the flowering of the human spirit” in the grim aftermath of the Second World War.

Richard Demarco, couchant, with noted Scots caricaturist Emilio Coia.

In 1963, he cofounded the Traverse Theatre, Scotland’s theatre for new writing, and three years after that founded the Richard Demarco Gallery which promoted Scotland’s cultural interchange with artists across Europe including — very importantly to Richard — from behind the Iron Curtain that divided the continent into free and captive halves. This was during an age when many in the arts world were too busy sympathizing with the murderous totalitarianism that had subjugated half of Europe. Richard has been a deep critic of the choices made by the British government as patron of the arts throughout the decades of his life, but not too long ago he finally patched things up with the Scottish Arts Council.

Readers of Alexander McCall Smith’s 44 Scotland Street might recall the man who comes to speak to the Scottish Police College. The “really important person from the art world in Edinburgh”, as Mr. McCall Smith puts it, comes and tells the trainee constables about the gorgeousness of Italian carabinieri uniforms and how the Scottish psyche still suffers from the iconoclasm of the Reformation, and even suggests architectural alterations and more sympathetic decoration of the Police College. “We didn’t know quite how to take this, but we sat there entranced,” the character admits in 44 Scotland Street. Anyone who either knows Ricky or has been to one of his lectures would immediately recognize the unnamed subject of the passage.

I first met the man when I was a first-year student at St Andrews and he had come up from the capital to give a lecture. I can’t remember what the stated subject was but this is entirely irrelevant as so vast and wide-ranging is the mind & experience of Richard Demarco that he is known for (some would say “notorious for”) never keeping within the bounds of the stated subject. Those who invite Richard to speak shouldn’t bother with a subject, just make posters stating “RICHARD DEMARCO SPEAKS”, giving the date, time, and place, and a crowd of interested characters is bound to turn up. (more…)

“It’s too easy for theological writers to sling around Abstractions with Capital Letters, as if with each stroke of the pen they’re tapping into Plato’s realm of changeless, ineffable Forms. Or at least that they’re writing in German, where all nouns start with caps.”

So begins John Zmirak, who tells a delightful story about one of America’s premier Catholic newspapers.

“A friend of mine used to write weekly for the estimable investigatory journal The Wanderer. Founded by German-Catholic immigrants, it was published auf Deutsch well into the twentieth century.

As my friend recalled, ‘The editors were, I think, waiting for the rest of the country to catch up with them. At last they admitted that this was unlikely, and agreed to translate the paper. But they kept on as their typesetter someone named Uncle Otto, who for years insisted on capitalizing every noun.’”

I’ve uploaded the last eleven issues of The Mitre — “the quality student newspaper at the University of St Andrews” — before its demise after the Midsummer’s Day issue of 2005. The old Mitre website can be found here.

Germany’s new finance minister, Freiherr zu Guttenberg & his wife, Freifrau Stephanie.

Unmentioned by this editorial is that Baron zu Guttenberg’s grandfather (his mother’s father) was the late German winemaker & Croatian politician the Count of Vukovar. From the Count, Baron zu Guttenberg is descended from the noble house of Eltz, who are responsible for one of my favourite castles in the whole world, Burg Eltz, which once graced the 500-deutschmark note.

At the ripe age of 70, the Count of Vukovar took up arms in defence of the town of Vukovar during the Yugoslav Wars of 1991. The Count was elected to the Croatian parliament the following year as an independent, and served in that body until 1999, when he retired from politics. Nonetheless, the Croatian parliament persuaded him to accept honourary membership of parliament in his own right, in which role he continued until his death in 2006.

The Baron’s wife, meanwhile, is Stephanie, Countess of Bismarck-Schönhausen, great-great-granddaughter of the “Iron Chancellor”, Otto von Bismarck. A portent of this economics minister’s future?

The Cathedral Church of St. Mary (Scottish Episcopal), Edinburgh.

Nikolaus von Dumba, in the study of the Palais Dumba on the Ringstraße in Vienna. (more…)

WHAT DO THESE three coats of arms, their representations produced for the 1910 coronation, have in common? The first thing that might come to the mind of most of the heraldically-inclined is that all three are the arms of British dominions; from left to right, of Australia, Canada, and South Africa. Aside from this commonality, however, each of these three arms have been superseded.

The Australian arms above were granted in 1908, and superseded by a new grant in 1912, though the old arms survived on the Australian sixpenny piece as late as 1963. The kangaroo and emu were retained as the shield’s supporters in the new grant of arms which remains in use today.

The Confederation of Canada took place in 1867, but no arms were granted to the dominion so it used a shield with the arms of its four original provinces — Ontario, Québec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick — quartered. As the remaining colonies of British North America were admitted to Canada as provinces, their arms were added to the unofficial dominion arms, which became quite cumbersome as the number of provinces grew. A better-designed coat of arms was officially granted in 1921, and modified only slightly a number of times since then.

South Africa‘s heraldic achievement, meanwhile, was divided into quarters, each quarter representing one of the Union’s four provinces: the Cape of Good Hope, Natal, the Transvaal, and the Orange Free State. While South Africa is (like Scotland, England, Ireland, and Canada) one of the few countries to have an official heraldic authority — the Buro vir Heraldiek in Pretoria — the country’s new arms were designed by a graphic designer with little knowledge of the rules & traditions of heraldry. As a result, the design produced is unattractive and very unpopular, unlike the new South African national flag, introduced in 1994, which was designed by the State Herald, Frederick Brownell, which enjoys wide popularity and universal acceptance.

The current arms of Australia, Canada, and South Africa are represented below.

I’ve long suspected that most cars permanently inhabit the best parking spaces in Manhattan — their owners wary to leave them for fear of giving up that spot. But every now and then you get that spot. In my case, it’s through the intercession of St. Martin de Porres, who likes to make sure this altar-server makes it to St. Agnes next to Grand Central every Sunday with time to spare.

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