Striving for a world transformed by justice and peace - a TL from 1827

[pipisme]

Maire wore a sexy red dress which showed the contours of her breasts, and which she had made herself, for her wedding. She didn't want to wear white because she was not a virgin, so she chose red because it was her favourite colour and it complemented her red hair.

Here is the order of service for the wedding. Aneurin and Maire stood at the top of the nave, in front of the sanctuary. Father Williams having asked them to join their right hands, Aneurin said:
"I Aneurin Griffiths, take thee Maire O'Brien for my lawful wedded wife, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part."

Then Maire said:
"I Maire O'Brien, take thee Aneurin Griffiths for my lawful wedded husband, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death us do part."

To be continued.

 

[pipisme]

Aneurin's and Maire's wedding continued
Then Father Williams said,while blessing them:
"I join you together in marriage, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost."

Then Aneurin and Maire said, "Amen".

After the priest had sprinkled Aneurin and Maire with holy water, he said more prayers to which the couple gave responses. Then he sprinkled the ring for Maire with holy water in the form of a cross and gave it to Aneurin, who said:
"With this ring I thee wed and I plight unto thee my troth",while putting it on the third finger of Maire's left hand.
There were more prayers by the priest and responses by the married couple,and a final prayer by Father Williams. He did not say the optional nuptial blessing. [1]

There was no music and the service took no longer than fifteen minutes. It was entirely in Welsh. Baby Catrin slept through it all,while the other young children were reasonably well-behaved. Carwen Griffiths was happlly absorbed by gazing at the stained glass windows.

[1] I have taken the wedding ceremony from here: http://www.traditionalcatholicpries...olic-wedding-ceremony-vs-new-wedding-ceremony, section headed 'The Traditional Rite of Marriage'.

 

[pipisme]

After the wedding everyone went to Aneurin's mother, Angharad's, house for a celebration. After about ten minutes John and Rhiannon and baby Catrin, togther with Nia and Tom and Myfanwy all went home. Caitlin and Siobhan sang Irish songs in their fine soprano voices. Mrs Kelly gave the married couple an Irish blessing. During the course of the afternoon and evening more people drifted off home. Aneurin and Maire and her siblings all left soon after 7 pm.

It was not until nearly 10 pm, after preparing the evening meal and getting Mairead to bed, that Aneurin and Maire could go to their bedroom. They now had their own room, while Caitlin and Siobhan shared a room, and Brid, Mairead and Sean were in the third bedroom. Aneurin and Maire had previously bought a second hand double bed to replace Maire's single bed.

 

[Archangel]

Keep it up, pip!

 

[pipisme]

Before Maire and Aneurin made love, she said the following prayer she had written:

Bless O God the Father, the fullness of the body of my beloved within me, and the giving of his seed to me. The showing of his love and desire for me.
Bless O God the Son, the wetness of my body. The showing of my love and desire for my beloved.
Bless O God the Holy Spirit, the union of our bodies. The showing of our love and desire for each other.

Aneurin told her that he liked the prayer.

That night they made love naked - eagerly, joyfully, slowly and passionately. Maire was much more sexually experienced than Nye and she told him what she liked, such as that she wanted him to give slow thrusts in her vagina. She orgasmed twice, crying out in a loud voice 'Hallelujah'. Afterwards they cuddled each other and fell asleep in each other's arms.

This was the first time that they had sexual intercourse without Maire using a vaginal sponge. She had out of necessity when she was a prostitute, but she felt guilty about her doing so because she believed in the Catholic Church's opposition to birth control, and also did not like it because she felt it was a barrier between her and Nye. She had repented of her sins of being a prostitute and using vaginal sponges. She very much wanted to grow in holiness and virtue. To become a more loving person.

 

[pipisme]

Some foreshadowing. In the Autumn Books feature in the issue of The Tablet, the Catholic weekly journal, dated 5 October 2013, there was the following full page review of The Collected Prayers and Spiritual Diary of Maire Griffiths.

This is a new edition of the book by Maire Griffiths. She has been overshadowed by her husband Aneurin, the famous poet, and has been depicted as the loyal wife who stood by him in spite of his betrayal of her by his infidelities. But this book shows that she was much more than a victim, but a strong and loving woman.
Her spirituality is rooted in the Celtic tradition which sees God as friend, companion, guest, fellow-worker, fellow-traveller. It is full of words like uphold, surround, encircle. She knows that God is transcendent, but is also aware that the Trinity is indwelling in the depths of her soul.

