Fr Mark Woodruff writes:
In 1990, Fr Peter Lyness, now of the Catholic Diocese of Westminster but at the time Assistant Administrator of the Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, remarked to me that it was a shame that at Walsingham, unlike at Lourdes, Fatima and otherplaces of pilgrimage, the Shrine had not developed its own body of hymns and liturgical music. He thought it was a pity that, despite the words of the present Anglican Walsingham Pilgrimage Hymn being so treasured by generations of pilgrims, the tune was none other than the Lourdes tune. He suggested I have a go at writing a tune for Walsingham.
I took the tune I had written back to Walsingham along with some verses I had written as an additional resource (based on the first three verses of the nineteenth century hymn by Jeremiah Cumming) - an alternative or companion to the other much loved verses. I presented it, with Father Lyness' encouragement, to the then Adminisrator, the late Fr Roy Fellowes who subsequently served as a Catholic priest in the diocese of Lancaster in retirement. "That's no use," he said. "Pilgrims come here and they like the hymn they know already." So pretty much ever after that it remained in my drawer.
In 1994, however, it was recorded by the Choir of the University of London Chaplaincy of Christ the King, Gordon Square, for a cassette, Ladye of Walsingham, commissioned for a short run of 50 tapes by Pilgrim Tapes Ltd (now Pilgrim CDs and Tapes). I have never once received any royalties from or given permission for the sale of further tapes, let alone its transfer to CD, despite representations. Nor is my work as author and composer acknowledged. It is very disappointing that a business which presents itself as a Christian enterprise has resolutely resisted for 17 years the rights and dues of a copyright holder.
In the mid 1990s, partly to remedy this, copies of the hymn and music were made available at low cost through the old Christian Literature Association bookshop at Faith House in Tufton Street, managed at the time by Mr David Chapman, who is now Manager of St Paul's Bookshop by Westminster Cathedral (a not-for-profit charitable enterprise of the priests and brothers of the Society of St Paul - proceeds go to the Society's work to promote the gospel through contemporary means of communication). When stocks were exhausted, I did not replenish them; but I gather that since that time the text and tune have continued to circulate and even featured at Catholic celebrations in honour of Our Lady of Walsingham.
Given the growing interest in the Catholic community in Walsingham as our National Shrine of Our Lady in its 950th year, with a particular emphasis on healing, life and reconciliation, I am making the updated hymn and its tune generaly available free of charge.
I make no claims for the quality of the verse beyond saying that it seems to have been useful in the past and may still be of service. In case this is so, it is now dedicated especially to the priests and people of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham.
Download A Walsingham Pilgrimage Hymn here (pdf file)
Friday, 24 June 2011
Bruges Pilgrimage 8-12 September 2011
For over 25 years, the Catholic League has arranged a late summer pilgrimage to Bruges. It has always been a strong support in our objectives to promote the reconciliation of all Christians with the Apostolic See of Rome. Last year, led by Fr Peter Geldard, we reflected on the huge significance of Anglicanorum Coetibus in answering our prayer of nearly a century for "corporate reunion". We examined the great figure of Cardinal Newman on the eve of his beatification during the forthcoming visit of the Holy Father.
This year we will be giving thanks for the Beatification, the success of Pope Benedict's apostolic visit and the foundatoin of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. It will be, as always, an ecumenical pilgrimage, continuing to hope and pray for the union of Christians and especially the reconciliation of the Anglican Communion and the Catholic Chuch.
All members of the League, members of the Ordinariate and others are most welcome to join us.
We will be staying with the Benedictine Daughters of the Church in their Priory of the Vineyard at the Begijnhof, or Beguinage, noted for their execution of the current Latin Liturgy of the Hours in Gregorian chant. We will arrive on the Patronal Festival, the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, under her title of Our Lady of the Vineyard. We will also be making a pilgrimage to the weekly Solemn Mass at the Basilica of the Holy Blood and venerating the relic. There will also be a celebration of the Melkite Greek Caholic Divine Liturgy.
The speaker this year is Fr Hugh Allan o. praem, Prior, St Philip's Priory, Chelmsford.
Pilgrims are responsible for their own travel arrangements adn insurance. The cost of the pleasant but basic accommodation, including meals, in the Beguinage guesthouse is confirmed at 210 euros for four nights full board.
Further details in the Flyer can be downloaded here.
A booking form can be downloaded here.
Antistes Noster
Una cum famulo tuo Papa nostro Benedicto et Antistite nostro "N."
These words in the Roman Canon signify the communion of the local Roman diocesan Church with its bishop and, in other dioceses and particular manifestations of the Church, the communion of the local diocese or particular Church with its head and, in turn, his communion with and under the Bishop of Rome as Pope - primate of the entire Church of the Latin rite and universal pastor serving the whole Church of Christ.
In the translation of the Canon we are about to use, this is translated as "together with your servant N. our Pope and N. our Bishop". A footnote adds "Mention may be made here of the Coadjutor Bishop, or Auxiliary Bishops, as noted in the General Instruction of the Roman Missal, no. 149."
An interesting question has kept arising at each of the receptions and ordinations in the Ordinariate. A great deal of effort has been put into establishing that the Ordinariates under the provisions of Anglicanorum Coetibus are, like the non-territorial Military Ordinariates, not agencies of the local dioceses but a particular Churches in their own right. In England, North America and Australia this puts them on a par with the semi-non-territorial Eparchies and Exarchates that are the local particular churches for Christians belonging to Eastern Catholic Churches. They are also akin to territorial abbeys, not standing within a local Catholic diocese but on their own as "circumscriptions" of the Church in their own right, led by an Abbot nullius, that is an Abbot whose abbey and territory belongs to no one else. Normally, the Ordinariate will be led by a bishop, but not necessarily. A priest who cannot be ordained bishop on the grounds of his marriage may also be chosen by the Pope to lead an Ordinariate.
This is the case in England with Mgr Keith Newton. He needs to request bishops from the local dioceses to confer the sacrament of order in the Ordinariate. If he were a bishop he would not have needed to invite the diocesans and auxiliaries of many of the English Catholic dioceses in which his clergy live to ordain them. But as he is a priest, and especially as the Ordinariate needs to use the churches of the dioceses for the services of its embyonic parishes, and of their principal churches for ordinations, when you go to a Catholic service of the Ordinariate taking place in a diocesan church or Cathedral, who is commemorated after the Pope?
The Westminster, Southwark and East Anglia position has been clear - the ordinations take place in the local diocese whose own bishop has been asked to ordain clergy for the Ordinariate operating within his territory and who, in so far as they will be functioning in and working with the local diocesan clergy, will from time to time come under his jurisdiction - like, for instance, ordained members of religious institutes (such as monastic orders). But is this not to misunderstand the terms of Anglicanorum Coetibus, which indicate that wherever the Ordinariate functions within the territory of the Bishops' Conference to which it belongs then, like the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Exarchate, it is its own church, not a subset of the local diocese. For sure, these are uncharted ecclesiological waters, despite the theoretical provisions of Canon Law and Ad Gentes on which Anglicanorum Coetibus is predicated. And certainly the byword is mutual support, good relations and close future working in common. But are the ordinations of the Ordinariate's clergy taking place in the Ordinariate, or in the local diocese under the tutelage of its Bishop?
The approach in other dioceses has been different. At Brentwood Bishop McMahon and at Birmingham Archbishop Longley commemorated, as the pontifical directs, "me your unworthy servant", followed by "Keith our Ordinary". This seemed happily to locate the ordinations in the communion of the Ordinariate as the particular Church concerned in its own right, at the same time as locating the Ordinariate, as the Apostolic Constitution intended, in immediate communion with the territorial Catholic diocese in which it is manifested here and there. In other words, this signifies not the dependance of the Ordinariate on the local Catholic diocese but their mutual and full communion.
Whichever practice is followed, it has to be said that in most of the cases so far it is clear that the Ordinations are for and within the Ordinariate, that functioning in a Church of another diocese does not detract from this because of this perfect communion, and that the Bishop of the Diocese where Ordinariate groups have clergy ordained to serve them is ordaining them at the request of and on behalf of the Ordinary.
But how is this communion relationship and the ecclesial reality of the Ordinariate vis-à-vis the surrounding diocese to be expressed liturgically and ecclesiologically?
Part of the problem has arisen because we translate the term for the Heads of our local, particular church as "bishop". In nearly every instance this is uncontroversial. But antistes means, for most practical Catholic purposes, "bishop", but not exclusively. It is the native Latin word for the position that a bishop holds in the Church, episcopus being a loan-word from Greek, in which it means overseer and from which the word for bishop in most languages is derived. But antistes is already a sacral term, coming from the orders of priests in Roman and Etruscan cults of the gods to describe the chief priest who stands to the fore of the body in which he performs the primary religious functions. Indeed it means that one who "stands before" (ante, not anti ("against")). The classic Latin Roman rite never adopted the Greek term, but kept to the Latin term invested with a whole culture's religious significance. It means therefore "leading" priest, or high priest, or chief priest. Clearly this encompasses the meaning and role of the bishop, even though "bishop" does not completely correspond with the hinterland of meaning to antistes.
In an interesting quirk of history, in the Swiss reformed churches at Zurich and Basel the leaders eschewed episcopal polity and thus rejected the term episcopus for their leader, it being too closely linked with Catholicism and the Pope. From 1525 the church at Zurich used the term antistes as an honorary title for their leader, Huldrych Zwingli. Not long after this, antistes or Vorsteher became an elected position, that of head of churches with synodal governance. Thus the antistes was an ordained minister elected by the city government and assigned the pastorship of one of the main churches. He was the principal representative of the local church, presided at its synod, and decided on the ordination of new ministers through exercising the responsbility of conducting theological examination. The position did not enjoy independent authority and jurisdiction (which were vested in the synods), but it could be used to exercise great influence nonetheless. In the nineteeenth century the office of antistes was replaced by the more contemporary and official-sounding "president".
But does the presence of antistes in the Roman Canon permit a commemoration of the leader of a particular Church, like the Ordinariates, who is not a bishop? Possibly; and there is precedent. At the Byzantine Exarchic Monastery of Basilian Monks at Grottaferrata near Rome, the abbot, or archimandrite, is Fr Emiliano Fabbricatore, who is not a bishop. (In fact he is described as Exarch-Ordinary.) During the anaphora of the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, he is commemorated thus (the monastery's own transliteration):
This is in place of the commemoration of the local bishop - because there isn't one. If, however, a bishop is present, he is indeed commemorated in the monastery out of honour (as sevasmiotàtou Episkòpou - honoured or venerable Bishop), prior (according to Church order) the priestly abbot.
