Against The Grain

The Southern Cross, the Catholic weekly of South Africa, has published the online Vatican II recollections of Archbishop Denis E Hurley, among which comes this amusing anecdote:

Archbishop Heenan of Westminster was [not in a good mood] . . . He thought the text [of Gaudium Et Spes] was a disaster, and in voicing his criticism took the opportunity of denouncing globetrotting religious periti (council experts) who were disturbing the faith of simple Catholic people. Many understood that his main target was Fr Bernard Häring, the prominent moral theologian who had been lecturing in England.

The Benedictine abbot of Beuron, Germany, in his intervention said he seemed to remember a group of globetrotting religious who ended up in England and settled in Canterbury.

The saying got around that Archbishop Heenan had been suffering from peritinitis from overindulgence in herring and that the remedy prescribed was Benedictine.