 

[Archangel]

Keep it up, pip!

 

[pipisme]

continuation of book review from post #1086

Maire O'Brien (as she was then) started her spiritual diary on the First Sunday of Advent in 1866. She was sixteen years old and had been a sex worker (or dolly mop in contemporary slang) for about two and a half months. In cheap notebooks, though not every day, she wrote her prayers and her thoughts on spiritual matters.

 

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continuation of book review

Maire's prayer asking God for the grace to be a compassionate prostitute is deeply poignant:
'Dearest Lord Jesus, give me the grace I pray to be compassionate to the men who come and see me when I am working as a dolly mop. Give me the grace always to be kind, respectful, patient and considerate towards them, to love them as you commanded us to love our neighbour and to remember that you died for them.
Give me the grace never to condemn them or judge them.
May I always serve them with humility and love, consenting to their wants on my body and on their bodies, without complaining.'

Maire came to accept that although being a prostitute was a sin, the pleasure she received from sex, including that of orgasm, was natural and God given. While she was a sex worker she went to Mass every Sunday and on major feast days, though being in a state of mortal sin she did not receive Holy Communion. During that time she prayed fervently to the Blessed Virgin Mary that God would send her a husband, and was full of gratitude and joy when she met Aneurin Griffiths and they fell in love and got married.

During Mass on Sunday 18 June 1869, a few days after she had accepted Aneurin's proposal of marriage, had stopped being a sex worker and had started work as a dressmaker at the workshop for ex prostitutes, and gone to Confession and received absolution for all her sins, Maire had a profound experience of God's infinite love for her. That evening she wrote in her diary:
'At Mass this morning what bliss, what joy, fire of God's love for me. Now I know for certain that He loves me as I am. I now promise that with God's grace I will love Him with all my heart and soul, and love my neighbour as myself. With His grace I will become a saint.'

Her prayers of sexual desire and thanksgiving she wrote during her marriage have attracted much controversy. Here is one of them:
'I thank you, Loving God, source of all goodness and love, for the delight you give me when my beloved Nye and I shag each other.
I thank you for the pleasure of his cock hard and full in my muff, wet and yielding for him.
I thank you when Nye spends in me, giving me his life giving seed.
I thank you, dearest Lord, for the joy when I come, waves of pleasure washing over me.
I thank you for my happiness when Nye strokes my pearl and I come with so much pleasure'.

For those readers who do not know Victorian slang, muff is vagina, spending is male ejaculation and pearl is clitoris.

To be continued.

 

[Archangel]

Keep it up, pip!

 

[pipisme]

continuation of book review

Although Maire Griffiths prayed for politicians of all parties, she was a member of the Commonwealth Party and she prayed for its success.

This review is not the place to go through again the well known story of the sexual relationship between her husband and Gwen John when he was forty-one years old and she was eighteen, before she went to London to become an art student. Maire forgave her husband, but was deeply hurt by the relationship between him and Miss John.

 

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continuation of book review

Maire Griffiths wrote in her spiritual notebook almost up to her death on 1st February 1938 at the age of eighty-seven. Her husband died in April 1933 at the age of eighty. People who knew her have said that she had an inner strength and calm, combined with great joy. She was generous with both her time and her money.

This is a much needed book about the spiritual life of a woman who achieved holiness as a wife and a mother of twelve children. The editor has done an excellent job in arranging and selecting Mrs Griffiths' prayers and writings and her commentary is informative but unobtrusive. We hope very much that her biography will be written.

The review was the subject of a lively correspondence in the letters page of the The Tablet. Here is one letter published in the issue dated 12 October 2013:

The publication of this book shows the perilous state of the Catholic Church under the leadership of the present so-called Pope. We know from biographies of her husband, Aneurin Griffiths, that she read and enjoyed his pornographic poems, and that she gladly and willingly indulged with him in depraved, disgusting and unnatural sexual practices which are mortal sins. Unless she repented of those sins before she died, and I very much hope that she did, I must conclude that she died in a state of mortal sin and is now in Hell. The fact that Pope John made this woman a Servant of God, is what you would expect from someone who has allowed homosexual Catholics to enter into so called marriages.