Surely then, given that antistes does not need to be restricted to "bishop", which does not fully translate it, chosen as it was in preference to episcopus, it is possible to commemorate a priest who is not a bishop in the Latin eucharistic prayers with some weighty precedent from another tradition in the Church, and translate it interpretatively for practical purposes by saying in the Ordinariate and its liturgical functions, "Keith our Ordinary," just as we also render it in the dioceses as "John", or "David our Bishop".
These words in the Roman Canon signify the communion of the local Roman diocesan Church with its bishop and, in other dioceses and particular manifestations of the Church, the communion of the local diocese or particular Church with its head and, in turn, his communion with and under the Bishop of Rome as Pope - primate of the entire Church of the Latin rite and universal pastor serving the whole Church of Christ.
In the translation of the Canon we are about to use, this is translated as "together with your servant N. our Pope and N. our Bishop". A footnote adds "Mention may be made here of the Coadjutor Bishop, or Auxiliary Bishops, as noted in the General Instruction of the Roman Missal, no. 149."
An interesting question has kept arising at each of the receptions and ordinations in the Ordinariate. A great deal of effort has been put into establishing that the Ordinariates under the provisions of Anglicanorum Coetibus are, like the non-territorial Military Ordinariates, not agencies of the local dioceses but a particular Churches in their own right. In England, North America and Australia this puts them on a par with the semi-non-territorial Eparchies and Exarchates that are the local particular churches for Christians belonging to Eastern Catholic Churches. They are also akin to territorial abbeys, not standing within a local Catholic diocese but on their own as "circumscriptions" of the Church in their own right, led by an Abbot nullius, that is an Abbot whose abbey and territory belongs to no one else. Normally, the Ordinariate will be led by a bishop, but not necessarily. A priest who cannot be ordained bishop on the grounds of his marriage may also be chosen by the Pope to lead an Ordinariate.
This is the case in England with Mgr Keith Newton. He needs to request bishops from the local dioceses to confer the sacrament of order in the Ordinariate. If he were a bishop he would not have needed to invite the diocesans and auxiliaries of many of the English Catholic dioceses in which his clergy live to ordain them. But as he is a priest, and especially as the Ordinariate needs to use the churches of the dioceses for the services of its embyonic parishes, and of their principal churches for ordinations, when you go to a Catholic service of the Ordinariate taking place in a diocesan church or Cathedral, who is commemorated after the Pope?
The Westminster, Southwark and East Anglia position has been clear - the ordinations take place in the local diocese whose own bishop has been asked to ordain clergy for the Ordinariate operating within his territory and who, in so far as they will be functioning in and working with the local diocesan clergy, will from time to time come under his jurisdiction - like, for instance, ordained members of religious institutes (such as monastic orders). But is this not to misunderstand the terms of Anglicanorum Coetibus, which indicate that wherever the Ordinariate functions within the territory of the Bishops' Conference to which it belongs then, like the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Exarchate, it is its own church, not a subset of the local diocese. For sure, these are uncharted ecclesiological waters, despite the theoretical provisions of Canon Law and Ad Gentes on which Anglicanorum Coetibus is predicated. And certainly the byword is mutual support, good relations and close future working in common. But are the ordinations of the Ordinariate's clergy taking place in the Ordinariate, or in the local diocese under the tutelage of its Bishop?
The approach in other dioceses has been different. At Brentwood Bishop McMahon and at Birmingham Archbishop Longley commemorated, as the pontifical directs, "me your unworthy servant", followed by "Keith our Ordinary". This seemed happily to locate the ordinations in the communion of the Ordinariate as the particular Church concerned in its own right, at the same time as locating the Ordinariate, as the Apostolic Constitution intended, in immediate communion with the territorial Catholic diocese in which it is manifested here and there. In other words, this signifies not the dependance of the Ordinariate on the local Catholic diocese but their mutual and full communion.
Whichever practice is followed, it has to be said that in most of the cases so far it is clear that the Ordinations are for and within the Ordinariate, that functioning in a Church of another diocese does not detract from this because of this perfect communion, and that the Bishop of the Diocese where Ordinariate groups have clergy ordained to serve them is ordaining them at the request of and on behalf of the Ordinary.
But how is this communion relationship and the ecclesial reality of the Ordinariate vis-à-vis the surrounding diocese to be expressed liturgically and ecclesiologically?
Part of the problem has arisen because we translate the term for the Heads of our local, particular church as "bishop". In nearly every instance this is uncontroversial. But antistes means, for most practical Catholic purposes, "bishop", but not exclusively. It is the native Latin word for the position that a bishop holds in the Church, episcopus being a loan-word from Greek, in which it means overseer and from which the word for bishop in most languages is derived. But antistes is already a sacral term, coming from the orders of priests in Roman and Etruscan cults of the gods to describe the chief priest who stands to the fore of the body in which he performs the primary religious functions. Indeed it means that one who "stands before" (ante, not anti ("against")). The classic Latin Roman rite never adopted the Greek term, but kept to the Latin term invested with a whole culture's religious significance. It means therefore "leading" priest, or high priest, or chief priest. Clearly this encompasses the meaning and role of the bishop, even though "bishop" does not completely correspond with the hinterland of meaning to antistes.
In an interesting quirk of history, in the Swiss reformed churches at Zurich and Basel the leaders eschewed episcopal polity and thus rejected the term episcopus for their leader, it being too closely linked with Catholicism and the Pope. From 1525 the church at Zurich used the term antistes as an honorary title for their leader, Huldrych Zwingli. Not long after this, antistes or Vorsteher became an elected position, that of head of churches with synodal governance. Thus the antistes was an ordained minister elected by the city government and assigned the pastorship of one of the main churches. He was the principal representative of the local church, presided at its synod, and decided on the ordination of new ministers through exercising the responsbility of conducting theological examination. The position did not enjoy independent authority and jurisdiction (which were vested in the synods), but it could be used to exercise great influence nonetheless. In the nineteeenth century the office of antistes was replaced by the more contemporary and official-sounding "president".
But does the presence of antistes in the Roman Canon permit a commemoration of the leader of a particular Church, like the Ordinariates, who is not a bishop? Possibly; and there is precedent. At the Byzantine Exarchic Monastery of Basilian Monks at Grottaferrata near Rome, the abbot, or archimandrite, is Fr Emiliano Fabbricatore, who is not a bishop. (In fact he is described as Exarch-Ordinary.) During the anaphora of the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, he is commemorated thus (the monastery's own transliteration):
En pròtis mnìsthiti, Kyrie, tu panaghiotàtou Patròs imòn Benediktou Papa Romis, ke tou panosiotàtou Archimandrìtou imòn Emilianou ...
Among the first, remember, Lord, our most holy Father Benedict, Pope of Rome, and our most reverend archimandrite Emiliano
This is in place of the commemoration of the local bishop - because there isn't one. If, however, a bishop is present, he is indeed commemorated in the monastery out of honour (as sevasmiotàtou Episkòpou - honoured or venerable Bishop), prior (according to Church order) the priestly abbot.
Surely then, given that antistes does not need to be restricted to "bishop", which does not fully translate it, chosen as it was in preference to episcopus, it is possible to commemorate a priest who is not a bishop in the Latin eucharistic prayers with some weighty precedent from another tradition in the Church, and translate it interpretatively for practical purposes by saying in the Ordinariate and its liturgical functions, "Keith our Ordinary," just as we also render it in the dioceses as "John", or "David our Bishop".
Norwich Ordinations to the Presbyterate of the Ordinariate: Patrimonial Reflections
Wednesday 14th June at St John's Cathedral, Norwich, saw the priestly ordinations of Father David Skeoch and Father Allen Brent. The two new priests of the Catholic Church were the first ordained to the pastoral clergy of the Ordinariate since the ordinations of the former Anglican bishops. We reported on this event in Cambridge in April, along with the candidates' interesting stories of their personal pilgrimages to this point.
This time, as Fr Skeoch (who leads a small pastoral group of lay Ordinariate faithful in the Ipswich area) and Fr Brent (who will continue to focus on his academic and patristic theological work, not least at the Augustinianum, the Pontifical Lateran University, in Rome) will be assisting and working closely with priests in the parishes of the East Anglia diocese where they live, the ordination took place in the diocesan Cathedral. Most sadly, the bishop himself, Bishop Michael Evans is seriously ill with terminal cancer and so Bishop Alan Hopes, the Bishops' Conference's Episcopal Delegate for the Ordinariate, was invited to administer the sacrament of Order in his stead.
The Entrance Hymn was Praise to the Holiest, sung to Billing, the tune familiar to Catholics thanks to its official imposition by the approval of the Hierarchy of the Westminster Hymnal in 1912. We have commented extensively on this tune and the history of its alternatives in our report on the Aysleford diaconal ordinations here.
As is the custom at St John's Cathedral, extensive use was made of cantor-led responsorial music. While this remains appropriate on such occasions as pilgrimages or in parishes where musical resources and proficiency are not fully developed, this is understandable. On this occasion, a "through"-setting of the Ordinary of the Mass in Latin or English would have been within the capacity of the clergy and faithful present (indeed this the case for the Agnus Dei, which was sung in Latin to simple Gregorian chant).
An important piece of Anglican patrimony that the Ordinariate can offer to the wider Catholic community is the confidence to sing the psalms through. A congregational response to a cantored verse is not an obligatory format - the response is to foster "active participation", but this can equally be achieved by the congregation being led in the singing of the whole text, whether in full, or perhaps antiphonally, or as a dialogue of the psalm verses between cantor and people. The words and the music of responses do not always prove weighty enough to invite the participation of the people anyway, so perhaps there is a case, after 40 years of using the present Lectionary to develop the participation of the people in the singing of the Gradual Psalm in the vernacular - we do not always have to rely on hymns for this, or leave the psalms as, effectively in so many parishes, a spoken exchange not dissimilar from a reading. The psalm should always be sung and Anglicans have a track record and knowledge base of how to achieve this through many centuries. (We will leave aside the question of the Gradual Psalm in the Anglican rite, which Cranmer abolished because it was at this point in the Sarum rite that the eucharistic oblations were prepared and transferred to the altar, laden with the heavy symbolism of sacrifice that he was anxious to undermine.)
