Fr Tim Finigan and Fr Sean Finnegan, priest-bloggers par excellence.
The most obvious theory to explain this move is that traditionalist priest-bloggers are like Martello towers, and need to be placed at strategic points round the coast to repel invaders: thus we have Fr Blake in Brighton, Fr Finnegan in Shoreham, and several other reliable people in similar places, such as Fr Marcus Holden in Ramsgate.
The Anglicans considered a similar strategy at Walmington-on-Sea.
Indeed, moving inland we do not seem to find a similar concentration of high-profile traditionally-minded priests - although one well-known blogging deacon has apparently been sent to Coventry by his bishop - so there we are. Q.E.D., as the Latin liturgy has it.
Look inside a Martello tower and you may find a priest.
What's Margate like?
Neither the Bible nor Shakespeare mention Margate, but it does feature in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land in the section called The Fire Sermon:
On Margate Sands. I can connect Nothing with nothing. The broken finger-nails of dirty hands. My people humble people who expect Nothing.
The Margate shelter where Eliot wrote The Waste Land (yes, really).
Buddha's original Fire Sermon was not preached at Margate, and it is said that he complained for many years that he had missed an opportunity of sampling the best of British fish and chips, not to mention cockles, mussels and whelks. Without a healthy diet of seafood how can you found a good religion? We know all about Galilee...
Anyway, it just remains to wish well to Fr Finigan, and of course to Blogfen too. Meanwhile, there are always day trips for those suffering from a hermeneutical deficiency...
Special trains on Sunday mornings?
Dear Sir,
ReplyDeleteI am encouraged by the comment on your luvvly blog, "The most obvious theory to explain this move is that traditionalist priest-bloggers are like Martello towers."
Having slaved away in obscurity in an odd coastal corner of Southwark Archdiocese, plagued by a congregation of retired ACTA supporters who live in caravans subject to coastal erosion but mercifully disappear into the English Channel on a daily basis, I have been working queietly away at my priestly traditional blog. I had thought it was completely unnoticed, and was happy for it to be unnoticed - having seen what befalls some bloggers whose daily hits are greater than those of their bishop's blog.
Now I have been not only catapulted from obscurity into the limelight by your comparison with the great Catholic traditional bloggers, but also held up as the very model of traditionalist bloggers, I expect to be told immediately to take a break for prayer and reflection. If so, I will go and have a retreat with the FFI on the norty step.
Yours etc.,
Fr Martello "Fawlty" Towers
Dear Eccles I expect he's being sent to Margate as a guided Catjolic missile. It's FULL of heathens and dastardly doings. My Auntie told me.
ReplyDeleteRumour has it that property prices in Margate have hit an all time high in the past couple of days.
ReplyDelete