Andrew Wilson
Guildford, Surrey

 

[Archangel]

Keep it up, pip!

 

[pipisme]

Another letter in the issue of The Tablet dated 12 October 2013:

I am delighted in the publication of the Collected Prayers and Spiritual Diary of Maire Griffiths. A working class wife and mother, she was saint like, and is much loved in Swansea as their own saint, though she will never be canonised by the Catholic Church. She is an inspiration to 'ordinary' lay people that they like her, by the grace of God, can become 'living flames of love', like Maire wrote she wanted to be. Having sinned greviously she knew she was a repentant sinner.

Theresa Morris
Swansea

In the issue of The Tablet dated 19 October 2013 there was the following letter

How dare Andrew Wilson in his letter in your issue dated 12 October tell us that Maire Griffiths is in Hell because of her 'depraved, disgusting and unnatural sexual practices'. I assume he means that she enjoyed receiving oral sex and clitoral stimulation from Aneurin, her husband. Only an ultra rigorous interpretation of Catholic Church teaching on sex regards taking part in these acts as mortal sins. Aneurin Griffiths wrote erotic, not pornographic poems.

Clare Dodds,

Liverpool

 

[pipisme]

Maire Griffiths was just under five feet five inches inches tall with shoulder length red hair and brown eyes. If she were living now in OTL her clothes size would be 14 and her bra size would be 38D. She conceived her first child sometime in the first week of her marriage.

On Sunday 4 July 1871, that is the day after her wedding, she and her siblings went to Mass at St. David's Priory Catholic Church in Swansea, as they did every Sunday. The parish priest, Father Cadoc Williams had read books liturgical reformers such as Ludovico Antonio Muratori and Antonio Rosmini. [1] Both men advocated the active participation of the people in the Mass and Muratori wanted some of the Mass to be in the vernacular, at least the readings from scripture.

[1] Here are their entries on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludovico_Antonio_Muratori and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Rosmini-Serbati.

 

[Archangel]

Keep it up, pip!

 

[pipisme]

Muratori described how when he was travelling in the Austrian Tyrol and one Sunday went to a church to hear Mass. He arrived just as the parish priest was about to say Mass which preceded in the usual manner up to the gospel. This the priest read in Latin from the left hand corner of the altar. Then having done so, he left the altar and came down to the altar rail and 'in a loud voice read from a book in German the same gospel for that is the native language of the people'. He said that the same custom was to be found in Dalmatia and Moravia.

Rosmini wrote that 'the Church is nothing other than the family of God'. He said that the liturgy is 'not a spectacle for the people to behold', rather they should be 'genuinely participating in this drama of religious worship'. [1] However he rejected the use of the vernacular in the liturgy, instead books with translation of the Latin texts of the missal should be provided for the laity.

Father Williams had also read the works of James Dymock and John Goter, two English priests and liturgists who lived in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and was much influenced by them. Dymock's belief that the laity share in the priesthood of Christ was the basis of his theology of active participation.

Goter was a younger contemporary of Dymock. He published Instructions and Devotions for hearing Mass; for Confession, Communion and Confirmation. In this book he shows from the fact that the prayers of the Mass are in the plural, that it is the action of a community and simply of the priest alone. In his book Goter provided all of the Ordinary of the Mass with the Canon translated into English.

At St. David's Priory Catholic Church, Father Williams believed strongly in the active participation of the congregation in the Mass. He had printed booklets which gave all of the Ordinary of the Mass in Latin with translations in English or Welsh, some in English and some in Welsh. These cost two pence each. During Mass, after he had read the Epistle and Gospel at the altar in Latin, he read them in English from the altar rail. Also the prayers said by the altar server were also said aloud by the people in Latin. At sung masses the congregation sung the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Agnus Dei in the plainchant setting of the Missa de Angelis.

Maire had bought copies of the Mass booklet for herself and her siblings Caitlin, Siobhan, Sean and Brid. Mairead being only four years old was still too young. They went to the sung Masses. Because they were younger than twenty-one and the requirement of the eucharistic fast of no food and drink after midnight did not apply to them, Maire, Caitlin and Siobhan received Holy Communion at Mass. Sean, Brid and Mairead were two young to receive Communion.