Mgr Keith Newton, Ordinary, presented his candidates for the priesthood to Bishop Alan, who then preached this homily. The Prayer of Thanksgiving for previous Anglican ministry was not offered, because it had already been used at the candidates entry to the Catholic clergy when they were ordained deacons at the Church of Our Lady and the English Martyrs, Cambridge (see our report here). During the Litany of the Saints, Our Lady was invoked as Mother of God, Seat of Wisdom and Lady of Walsingham; and, alongside the local saints like St Edmund, King and Martyr, and St Felix, Apostle of the East Angles, there were some interesting invocations reflecting the interests of the two candidates. St Lazarus recalls Fr Skeoch's membership of the Order of St Lazarus, an old order of chivalry under the Protection of His Beatitude Maximus V Laham, Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch of Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria. For some time the order has been open to ecumenical members and this is how Fr David has belonged to it and served as an Anglican chaplain within it. It is part of the story of his journey into the Catholic Church's fullness of communion. St David of Scotland is, of course, Fr Skeoch's own patron saint. Fr Allen's scholarly interests and patrons were represented by the Latin Fathers, St Augustine and St Cyprian, St Ignatius of Antioch and, of course, Blessed John Henry Newman. Fr Brent's Christian name, Allen, could be a Celtic name meaning "Rock". In Cornwal there is a St Allen's Church, but this saint was not invoked under this name. Perhaps, however, it can be identified with Cephas, St Peter the Apostle (invoked alongside St Paul), the Rock on which the Lord builds his church and with whose successor the two new priests now serve in the Catholic Church's full communion. An interesting invocation, passing almost unremarked, was of Saint Maria Goretti, an early twentieth-century girl of 11, living near Nettuno on the coast south of Rome. She died as a result of a strangling and stabbing attack (11 times) from a 20 year old neighbour whose attempts at rape she resisted, crying out that they were a mortal sin and not what God wanted. Maria could not be saved and died looking forward to being united with the Mother of God and her Son in heaven. She forgve her attacked (who according to the lights of the time was a minor and was sentenced to life in prison). Years later, thanks to the patient and redemptive ministry of the local bishop, Msgr Giovanni Blandini, and unsettling visions of the martyr in his dreams, he came to repentance and attended her canonisation in 1950. He ended his days as a Capuchin lay brother. Pope Pius XII referred to her as the St Agnes of the twentieth century, a Virgin Martyr for our times. Her resting place and shrine is in the crypt of the Basilica of Saint Mary of Graces in Nettuno. The image of Our Lady of Nettuno, St Mary of Graces, is the medieval image of Our Lady of Ipswich, second in popularity to Our Lady of Walsingham. It was rescued thanks to sailors at the destruction of the shrines under Henry VIII and came to Naples, whence it later arrived at Nettuno. The association of the image with Our Lady of Grace is the same in Nettuno as it had been in Ipswich. It shows the Mother of God, seated on a throne attending to the Christchild on her lap, an image closely related, too, to the representation of Our Lady enthroned and enthroning her Divine Son as "Seat of Wisdom", a title under which she had been invoked at the beginning of the Litany. In recent years, the pilgrimage to Our Lady of Ipswich has been revived at the medieval Anglican Church of St Mary Elms. Since 1987, with the Catholic faithful at St Pancras Church, there has been an ecumenical guild of Our Lady of Ipswich, praying for Christian Unity, which was instrumental in restoring a Shrine and setting up a new image in 2002.
Very strangely, during the Laying on of Hands by the bishop and the priests, which is directed to take place in silence, the organist improvised at length. This solemn moment of prayer and expectancy is almost the most deeply moving point, immediately prior to the prayer of consecration to priesthood, in the entire ordination rite. But, sadly, there is an assumption in some avenues of the Church music world that all gaps and liturgical actions have to be covered up with sound. But, just as a hymn would have been inappropriate at this moment and a choir anthem a distraction - there is a reason why the rite enjoins silence - the organ accompaniment was, doubtelss inadvertently, obtrusive. Not knowing how long the imposition of hands would last, there was no chance that the music could be structured, although there were occasional quotations from Veni Creator. So this was neither a composed organ voluntary, nor a designed and crafted extemporisation. Clearly the organist was doing as instructed, but with no idea of how long to play, there was no chance that the music could take form. A judiciously selected collection of pieces that can come to the rescue when there are unexpected hiatus is usually better than "organ filler" for any significant length of time, but allowing the lturgy to subside into silence as it prepares to embark on its next course is usually best, especially where silence is integral to it.
Regrettably, the clergy and faithful were not supplied with the words of Veni Creator during the investiture with the chasuble and stole, and so this was delivered by the fine cantor, Chris Duarte, who is director of music.
The Hymn in place of the Offertory chant at the Presentation of the Gifts was We pray thee, heavenly Father, upon which we have commented exhaustively here. We need only add that, according to Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology, with the publication of the English Hymnal in 1906, the author, Stuckey Coles, actually issued re-written words for verses 2-4 that he had devised for a confirmation classy at Wantage and which had been published in Hymns Ancient & Modern. The new verses, celebrating "the Catholic oblation" were obviously written when at Pusey House he felt able to much bolder in articulating explicit Catholic teaching.
During the Canon Bishop Alan commemorated "Michael our bishop", not mentioning Keith Newton as Ordinary; so, even though this question of who is commemorated in an Ordinariate litrugy taking place in the church (including the principal church) of another diocese is not settled, it seemed to reinforce the sense that the ordinations were being seen locally as an East Anglia diocesan event.
At Holy Communion the Hymn was apparently chosen by Fr Skeoch (doubtless matching the selection of Newman's Praise to the Holiest, apt for the expertise of Fr Brent): O Bread of heaven, beneath this veil. It was written in Italian by St Alphonsus Maria de Liguori (1696-1787), founder of the Redemptorists and Bishop of Sant'Agata dei Goti in the Kingdom of Naples. His Italian verses appear to have come to England through the 1830 publication in Turin of his Canzoncine Spirituali, a copy of which found its way to the London Oratory library. Translations of many of these hymns, written to excite the piety of ordinary people, especially the urban poor, were edited in a collection by Charles Coffin in 1863, Fr Edmund Vaughan (1827-1908, also a Redemptorist) supplying many of the verses, including this one, from the 1830 book in Italian. Vaughan as a translator suits St Alphonsus' hymns, as both were concerned with mission to ordinary people and especially the poor, and popular, direct, devotional preaching. This is why the hymn remais to this day one of the most popular and heartfelt Catholic eucharistic hymns. By 1912 its popularity was such that it was firmly included in the Hierarchy's only authorised collection, the Westminster Hymnal, to a tune by Henri Friedrich Hémy (1818-88), a native of Newcastler and son of a German military bandsman who came to England with the Duke of Buccleugh in 1797. He was a celebrated musician in the North East and became Professor of Music at Ushaw College, near Durham. He wrote a number of tunes for Catholic hymns, including Stella for Hail, Queen of Heaven, the ocean's star and this one, Tynemouth, for O Bread of heaven. Later Richard Terry, musical editor of the Westminster Hymnal, wrote new harmonies for Hémy's tune and this is the version in wide usage today.
At the end of the Mass, Bishop Alan, as he always does, thanked everyone who had taken part and made repeated the warm welcome he had made to the Ordinary at the beginning. Thereupon the Cathedral Dean, Fr James Walsh, went to the lectern to express the warm appreciation of the diocese to Bishop Alan for stepping in to confer the ordinations in Bishop Michael Evans' stead, whose greetings he conveyed to all assembled. He congratulated the new priest ordained to serve within the diocese, but made no mention of the Ordinariate, and there was no reference or welcome to the Ordinary. Mgr Newton then went to the lectern and thanked the Dean for the Cathdral's generosity, but went on to point out that the ordinations were to the priesthood of the Ordinariate, and that "the way it works" was that he as Ordinary had invited Bishop Alan to ordain, not the Diocese of East Anglia. That point gently and well made and hopefully understood in a warm spirit, he went on to pledge, as he had on previous occasions (especially in his excellent homily at Birmingham), the vocation of the Ordinariate as established under the provisions of Anglicanorum Coetibus to work hand in hand with the local dioceses, support their life and witness, and for its clergy to be brothers and close collaborators with their priests.
The final hymn was the increasingly popular hymn to Our Lady of Walsingham, Joy to thee, Queen within thine ancient dowry, to Herny Smart's appealing Victorian tune, Pilgrims. The hymn's provenance is hardly known. Any intelligence on its origins is eagerly sought.
Two particularly gratifying pieces of Anglican heritage now cherished in the Catholic Church, and signs of all our hopes for Church Unity and the reconciliation of all Christians, were the pectoral crosses worn by Bishop Holes and the Ordinary. Mgr Newton wore the pectoral cross in the shape of the badge of the Society of the Holy Cross, an Anglican priestly confraternity in which he had been a leading figure and which had presented with it on his episcopal ordination in the Church of England for the see of Richborough. Bishop Alan Hopes wore the pectoral cross that had belonged to Mgr Graham Leonard as Anglican Bishop of London, prior to his retirement and ordination (sub conditione) as a Catholic priest.
This time, as Fr Skeoch (who leads a small pastoral group of lay Ordinariate faithful in the Ipswich area) and Fr Brent (who will continue to focus on his academic and patristic theological work, not least at the Augustinianum, the Pontifical Lateran University, in Rome) will be assisting and working closely with priests in the parishes of the East Anglia diocese where they live, the ordination took place in the diocesan Cathedral. Most sadly, the bishop himself, Bishop Michael Evans is seriously ill with terminal cancer and so Bishop Alan Hopes, the Bishops' Conference's Episcopal Delegate for the Ordinariate, was invited to administer the sacrament of Order in his stead.
The Entrance Hymn was Praise to the Holiest, sung to Billing, the tune familiar to Catholics thanks to its official imposition by the approval of the Hierarchy of the Westminster Hymnal in 1912. We have commented extensively on this tune and the history of its alternatives in our report on the Aysleford diaconal ordinations here.
As is the custom at St John's Cathedral, extensive use was made of cantor-led responsorial music. While this remains appropriate on such occasions as pilgrimages or in parishes where musical resources and proficiency are not fully developed, this is understandable. On this occasion, a "through"-setting of the Ordinary of the Mass in Latin or English would have been within the capacity of the clergy and faithful present (indeed this the case for the Agnus Dei, which was sung in Latin to simple Gregorian chant).
An important piece of Anglican patrimony that the Ordinariate can offer to the wider Catholic community is the confidence to sing the psalms through. A congregational response to a cantored verse is not an obligatory format - the response is to foster "active participation", but this can equally be achieved by the congregation being led in the singing of the whole text, whether in full, or perhaps antiphonally, or as a dialogue of the psalm verses between cantor and people. The words and the music of responses do not always prove weighty enough to invite the participation of the people anyway, so perhaps there is a case, after 40 years of using the present Lectionary to develop the participation of the people in the singing of the Gradual Psalm in the vernacular - we do not always have to rely on hymns for this, or leave the psalms as, effectively in so many parishes, a spoken exchange not dissimilar from a reading. The psalm should always be sung and Anglicans have a track record and knowledge base of how to achieve this through many centuries. (We will leave aside the question of the Gradual Psalm in the Anglican rite, which Cranmer abolished because it was at this point in the Sarum rite that the eucharistic oblations were prepared and transferred to the altar, laden with the heavy symbolism of sacrifice that he was anxious to undermine.)
