Caterwawlen
Ryan, is this recent objection to caterwauling by the Catholic Church a direct result of people overstepping the language used at Vatican II again? To my limited knowledge I thought that Rome did not hesitate to accept the practice of caterwauling due to the history it has in restoring relationships within the Church. Of course you probably already know these facts, but I will relate them in the open for our dear readers.
As everyone I’m sure knows, caterwaul is descended etymologically from the middle English word ‘Caterwawlen’ (cater + wrawlen), meaning “to yowl”. Although the old English root has given linguists the historical slip, I would like to posit my theory of why this is so. It seems that in seventh century England at the Council of Whitby problems arose between the delegates of St. Gregory the Great, Pope of Rome, the Venerable Bede of Jarrow (who sided with St. Gregory), and those Irish and Scottish clergy and holy men who were being pressured to put away their very “Eastern” practices and manners of how they would date Easter, and how they would tonsure their monks, and to replace them with the traditions of Rome. With a careful reading between the lines of Bede’s account of the council we can understand that through the intervention and wisdom of St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne the day was saved. It seems that when they had reached an impasse, Blessed Cuthbert negotiated a certain item that the Irish and the Scots could keep in their practices while agreeing to relinquish the dating of Easter and the tonsuring of their monks to Roman practice. Now, while Bede does not specifically say what this practice was that they were allowed to keep, I venture to make a guess that it was indeed the non-liturgical form of caterwauling that was unknown at that time to the English but was known by all the Celts and Picts in old gaelic as “screach a chur”. According to Bede, St. Gregory acquiesced on this matter and union between the two churches was maintained and strengthened.
So, it would appear that this ancient practice which I theorize the Celts received from St. John Cassian in Gaul along with their other Eastern practices, can actually be traced back to the Egyptian desert and the disciples of St. Antony the Great.
Now I assure you that the type of caterwauling we Orthodox still participate in is of course the non-liturgical form. We only have to be reminded of the great lesson we can learn from the disastrous consequences the Huguenot church suffered from by dabbling in liturgical caterwauling. God save us all from such chaos.
May we at Blogodoxy learn from these lessons in history and use this beneficial practice as a means of growing closer together (of course only after obtaining the proper licenses of which Benedict spoke of earlier).