[1] I have taken the information in this post and my previous post about Muratori, Rosmini, Dymock and Goter, and quotations by Muratori and Rosmini, from the OTL book Light in Darkness: Forerunners of the Liturgical Movement J.D. Crichton, Dublin: The Columba Press, 1996.

 

[pipisme]

Maire Griffiths' vital statistics were full bust 38 inches, waist 31 inches, hips 40 inches. [1]

After the poor Liberal performance in the general election in which they fell from 69 MPs to 45 MPs, on 23 May 1871 William Forster, the Liberal Party leader, announced his intention to resign when Liberal MPs had elected a new leader. There were two candidates for the leadership, Charles Dilke and Austen Henry Layard.

Dilke had been elected MP for Saffron Walden in the general election of June/July 1870. He was widely regarded as the leader of the radical/left-wing Liberals. Layard was the candidate of the Liberal establishment and had the support of the centre and right of the party. He had been MP for Aylesbury from 1853 to 1866, when he was defeated in the April/May general election that year. He was elected as Liberal MP for Penryn and Falmouth in a by-election on 15 October 1866. He was Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office and Secretary of State for India in Liberal governments from 1858 to 1864. [2]

The result of the election on 6 June 1871 was as follows:
Layard: 35 votes
Dilke: 9 votes.
Layard appointed Dilke and the Marquis of Hartington, the unofficial leader of right-wing Liberals, to what was in effect his shadow cabinet.

[1] See http://www.belladinotte.com/fitting under column for size 14.

[2] Here is his entry on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austen_Henry_Layard. In this TL his life and career was the same as in OTL up to 1852.

 

[Archangel]

Keep it up, pip!

 

[pipisme]

The trial of Edward Mahoney for the murder of John Malcolm Ludlow opened in the Four Courts, Dublin, on 12 June 1871. The prosecution was led by Sir Philip Callan QC, the Attorney-General for Ireland, while Sir John Thomas Ball QC, led for the defence. Callan was Irish Nationalist MP for Dundalk and had been Attorney-General for Ireland since August 1870. [1] Both he and the Solicitor-General for Ireland were Irish Nationalist MPs serving in Commonwealth governments. Ball was one of the two Conservative MPs for Dublin University and had been Atoorney-General for Ireland from 1868-1870. [2]

As there was no doubt that Mahoney had stabbed and killed Ludlow, the purpose of the trial was to ascertain whether or not he was not guilty by reason of insanity. I will give only a summary of the trial.

Mrs Catherine Butler was the first witness to be cross examined by Callan. He asked her:
'Are you Mrs Catherine Butler of 18 Rutland Square, Dublin, the older sister of the defendant and the husband of Doctor Charles Butler?'

'I am.'

'Has the defendant been living with you and your husband, as a condition of his bail, since the 20th of June?'

'He has'.

'Did he live with you before then?'

'He did not. He lived in lodgings in Dublin.'

'Did he visit you while he was living in lodgings?

'He visited my huband and me usually every weekend.'

'Mrs Butler, please give the court an idea of the personality of your brother Edward.'

'Edward is a shy and quiet gentleman. He has no aptitude for practical work. He has a very great interest in political matters. He has a number of acquaitances, but no friends.'

'Did he ever express any opinion as regards Mr Ludlow.'

'Yes he often said that he and his government were in the pay of the Roman Catholic Church and were traitors to Ireland because of their policy of Home Rule for this country. Mr Ludlow was the chief traitor.'

'Did your brother ever tell you what he would like to happen to the men he considered to be traitors?'

'On Sunday 14 June, he said that anyone who killed Mr Ludlow would be a hero and a patriot.'

'Did you or your husband tell the police what your husband said?'

'Neither I or my husband told the police.'

'We did not think there was any need to. We were sure that Edward would never kill anybody. He is a kind and gentle man.'

'Your brother has claimed that the voices of Thomas Cranmer and Oliver Cromwell told him to kill Mr. Ludlow. Did he ever tell you that he heard these two persons or anyone else speaking to him?'

No, he never did. Edward must have been in great distress to have done such a dreadful act as killing Mr Ludlow, the former prime minister.'

'Thank you Mrs Butler. I have no more questions for you.'

[1] Here is Callan's entry in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Callan.

[2] Here is Ball's Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Thomas_Ball.