Mgr Keith Newton, Ordinary, presented his candidates for the priesthood to Bishop Alan, who then preached this homily. The Prayer of Thanksgiving for previous Anglican ministry was not offered, because it had already been used at the candidates entry to the Catholic clergy when they were ordained deacons at the Church of Our Lady and the English Martyrs, Cambridge (see our report here). During the Litany of the Saints, Our Lady was invoked as Mother of God, Seat of Wisdom and Lady of Walsingham; and, alongside the local saints like St Edmund, King and Martyr, and St Felix, Apostle of the East Angles, there were some interesting invocations reflecting the interests of the two candidates. St Lazarus recalls Fr Skeoch's membership of the Order of St Lazarus, an old order of chivalry under the Protection of His Beatitude Maximus V Laham, Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch of Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria. For some time the order has been open to ecumenical members and this is how Fr David has belonged to it and served as an Anglican chaplain within it. It is part of the story of his journey into the Catholic Church's fullness of communion. St David of Scotland is, of course, Fr Skeoch's own patron saint. Fr Allen's scholarly interests and patrons were represented by the Latin Fathers, St Augustine and St Cyprian, St Ignatius of Antioch and, of course, Blessed John Henry Newman. Fr Brent's Christian name, Allen, could be a Celtic name meaning "Rock". In Cornwal there is a St Allen's Church, but this saint was not invoked under this name. Perhaps, however, it can be identified with Cephas, St Peter the Apostle (invoked alongside St Paul), the Rock on which the Lord builds his church and with whose successor the two new priests now serve in the Catholic Church's full communion. An interesting invocation, passing almost unremarked, was of Saint Maria Goretti, an early twentieth-century girl of 11, living near Nettuno on the coast south of Rome. She died as a result of a strangling and stabbing attack (11 times) from a 20 year old neighbour whose attempts at rape she resisted, crying out that they were a mortal sin and not what God wanted. Maria could not be saved and died looking forward to being united with the Mother of God and her Son in heaven. She forgve her attacked (who according to the lights of the time was a minor and was sentenced to life in prison). Years later, thanks to the patient and redemptive ministry of the local bishop, Msgr Giovanni Blandini, and unsettling visions of the martyr in his dreams, he came to repentance and attended her canonisation in 1950. He ended his days as a Capuchin lay brother. Pope Pius XII referred to her as the St Agnes of the twentieth century, a Virgin Martyr for our times. Her resting place and shrine is in the crypt of the Basilica of Saint Mary of Graces in Nettuno. The image of Our Lady of Nettuno, St Mary of Graces, is the medieval image of Our Lady of Ipswich, second in popularity to Our Lady of Walsingham. It was rescued thanks to sailors at the destruction of the shrines under Henry VIII and came to Naples, whence it later arrived at Nettuno. The association of the image with Our Lady of Grace is the same in Nettuno as it had been in Ipswich. It shows the Mother of God, seated on a throne attending to the Christchild on her lap, an image closely related, too, to the representation of Our Lady enthroned and enthroning her Divine Son as "Seat of Wisdom", a title under which she had been invoked at the beginning of the Litany. In recent years, the pilgrimage to Our Lady of Ipswich has been revived at the medieval Anglican Church of St Mary Elms. Since 1987, with the Catholic faithful at St Pancras Church, there has been an ecumenical guild of Our Lady of Ipswich, praying for Christian Unity, which was instrumental in restoring a Shrine and setting up a new image in 2002.
Very strangely, during the Laying on of Hands by the bishop and the priests, which is directed to take place in silence, the organist improvised at length. This solemn moment of prayer and expectancy is almost the most deeply moving point, immediately prior to the prayer of consecration to priesthood, in the entire ordination rite. But, sadly, there is an assumption in some avenues of the Church music world that all gaps and liturgical actions have to be covered up with sound. But, just as a hymn would have been inappropriate at this moment and a choir anthem a distraction - there is a reason why the rite enjoins silence - the organ accompaniment was, doubtelss inadvertently, obtrusive. Not knowing how long the imposition of hands would last, there was no chance that the music could be structured, although there were occasional quotations from Veni Creator. So this was neither a composed organ voluntary, nor a designed and crafted extemporisation. Clearly the organist was doing as instructed, but with no idea of how long to play, there was no chance that the music could take form. A judiciously selected collection of pieces that can come to the rescue when there are unexpected hiatus is usually better than "organ filler" for any significant length of time, but allowing the lturgy to subside into silence as it prepares to embark on its next course is usually best, especially where silence is integral to it.
Regrettably, the clergy and faithful were not supplied with the words of Veni Creator during the investiture with the chasuble and stole, and so this was delivered by the fine cantor, Chris Duarte, who is director of music.
The Hymn in place of the Offertory chant at the Presentation of the Gifts was We pray thee, heavenly Father, upon which we have commented exhaustively here. We need only add that, according to Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology, with the publication of the English Hymnal in 1906, the author, Stuckey Coles, actually issued re-written words for verses 2-4 that he had devised for a confirmation classy at Wantage and which had been published in Hymns Ancient & Modern. The new verses, celebrating "the Catholic oblation" were obviously written when at Pusey House he felt able to much bolder in articulating explicit Catholic teaching.
During the Canon Bishop Alan commemorated "Michael our bishop", not mentioning Keith Newton as Ordinary; so, even though this question of who is commemorated in an Ordinariate litrugy taking place in the church (including the principal church) of another diocese is not settled, it seemed to reinforce the sense that the ordinations were being seen locally as an East Anglia diocesan event.
At Holy Communion the Hymn was apparently chosen by Fr Skeoch (doubtless matching the selection of Newman's Praise to the Holiest, apt for the expertise of Fr Brent): O Bread of heaven, beneath this veil. It was written in Italian by St Alphonsus Maria de Liguori (1696-1787), founder of the Redemptorists and Bishop of Sant'Agata dei Goti in the Kingdom of Naples. His Italian verses appear to have come to England through the 1830 publication in Turin of his Canzoncine Spirituali, a copy of which found its way to the London Oratory library. Translations of many of these hymns, written to excite the piety of ordinary people, especially the urban poor, were edited in a collection by Charles Coffin in 1863, Fr Edmund Vaughan (1827-1908, also a Redemptorist) supplying many of the verses, including this one, from the 1830 book in Italian. Vaughan as a translator suits St Alphonsus' hymns, as both were concerned with mission to ordinary people and especially the poor, and popular, direct, devotional preaching. This is why the hymn remais to this day one of the most popular and heartfelt Catholic eucharistic hymns. By 1912 its popularity was such that it was firmly included in the Hierarchy's only authorised collection, the Westminster Hymnal, to a tune by Henri Friedrich Hémy (1818-88), a native of Newcastler and son of a German military bandsman who came to England with the Duke of Buccleugh in 1797. He was a celebrated musician in the North East and became Professor of Music at Ushaw College, near Durham. He wrote a number of tunes for Catholic hymns, including Stella for Hail, Queen of Heaven, the ocean's star and this one, Tynemouth, for O Bread of heaven. Later Richard Terry, musical editor of the Westminster Hymnal, wrote new harmonies for Hémy's tune and this is the version in wide usage today.
At the end of the Mass, Bishop Alan, as he always does, thanked everyone who had taken part and made repeated the warm welcome he had made to the Ordinary at the beginning. Thereupon the Cathedral Dean, Fr James Walsh, went to the lectern to express the warm appreciation of the diocese to Bishop Alan for stepping in to confer the ordinations in Bishop Michael Evans' stead, whose greetings he conveyed to all assembled. He congratulated the new priest ordained to serve within the diocese, but made no mention of the Ordinariate, and there was no reference or welcome to the Ordinary. Mgr Newton then went to the lectern and thanked the Dean for the Cathdral's generosity, but went on to point out that the ordinations were to the priesthood of the Ordinariate, and that "the way it works" was that he as Ordinary had invited Bishop Alan to ordain, not the Diocese of East Anglia. That point gently and well made and hopefully understood in a warm spirit, he went on to pledge, as he had on previous occasions (especially in his excellent homily at Birmingham), the vocation of the Ordinariate as established under the provisions of Anglicanorum Coetibus to work hand in hand with the local dioceses, support their life and witness, and for its clergy to be brothers and close collaborators with their priests.
The final hymn was the increasingly popular hymn to Our Lady of Walsingham, Joy to thee, Queen within thine ancient dowry, to Herny Smart's appealing Victorian tune, Pilgrims. The hymn's provenance is hardly known. Any intelligence on its origins is eagerly sought.
Two particularly gratifying pieces of Anglican heritage now cherished in the Catholic Church, and signs of all our hopes for Church Unity and the reconciliation of all Christians, were the pectoral crosses worn by Bishop Holes and the Ordinary. Mgr Newton wore the pectoral cross in the shape of the badge of the Society of the Holy Cross, an Anglican priestly confraternity in which he had been a leading figure and which had presented with it on his episcopal ordination in the Church of England for the see of Richborough. Bishop Alan Hopes wore the pectoral cross that had belonged to Mgr Graham Leonard as Anglican Bishop of London, prior to his retirement and ordination (sub conditione) as a Catholic priest.
Birmingham Ordinations to the Presbyterate: Strengthening of the Brethren and Some Patrimonial Reflections
At Pentecost on behalf of the Ordinary of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, Archbishop Bernard Longley ordained eight new priests, many of whom were serving embryonic parish groups represented in St Chad's Cathedral in strength. As we have observed before, this congregation was not, as the stereotype of some commentators has it, ageing traditionalists obsessed with the minutiae of fussy liturgy, but honest to goodness ordinary church going people, such as you find in every parish in the land, the integrity of whose faith and discipleship had posed before them a vocation to enter into the fulness of Catholic communion, a call to which they had gladly responded. Here were people of different races and backgrounds, different ages and professions. These are the committed believers whose testimony before the world and in the Church is vital to the re-evangelisation of our society and its culture, and the wider struggle for the soul of Europe upon which Pope Benedict has focussed the mind of the Church so strongly, notably through the creation of a Catholic ordinariate for Christians of the invaluable Anglican tradition in all its variety and richness.
During the Eucharistic Prayer, Victoria was retired in order for all to sing Sanctus viii De Angelis. This was once thought to be a relatively modern composition, owing to its tuneful appeal in what sounds like a modern major key and some dissimilarities from other Gregorian masses. Some of the features of the De Angelis mass indicate a close resemblance to Jewish liturgical music, notably a Shema Yisrael from a Jewish community in South Arabia - Hear, O Israel: the Lord your God is one God. Blessed be the Name of the glory of his kingdom for ever. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might, etc., from Deuteronomy 6, that forms the centrepiece of the daily morning and evening services in teh Synagogue. The eminent lay Catholic liturgist and musicologist, Professor Laszlo Dobszay, has written compellingly of the sharing of musical cultures in the Mediterranean and near East, so it is not impossible that elements of the Missa de Angelis represent a long and healthy tradition of borrowing of musical forms and patrimony across the known world, possibly indicating too a time of closer encounter and exchange between Christians, Jews and Muslims.
Most significantly, in the Canon the Archbishop commemorated "Keith our Ordinary" as well as "me your unworthy servant", thereby recognising that while the ordinations were taking place in the Cathedral of the Archdiocese of Birmingham at the hands of its Archbishop, nonetheless they were actually taking place in the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, a particular church in its own right, albeit without physical churches of its own for the moment.
At Holy Communion, the choir sang Factus est repente, part of the Communion antiphon for the Feast of Pentecost and part of the Offertory, set to music by Gregor Aichinger (1564-1628), a priest from the Bavarian city of Regensburg who went to study music in Rome for two years from 1599, possibly under those who had themselves been students of Paletrina. Among them could have numbers Francesco Soriano (master of the Capella Giuliana at St Peter's) or Giorgino Bernardino Narnini (master of the choir of San Luigi dei Francesi). As such, he just about stands in that tradition of the Roman School, its influence in Venice and also into Germany that actually pervaded that musical assumptions in the litrugical culture of both Catholics and Protestants (see above):
The end of Mass was characterised by three glorious elements. First, the Archbishop invited us not to leave the Cathedral before we had venerated the relics of Blessed John Henry Newman in the Old Baptistery and returned thanks for the Ordinations, which he saw very much as part of the witness to the Catholic faith he had given bearing fruit in the present age. Secondary relics, including a zucchetto and a book, admittedly; but close proximity to heaven, if one truly believes in what the Incarnation and the Resurrection truly mean. Secondly, we left the altar to the stirring hymn, We have a gospel to proclaim, by Edward Joseph Burns, born in 1938 and a Anglican priest serving in the diocese of Blackburn, written in response to its bishop's call to mission after the fourfold pattern of Christ's incarnation, passion, resurrection and ascension. The tune, Fulda, is by William Gardiner (1770-1853), a composer who has the distinction of being the first person to introduce the performance of music by Beethoven to England in his native city of Leicester in 1793. A copy of Beethoven's Violin Trio in E flat (Opus 3) was among the possessions of the refugee Abbé Döbler, chaplain of the Elector of Cologne (the archbishop, whose see was really linked to membership of the Bavarian Wittlesbach royal family), who had been taken under the wing of Mrs Frances Bowater, the daughter of the Earl of Faversham, and who befriended Gardiner. Döbler and Gardiner joined together in the first English performance of the piece that year at Bowater House. In 1808 Gardiner published Sacred Melodies, a collection of tunes drawn from the music of German composers (Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn) that he set to hymns and metrical psalms as sung in chapel choirs. He thought Fulda was by Beethoven, but the tune has not been discovered in his oeuvre and is probably by Gardiner himself. The story of this tune makes it probably one of the more eccentric pieces of English worship patrimony, but it is very fine nonetheless. Third, as the procession drew near to the opened West Door, we heard the fine peal of eight bells from the Cathedral bell tower. Some cleric once wrote, in the newsletter of the Association for Latin Liturgy, that change-ringing was intrinsically Protestant because prior to this uniquely English tradition emerging after the breach with Rome, Catholic bells had been hung in a different way, swung in a different method and thus struck at a different angle. The resulting kind of sound was held thus to be "more Catholic". This kind of rot has no place in Catholic apology, but is surprisingly prevalent in different ways among all traditionalists who have no understanding that tradition of its nature develops. It is not beyond the bounds of possiblity that, had England remained in communion with the See of Rome, change-ringing would have grown up in the towers of churches across the land anyway. All the same, it is nothing other than a sheer delight that this characteristically English and joyous custom took hold in the Catholic Church long ago - there is a fair number of towers in Catholic Churches in England that boast a peal of bells for ringing the changes. The full eight bells have been at St Chad's since Easter 1877 and the only sadness in hearing them ring this Pentecost was that, because of a whole day of driving rain, it was impossible for the congregation to spill out onto the large pavement to glory in the praise they were offering.
Mgr Newton and Archbishop Longley were joined by Bishop Mark Jabalé OSB, retired bishop of Menevia and sometime Abbot of Belmot, along with 30 other priests, many of whom were supporters from the clergy of the archdiocese of Birmingham. These included Mgr Canon John Moran, Vicar General of the Birmingham archdiocese, Mgr Andrew Burnham of the Ordinariate, and Canon Gerry Breen, Dean of the Cathedral. The League was represented by Fr Mark Woodruff (Director). Serving alongside Birmingham deacons during the Liturgy was one of the Ordinariate's two "transitional" deacons, the Revd Daniel Lloyd. The first two new Catholic priests to be ordained were old friends of the League through Fr Mark. Fr Richard Smith and Fr Mark have made a retreat or pilgrimage to Belgium almost every year in the last 20 in the hope of Catholic Christian Unity, at first to the Abbey of St Andrew at Zevenkerken near Bruges, and more recently to the Beguinage in Bruges on the Catholic League's annual pilgrimage for Christian Unity. In 2010 Fr Richard celebrated his Golden Jubilee in the priesthood of the Church of England, throughout which he has lived, served and witnessed to the Catholic Faith. This included several years as a missionary in Guyana and long service as a representative of the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, founded in 1701 and Anglicanism's longest established overseas mission agency. As vicar of Eye, Suffolk, he succeeded Canon Donald Rea, who had been chairman of the Anglican Confraternity of Unity, founded in 1926 "to restore union with the Holy See (like the League), and who had been befriended by Pope John XXIII. The remarkable story is that in June 1959 the Pope noticed that the Anglican Canon, in a private audience, was carrying a Latin Roman Breviary. He told the priest who was interpreting for them, "That book of his looks a bit old. Mine is not so new. but it's newer than his. I will give it to him." Next day the four volumes of the Pope's breviary arrived, with the markers where the Pope had finished his office on the feast of the Sacred Heart, and containing his family memorial cards, including one for his father. On the cover of the black volumes were the arms of the Cardinal Patriarch of Venice.
Writing in Reunion, the Confraternity's journal, Canon Rea quoted Pope John on the delicate subject of church unity (thanks to this report in Time Magazine online). "In working for reunion," Pope John had said, "it is necessary (1) to be very meek and humble, (2) to be patient and know how to wait God's hour, and (3) to insist on positive arguments, leaving aside for the moment those elements on which we differ, and to avoid discussions that may offend against the virtue of charity."
Father Richard ensured that the volumes were safely deposited at the Lambeth Palace Library as a testimony of the work of Anglo-Papalists to bring about Catholic-Anglican unity from the beginning of the modern ecumenical age, and also of the desire in the Pope for reconciliation between Christians.
It was a special joy for Fr Mark, too, to be present at the ordination of Fr John Pitchford, who until 1991 was his predecessor as vicar of St Peter's, Grange Park, Winchmore Hill in north London. St Peter's has the distinction of being the only Church whose construction was authorised and completed during the Second World War. It was made out of materials from bombed out churches and was intended as a morale-booster, set as the church at the heart of a new garden-suburban development on the outskirts of the metropolis. Many of the furnishings came from bombed, demolished or disused churches too - the font from St Catherine Coleman in the city, a lectern from St Peter's Eaton Square's vicarage chapel, pews from St Stephen's Bow. During Fr Mark's tenure, the ornate tabernacle depicting the pelican in her piety from St Ethelburga's Bishopsgate, bombed by the IRA, was installed in a fitting new home in the centre of the sanctuary at St Peter's, for ever after to point to the Church's faith in the eucharist. Fr Pitchford is an author in the service of the Church. To navigate the labyrinth of regulations and to promote good practice in parish administration, he wrote for Anglican lay people An ABC for the PCC. In 1991 he brought out Daily with God, a personal prayer book for Anglicans and Roman Catholics, to enhance with additional resources for personal and corporate devotion the provisions of both churches' Litrugy of the Hours.
We also wish the other priests who were ordained every good wish and offer our prayers for this new chapter in their ministry: Fr John Lungley, Fr Paul Burch, Fr Christopher Marshall, Fr Matthew Pittam, Fr David Mawson, and Fr Paul Berrett.
The Entrance Hymn was Love of the Father, Love of God the Son, a hymn to the Holy Spirit from the 12th century (Amor Patris et Filii), mediated to the Church of this age and the hymnody of the vernacular liturgy by the poet Robert Bridges OM, Poet Laureate from 1913, the only physician to hold this distinction. His poems are noted for the power that comes from their economy of expression. At Oxford he was a friend of Gerard Manley Hopkins and it is thanks to Bridges, who saw to the posthumous publication of the Jesuit's work, that Hopkins' fame as a poet grew in public and critical estimation. Bridges' own verse was admired by composers, especialy Gustav Holst, Sir Hubert Parry, and Gerard Finzi. His numerous hymns and translations were issued in the Yattendon Hymnal of 1899, named after his retreat in retirement to Berkshire. Among his verses are many still in use today: the German Passiontide chorale (now through the Bach harmonisation of its tune), Ah, holy Jesu, how hast thou offended?, All my hope on God is founded (a translation of Luther's great Reformation hymn, Ein' Feste Burg), O gladsome light (Phos Hilaron from Byzantine vespers), and O sacred Head, sore wounded (another German hymn, famed for its tune, the so-called Passion Chorale). He also translated Latin Catholic hymns, such Office hymns and those of Charles Coffin. His work comes at a period when a number of scholarly English Christians had been raiding the treasuries of all the Christian traditions to re-create them for the adornment of English worship, not least the Church of England's Prayer Book Liturgy. Bridges thus stands among John Mason Neale, George Ratcliffe Woodward (father of the modern Christmas carol), Sir Henry Baker, John Brownlie (a Free Church of Scotland translator of Greek hymns), the Revd John Chandler (Anglican translator of Latin hymns, such as On Jordan's bank the Baptist's cry), Percy Dearmer (Anglican priest-liturgist and main editor of the English Hymnal), Thomas Alexander Lacey (a hard-working Anglo-Catholic vicar-cum-journalist-cum-open-air-preacher, who translated office and Eastern hymns for the English Hymnal), Athelstan Riley (more office hymns, although he is better known for his own Ye watchers and ye holy ones) and Catherine Winkworth (the translator of hundreds of German chorales, the most famous being Now thank we all our God and Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of creation). Some of these hymns will be known to Catholics in different translations, but it is all the more important that the Ordinariate maintains the versions it has received from the Anglican tradition, partly for their own sake and partly because this rich store of hymns from all parts of Christendom and the history of worship is itself testament to an otherwise hidden facet to Anglican patrimony, the creativity of its acquisitiveness as it worked to enhance worship with "the beauty of holiness".
The tune of Love of the Father is Song 22 by Orlando Gibbons, gentleman and then organist of the Chapel Royal (also a secular court musician) under James I in the early 17th century. He is thus a successor of Tallis and Byrd, but at some distance, and an Anglican Protestant. But he does develop the form and tradition of the English anthem set on its way by Tallis, especially its development into the verse anthem form. Song 22 comes from the Hymnes and Songs of the Church of 1623 and is the tune for the metrical version of the Prayer of Hezekiah (Isaiah 38). This pure piece of Anglican patrimony has already been absorbed in the English worship of the Catholic Church (see The Catholic Hymnbook of 1998).
By the same token, Victoria's Missa O Quam Gloriosam has been a regular feature in Anglican cathedrals, other large churches with choirs and college choir repertoires for several generations. Tomas Luis da Victoria was born in the province of Avila, Castile in 1548 and sent by Philip II to be cantor of the Collegium Germanicum founded by St Ignatius of Loyola in Rome. It may well be that he studied under Palestrina and he counts as one of the three great Catholic composers of the Counter-Reformation, alongside Palestrina and the Franco-Fleming from Mons, Orlande de Lassus. Not only was his music thus forged in the context of the Catholic Church reforming itself partly in response to the challenges of the Reformation, it also stands in a musical process of development that would later come to influence, through Andrea and Giovanni Gabrielli, the Protestant composers Hans Leo Hassler, Heinrich Schütz and thus the great musical theologian of Lutheranism, John Sebastian Bach. Again, we see how entwined the Anglican and Catholic liturgical and musical patrimonies truly are; as Pope Paul VI remarked of Anglicans and Catholics, they share a "communion of origins".
The Golden Sequence for Pentecost, Veni Sancte Spiritus, was sung in Latin to its beautiful Gregorian melody. Sadly we did not have the words, although it would have been well within the capability of many present to render it faithfully.
After the Ordinary presented his candidates to the Archbishop for Election, it fell to Mgr Newton to preach. The text is available on the Ordinariate Portal. Towards the end, he paid tribute to the support of the Archbishop, the clergy and people of the archdiocese and pledged the support of the Ordinariate clergy to the diocese in return. After all, the Ordinariate is not supposed to be a separate church in its own right, but a church in its own right that works with and lends strength to the other churches. As very much a papal initiative for responding to a special phenomenon in Britain, it especially realises the successor of Peter's duty to "strengthen the brethren", not least because as it has received so much strength and support already from the existing Catholic community in the country.
The Prayer of Thanksgiving for previous Anglican ministry was not offered, having already been made at the diaconal ordinations at Oscott College the previous Monday. During the Laying on of Hands by all the priests present and the Ordination Prayer itself, the deep sense of silence and expectancy among the faithful made a great impression. For the Promise of Obedience, the Anointing and the Presentation of the Eucharistic Gifts and Vessels, each candidate had to ascend the seven fairly steep steps to the archbishop's stool. This challenge was firmly overcome by even the more elderly priests, although it was clear the Cathedral had been reordered without thought to the details of the rite of ordination, or kneeling for confirmation or Holy Communion. For the laying on of hands and the Ordination prayer, as we have observed before, the candidates were missing an essential element of Anglican patrimony: the hassock.
The hymn Veni Creator Spiritus was sung in its entirety in Latin during the investiture with the chasuble, thus immediaely and aptly prior to the anointing. Again, no text was furnished, so those who had not mastered the memory of the classical text were unable to join in.
At the Offertory, the excellent choir sang Confirma hoc, Deus, Byrd's setting of the Offertory chant of the day from Book II of the Gradualia of 1607:
God, strengthen what you have wrought in us. For the sake of your Temple that is in Jerusalem, kings shall offer gifts to you, alleluia.It was gratifying to see a part of England's native Catholic patrimony, created for singing at clandestine Masses in penal times in England at some risk, sung at exactly its own place in the Liturgy. Now these pieces by Byrd and Tallis are shared by English Catholics and Anglicans, especially through the magnificent Anglican choral tradition in its cathedrals.
During the Eucharistic Prayer, Victoria was retired in order for all to sing Sanctus viii De Angelis. This was once thought to be a relatively modern composition, owing to its tuneful appeal in what sounds like a modern major key and some dissimilarities from other Gregorian masses. Some of the features of the De Angelis mass indicate a close resemblance to Jewish liturgical music, notably a Shema Yisrael from a Jewish community in South Arabia - Hear, O Israel: the Lord your God is one God. Blessed be the Name of the glory of his kingdom for ever. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might, etc., from Deuteronomy 6, that forms the centrepiece of the daily morning and evening services in teh Synagogue. The eminent lay Catholic liturgist and musicologist, Professor Laszlo Dobszay, has written compellingly of the sharing of musical cultures in the Mediterranean and near East, so it is not impossible that elements of the Missa de Angelis represent a long and healthy tradition of borrowing of musical forms and patrimony across the known world, possibly indicating too a time of closer encounter and exchange between Christians, Jews and Muslims.
Most significantly, in the Canon the Archbishop commemorated "Keith our Ordinary" as well as "me your unworthy servant", thereby recognising that while the ordinations were taking place in the Cathedral of the Archdiocese of Birmingham at the hands of its Archbishop, nonetheless they were actually taking place in the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, a particular church in its own right, albeit without physical churches of its own for the moment.
At Holy Communion, the choir sang Factus est repente, part of the Communion antiphon for the Feast of Pentecost and part of the Offertory, set to music by Gregor Aichinger (1564-1628), a priest from the Bavarian city of Regensburg who went to study music in Rome for two years from 1599, possibly under those who had themselves been students of Paletrina. Among them could have numbers Francesco Soriano (master of the Capella Giuliana at St Peter's) or Giorgino Bernardino Narnini (master of the choir of San Luigi dei Francesi). As such, he just about stands in that tradition of the Roman School, its influence in Venice and also into Germany that actually pervaded that musical assumptions in the litrugical culture of both Catholics and Protestants (see above):
Suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind. God, confirm what you have wrought in us, from your holy Temple that is in Jerusalem.This was followed by Come down, O love divine by Bianco da Siena (who died in 1434), translated by Richard Frederick Littledale. Littledale was a fellow priest and collaborator with John Mason Neale in the translation of Greek and Latin hymns and liturgical prayers, and a four-volume commentary on the psalms. He had been a scholar (i.e. fellow) of Trinity College, Dublin, and in 1888 brought out A Short History of the Council of Trent, which is complimentary of the role of the Jesuits in the implementation of many of the positive reforms it ordained. Thus Littledale represents that strong and long-standing element within Anglo-Catholic scholarly circles of past ages that oriented itself not so much Romewards as placed the Church of England within the swim of the wider Church and its life and history. These are important foundations for Anglo-Catholicism, but also for Anglican-Catholic efforts during the last two centuries towards the recovery of unity through an awareness of the communio of the whole Body of Christ, the Church. What they created and left behind is thus a determining factor in the nature and ongoing relevance of an Anglican patrimony, both within Anglicanism and in the communion of the Catholic Church. Bianco da Siena was a poet and mystic, a disciple of Blessed Giovanni Colombini, founder of the Gesuati, a Sienese order said to resemble the Franciscans in their original days, having an intense devotion to the Name of Jesus (it decayed and was evntually suppressed by Pope Clement IX in 1668). The tune is the perfectly crafted Down Ampney, specially written by Ralph Vaughan Williams, musical editor of the English Hymnal in 1906, to fit the deeply moving words, which are in such an uncommon metre for hymns that few tunes existed to match it and none available really worked. Down Ampney, however, has formed an indissoluble marriage with the words in almost all English-speaking worship traditions. It is named after a village in the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire that was Vaughan Williams' birthplace. The son of its vicar, Vaughan Williams was immersed in the musical and religious language of his origins; but despite his masterwork of the English Hymnal's music (and many other pieces of sacred and religious music), perhaps shaped by his enduringly dark experience from the Great War (there is often an air of menace or darkness behind the music of this supposedly "quintessentially English", pastoral composer) his attitude to religion was as "an atheist ... who drifted into a cheerful agnosticism", according to his second wife, Ursula. This is a difficult part of the English hymn tradition to form part of the Ordinariate's patrimony (besides, it is already a part of the musical culture of the Catholic Church), because it matters that sacred music expressed the faith of the composer. Of course, anything can be sanctified and drawn into God's service - after all, the music of this tune has affected and moved generations of Christians at their confirmation, at Pentecost, at ordinations. But perhaps it is not so far from what the Ordinariate is supposed to be about when we recall that Vaughan Williams and his beautiful and outstanding body of music came to see the Christian religion not as a set of propositions but as some kind of reliable journey. Indeed in his The Pilgrim's Progress he renamed John Bunyan's hero from Christian to Pilgrim. This is a perspective that it is well to bear in mind if we are about the re-evangelisation of culture and the struggle for the soul of Europe.
The end of Mass was characterised by three glorious elements. First, the Archbishop invited us not to leave the Cathedral before we had venerated the relics of Blessed John Henry Newman in the Old Baptistery and returned thanks for the Ordinations, which he saw very much as part of the witness to the Catholic faith he had given bearing fruit in the present age. Secondary relics, including a zucchetto and a book, admittedly; but close proximity to heaven, if one truly believes in what the Incarnation and the Resurrection truly mean. Secondly, we left the altar to the stirring hymn, We have a gospel to proclaim, by Edward Joseph Burns, born in 1938 and a Anglican priest serving in the diocese of Blackburn, written in response to its bishop's call to mission after the fourfold pattern of Christ's incarnation, passion, resurrection and ascension. The tune, Fulda, is by William Gardiner (1770-1853), a composer who has the distinction of being the first person to introduce the performance of music by Beethoven to England in his native city of Leicester in 1793. A copy of Beethoven's Violin Trio in E flat (Opus 3) was among the possessions of the refugee Abbé Döbler, chaplain of the Elector of Cologne (the archbishop, whose see was really linked to membership of the Bavarian Wittlesbach royal family), who had been taken under the wing of Mrs Frances Bowater, the daughter of the Earl of Faversham, and who befriended Gardiner. Döbler and Gardiner joined together in the first English performance of the piece that year at Bowater House. In 1808 Gardiner published Sacred Melodies, a collection of tunes drawn from the music of German composers (Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn) that he set to hymns and metrical psalms as sung in chapel choirs. He thought Fulda was by Beethoven, but the tune has not been discovered in his oeuvre and is probably by Gardiner himself. The story of this tune makes it probably one of the more eccentric pieces of English worship patrimony, but it is very fine nonetheless. Third, as the procession drew near to the opened West Door, we heard the fine peal of eight bells from the Cathedral bell tower. Some cleric once wrote, in the newsletter of the Association for Latin Liturgy, that change-ringing was intrinsically Protestant because prior to this uniquely English tradition emerging after the breach with Rome, Catholic bells had been hung in a different way, swung in a different method and thus struck at a different angle. The resulting kind of sound was held thus to be "more Catholic". This kind of rot has no place in Catholic apology, but is surprisingly prevalent in different ways among all traditionalists who have no understanding that tradition of its nature develops. It is not beyond the bounds of possiblity that, had England remained in communion with the See of Rome, change-ringing would have grown up in the towers of churches across the land anyway. All the same, it is nothing other than a sheer delight that this characteristically English and joyous custom took hold in the Catholic Church long ago - there is a fair number of towers in Catholic Churches in England that boast a peal of bells for ringing the changes. The full eight bells have been at St Chad's since Easter 1877 and the only sadness in hearing them ring this Pentecost was that, because of a whole day of driving rain, it was impossible for the congregation to spill out onto the large pavement to glory in the praise they were offering.
Thursday, 23 June 2011
Is the Ordinariate for You? An Ecumenical Response
In March, the Anglican Association published the pamphlet, Is the Ordinariate for You? Some considerations for thoughtful Anglicans about the Ordinariate Proposals contained in and offered by "Anglicanorum Coetibus".
It represents a missed opportunity to make a positive case for Anglicanism and especialy the Church of England - its belief, polity and patrimony - in the reality of a new situation which has utterly pervaded its life and direction from now on. Thankfully at ARCIC III, Anglicans and Catholics together, mandated by their respective authorities, are addressing these questions as, 50 or so years on, the dialogue towards unity has run so deep, that the true natures of our Chuches' respective identities and different theological perspectives and beliefs are at last revealed. As Cardinal Kasper once observed, echoing the Decree on Ecumenism, now that we see more clearly where the other stands, and express more profoundly and clearly where we ourselves stand, the dialogue towards unity can begin again in earnest.
Sadly, given these immense and hopeful opportunities for reconciliation in visible unity - and common life and collaboration in the meantime -, Is the Ordinariate for You? has nothing to offer for the task in hand. Instead it is an exercise in presenting Catholicism and Anglicanism as rivals with competing claims. And in failing to make a positive case for Anglicanism, especially the assertion of an orthodox Classic Anglican theological position and a survey of its distinctive historic, religious, theological and litrugical patrimony, it can only define its Anglicanism in terms of the Catholicism it is rejecting.
This is fundamentally a Protestant starting point, but not one that members of the Free Churches and many Anglican Evangelicals now in the end share, ever since the age of ecumenism dawned. If this essay is the presentation by proud, confessing Anglicans that their Church is the best of all, then it falls short and deprives the other Churches ecumenically of a potentially valuable reflection. Instead, if it is the assertion of an old Anglican High Church conviction that the Anglican Church is "Catholic but Reformed", it makes no other case than that it is actually "Reformed but with Catholic features". Yet this sense of contrast and confrontation is not the spirit into which the Catholic Church enters into dialogue with the Anglican Communion in the present age, as both seek to enter more deeply into the mystery of the Church where they are (as the Pope once said of ecumenical work) and thus their deeper unity in Christ.
The integrity of Anglican church life and belief as they have now developed deserve a better Apologetic in the field of ecumenical encounter and dialogue than can be taken from the Anglican Association. Here is the Catholic League's Ecumenical Response.
It represents a missed opportunity to make a positive case for Anglicanism and especialy the Church of England - its belief, polity and patrimony - in the reality of a new situation which has utterly pervaded its life and direction from now on. Thankfully at ARCIC III, Anglicans and Catholics together, mandated by their respective authorities, are addressing these questions as, 50 or so years on, the dialogue towards unity has run so deep, that the true natures of our Chuches' respective identities and different theological perspectives and beliefs are at last revealed. As Cardinal Kasper once observed, echoing the Decree on Ecumenism, now that we see more clearly where the other stands, and express more profoundly and clearly where we ourselves stand, the dialogue towards unity can begin again in earnest.
Sadly, given these immense and hopeful opportunities for reconciliation in visible unity - and common life and collaboration in the meantime -, Is the Ordinariate for You? has nothing to offer for the task in hand. Instead it is an exercise in presenting Catholicism and Anglicanism as rivals with competing claims. And in failing to make a positive case for Anglicanism, especially the assertion of an orthodox Classic Anglican theological position and a survey of its distinctive historic, religious, theological and litrugical patrimony, it can only define its Anglicanism in terms of the Catholicism it is rejecting.
This is fundamentally a Protestant starting point, but not one that members of the Free Churches and many Anglican Evangelicals now in the end share, ever since the age of ecumenism dawned. If this essay is the presentation by proud, confessing Anglicans that their Church is the best of all, then it falls short and deprives the other Churches ecumenically of a potentially valuable reflection. Instead, if it is the assertion of an old Anglican High Church conviction that the Anglican Church is "Catholic but Reformed", it makes no other case than that it is actually "Reformed but with Catholic features". Yet this sense of contrast and confrontation is not the spirit into which the Catholic Church enters into dialogue with the Anglican Communion in the present age, as both seek to enter more deeply into the mystery of the Church where they are (as the Pope once said of ecumenical work) and thus their deeper unity in Christ.
The integrity of Anglican church life and belief as they have now developed deserve a better Apologetic in the field of ecumenical encounter and dialogue than can be taken from the Anglican Association. Here is the Catholic League's Ecumenical Response.
Aylesford Diaconal Ordinations: W. H. Monk, Patrimony, Plainchant and Hymns
As we are just in receipt of this Order of Service, we have a chance to comment on some of its features as they resonate with an Anglican patrimony. (We have already written in some depth of the priestly ordinations for the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham that took place in the territory of the archdiocese of Southwark, and some of the features occured at other subsequent ordinations and we have already commented on them (q.v.) - follow the links.)
The Ordination Liturgy began with the Regina Caeli, sung in the form known throughout the Anglican Catholic world, the metrical verse, Joy to thee, O Queen of Heaven. It seems to be unfamiliar to current Catholic usage. Where the Regina Caeli is sung at all, it tends to be in Latin to the Gregorian tune or in English to a modern melody. So Joy to thee is assumed to be of Anglo-Catholic provenance. But there it is at no. 263a of the Westminster Hymnal of 1939 (but not that of 1912) with the Imprimatur of E Morrogh Bernard, Vicar General of the Westminster diocese. Incidentally, Bishop David Mathew writes of vernacular hymns sung outside the Liturgy in the Preface of "the homely Catholic services in the last fifty years, with their loud and draughty singing".
That Joy to thee is an English metrical version of the Regina Caeli Easter Marian antiphon served to popularise it in Anglicanism and win it a readier acceptance in a communion that had for centuries eschewed direct invocation of the saints in its worship (other than in the Benedicite and the Benedictus and even there not for intercessory purposes). It seems not to be in current Catholic usage, but it has remained much loved in Anglican churches with a leaning towards the Catholic tradition, not least those that are strongly attached to the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. The benefit of a strophic verse in the vernacular and a familiar hymn-tune mean, however, that some Anglicans were able to keep this flag flying and their heirs were proud to wave it at Aylesford.
The name of the translator, as with a lot of "hymns doing duty" of this age, is not immediately known. Any reader who can shed light on his or her identity would be doing liturgical and hymnographical history a service by sharing their intelligence. The usual melody is the same as that used for the great hymn of Easter morning, Jesus Christ is risen today, verses based on the 14th century hymn Surrexit Christus hodie and included in the Lyra Davidica of 1708. Subsequently Charles Welsey elaborated on these verses, but we do not know for certain who was their originator. The emergence of the exhilarating tune, ranging from middle C to top E (a range exceeded rarely for congregational singing - even Hark! the Herald Angels sing, with its two top Es at the last couplet in the verse and the beginning of the chorus too, eases the range by go down no further than D), seems to be contemporary with the emergence of the English words at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It is possible that it set an eight-line hymn, setting the tune that we sing to the Alleluias to seven syllables as for the lines in the rest of the verses (and some parts of the Church use it for singing thus to At the Lamb's high feast we sing). But we know the tune to a version arranged by William Henry Monk, editor of the essentially Anglo-Catholic Hymns Ancient and Modern - a true bearer of Anglican patrimony.
Its fair to say that, here, Anglican patrimony is best seen (as with the rest of the Church's tradition) not as something static or there to be harvested from the past, but as a living and ever progressing phenomenon. Depending on how you look at it, this patrimony reinvents itself for the age and stage which it finds itself addressing, or it is an instance of the organic development of the great Tradition itself, according to its gifts, its lights, its times. Monk was something of a prodigy. Soon seen as a gifted composer and keyboard performer, by 18 he was organist of St Peter's Eaton Square in Belgravia, close to Buckingham Palace, which partly stands in its parish. Two years later in 1843 he was organist of the more confidently aristocratic St George's Albermarle Street (now only dimly recalled by the St George's Hotel which stands on its site and which until only recently retained its identity as the still just about smart back entrance to Brown's), before moving even more loftily in 1845 to St Paul's Portman Square, a proprietary chapel for the Portman family's fashionable property speculation that grew out of a goat's milk farm holding they presciently secured in the reign of Queen Mary I and which they retain to this day. Another two years, and William was off again, this time to be choirmaster and then organist of King' College in the Strand.
A five year stint there enabled him to institute some changes to the worship, prompted by William Dyce, the eminent Pre-Raphaelite painter, frescoist (notably in the Robing Room of the Palace of Westminster) and art and design theorist, who was Professor of Fine Arts at King's at the time. A man of formidable learning in a range of fields, Dyce (1806-1864) was a gifted organist, passionate about sacred music of the highest artistic merit. In 1841 he had founded the Motett Society to promote the revival of "early music" and in 1843 published a noted version of the Book of Common Prayer, with an essay on Gregorian chant and its adaptation to English texts. Think of this taking place in the same period as the growing popularisation of Bach's choral and organ works, Samuel Wesley and Vincent Novello promoting the liturgical music of other masters from Palestrina to Mozart, the decay of the measured method of executing plainchant that had held sway since the sixteenth century and was still the "working assumption" for Catholic and Anglican musicians in England alike. For example, Samuel Webbe the elder, 1740-1816, famed organist of the Sardinian Embassy Chapel, includes in his Essay on the Church Plain Chant such tunes as Veni Sancte Spiritus for the Golden Sequence, indicating how "plainchant" was seen rhythmically and melodically (and indeed modally) at the time. Consider too Giovanni Guidetti's Directorium Chori of 1582 - known to Anglicans as the source of the tune Aeterna Christi Munera, with its slightly freer but nevertheless measured rhythm and its setting effectively in F major rather than its native Mode 7 - was regarded by Sir John Stainer as an authoritative source for "the Ancient Plain-Song" in his Cathedral Prayer Book of 1891.
But think too of the fervour of Cardinal Wiseman and a new generation of Catholic musicians about to convince the First Synod of Westminster in 1852 that plainchant was the ideal form of church music. 1848 saw the publication of the Mechlin Gradual (Mechlin is Malines, or modern-day Mechelen in Flanders, see city of the Belgian primate. The illustrious Cardinal Mercier hosted the famous Malines Conversations in 1921-25 at which the idea of corporate reunion became part of the ecumenical DNA and the concept of the Anglican Church "united not absorbed" was imagined by Dom Lambert Beauduin, founder of the classical Liturgical Movement, also at the instigation of Cardinal Mercier in 1907). The Mechlin Gradual presented plainchant in a more accessible way for choirs; it also tried to recover the modality of medieval chant from the conventions of major and minor, as well as some of its lightness and speed. But it still reproduced the truncation of melodies that had been going on since the sixteenth century for "ease" of execution and it followed the tradition of reworking the text and music to align the word and musical accents. It was only a halfway step towards a distinctive type of rhythm for plainchant that could mark it out from the metres and theory of more recent classical sacred music and that enable it to be sung more freely and swiftly. Indeed it was already seen as a debased for of the chant, for all its influence throughout the rest of the nineteenth century and beyond (it was founded on the 1614 codification of the Graduale Romanum by Raimondi of the Medicean Press in Rome, revered because it was believed to be the work of the inspired Palestrina, which was not the case). From 1883 Dom Prosper Guéranger and his monks at the newly refounded Abbey at Solesmes had been working on recovering plainchant - the Gregorian restoration - from its best, most venerable and musicologically reliable sources, although the first fruits were not to be published for external dissemination until 1864.
Here we have two impulses in the drive to restore plainchant in Catholic circles. The first sees plainchant as essentially the same as other kinds of music - ancient and venerable in origin but forming part of the same body of music familiar in the London chapels and (for instance) the northern parishes where choral composing in classical styles was rich and vibrant in its own right, as well as attuned to the movement to emulate the style of Renaissance polyphony. So the harmonising is contemporary with classical and early Victorian tastes, and non-strophic texts (e.g. psalm and canticle verses, or antiphons) are sung slowly to fit more easily a metrical accompaniment. The second impulse is to set plainchant as a genre of music in its own right, with its own rhythmic culture, modality and pre-eminence as the musical vehicle for the offering of the Latin Roman rite's liturgy. This has been described as Ultramontane, but it is borne in the period of monastic renewal following the restoration of the Catholic Church in its integrity in France after a history of Neo-Gallicanism since the seventeenth century (in which about half of dioceses obeserved their own semi-invented rites), the Revolution that proscribed public worship and the uncertain restoration of a mix of the Roman and various diocesan rites. Guéranger wanted the Catholics of France to cleave no longer to a romantic idea of an independent national Catholic Church, not only because the invented rites drew on a misreading of the medieval sources from which they had been drawn, but because he wanted all the Catholic Church to recover its unity and identity in a rediscovery and a re-reception (as we might say today) of its own tradition. This meant an absolute fidelity to the Roman rite for the sake of the unity and cohesion of the Church at a time of both renewal and direct challenge. Wiseman, for his part, did not want the emancipated Catholic Church in England that he led to be stuck in the past that had seen it through harsh times in isolation, but to reconnect with the wider Catholic Church at a time of spiritual, liturgical, pastoral, monastic and evangelistic renewal. For both, in different ways, a distinctive plainchant, newly re-invigorated, would signal the Church's unbreakable solidarity, its loyalty to Rome as the keystone to Catholic unity and identity (Pius IX approved the Mechlin Gradual when it came out and it would not be until 1903 that Pope Pius X was finally free to assign the custody of the Roman rite's chant to the monks of Solesmes).
The perspective of Anglicans was slightly different. It is a mistake, such as many have made, to view the recovery of plainsong in England solely through Anglican eyes and its role in the revival of the religious life (notably at Cowley with the Society of St John the Evangelist for man and Wantage with the Community of St Mary the Virgin for women; the name of the Revd George Herbert Palmer is significant for both - he was organist for the former and his adaptations published by the latter). At this period, Anglican interest in plainchant is not motivated by Ultramontane concerns to demonstrate the unity of the Catholic Church through the use of the Roman rite in music restored to its pre-eminent form and condition. The old Roman sources (the Medicean Graduale Romanum, Guidetti's Directorium, the Mechlin book, etc) are taken as authorities for some of the "Ancient" features of, for instance, Monk's Hymns Ancient and Modern, but Anglican scholarship is looking (as the Neo-Gallicans had done) at the treasures of the Sarum rite in search of a something distinctively English by which the Church of England, newly confronted with the questions as to its authenticity and integrity by Newman and the Tractarians, could account for itseld and assert its claims by retracing steps to some different historical roots rather than in terms of identification with the wider tradition as it was trying to recover itself. Of course, the objective that Dyce was articulating as an Anglican was to re-appropriate from this "ancient tradition", for all the imperfections with which it had been transmitted up to then, chant that could be sung to the English Liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer.
But when Monk became music editor of Hymns Ancient & Modern in 1857 the assumptions about plainchant - even in an English form - were a mix of the old, slow and measured style (no wonder the creativity of the nineteenth century supplanted it with new hymntunes - e.g. Webbe's Melcombe - known to Anglicans as the tune for New every morning, but it was possibly written for a Vespers office hymn at the Sardinian or Portuguese Embassy chapel, and St Thomas, written as a "Motett", probably for Tantum Ergo at Benediction or an Offertory. It is no wonder Anglo-Catholics picked up on this use of the tunes), with the freer style of the Mechlin Gradual and with the resurrection of Sarum tunes and versions of Gregorian melodies, yet rendered in the same styles (for heavily measured choral settings of plainchant hymn melodies, see Hymns Ancient & Modern Standard, Nos. 1 and 2, with their "Proper Sarum Melody". The 1924 version has freer accompaniments for the chant tunes. Compare the measured (and choral) setting of the Mechlin O Salutaris tune with its freer alternative at No. 311).
Thus Dyce and Monk deserve some credit for giving to Anglican worship two things. First a way of singing some of the chant of the historic Ecclesia Anglicana in a more systematic and dynamic way that had been conceivable before. Secondly they inaugurated a developed tradition and expertise for singing Gregorian chant in English that grew in popularity among aspirational clergy and their congregations desirious of demonstrating, for evangelistic, apologetical and eventually ecumenical purposes, the Catholic origins and identity of their Church and its liturgical life. This took root in the revival of religious life; it was alive to developments in Catholic liturgical performance and research; it was founded in the highest scholarly research in liturgy and hymography (the names of Frank Edward Brightman and John Mason Neale came to be outstanding in these fields respectively); and was scrupulous in its adherence to the principles of Solesmes. Illustrious figures include Francis Burgess of the Gregorian Association, George Herbert Palmer, Bishop Walter Frere CR and Sir John Stainer at the Plainsong & Medieval Music Society, and J H Arnold (whose peerless settings of the Sarum hymns populate that 1930 edition of the English Hymnal) through the later nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. One of the things that the Catholic Anglophone world has found it difficult to do is to develop a musical language for the reformed Roman rite in the vernacular that is faithful to and drinks deep from its own tradition, so relatively recently recovered. But Anglicanism offers a tradition of singing Gregorian chant in England that even predates the abolition of the Sarum rite and waxed and waned since Merbecke set the First Prayer Book and adaptations of chants survived even beyond the Commonwealth's disruption; it also painstakingly recreated this patrimony and for well over a hundred years has built the resources and knowledge for rendering the Liturgy in English to Gregorian chant. Some parts of the Church of England favoured the Sarum variation of chants as part of an Anglican distinctiveness to their sense of Catholicity; others favoured Roman and Solesmes forms in view of their orientation towards wider Catholicism and their aspiration to identify their Church more closely with the Catholic Church, even while singing in English. It seems that, all told, this a valuable piece of Anglican patrimony to offer the Catholic Church in this age - the memory and knowledge of singing plainchant in English. Just because, as in the mid-nineteenth century, this is something that will need researching and restoring because it has tended to fall out of use in the last few decades does nothing to question the value of such an exercise - and it is a matter of rejoicing that, especially in the States, these old Anglican resources are finding a new lease of life in various circles and indeed encouraging contemporary Catholic musical scholars to develop sound adaptations of Gregorian chant for the singing of the Proper of the Roman Mass in the vernacular.
Monk carried forward his work to implement plainchant psalmody and Offices, as well as choral music suited to the cycle of the Prayer Book's liturgical year, when he took up the position of Organist at St Matthias's Church, Stoke Newington in 1852. But it was his arrangement of hymn tunes that brought him to the attention of those planning a new hymn book to enhance the observances of the Anglican liturgy with the resource of a treasury of hymns from throughout the Church's tradition, East and West, Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant. He was appointed music editor of Hymns Ancient and Modern in 1857 and we have the book first published in 1861 to thank for such indelibly imprinted tunes in English hymn-singing as: Eventide, for Abide with me; Merton for Hark! A thrilling voice is sounding; Evelyns for At the Name of Jesus; St Ethelwald for Soldier of Christ, arise and - importantly - Unde et memores for And now, O Father, mindful of the love, a hymn written to be sung during the subdued recitation of the Roman Canon in English or Latin by the more advanced Anglo-Catholic clergy.
We remarked earlier that Hymns Ancient & Modern was an Anglo-Catholic book. We say this because it was the most successful at providing a collection of hymns for use in Anglican worship which served the set litrugy of the Book of Common Prayer, enhanced and brought out its doctrine in pursuit of Tractarian, indeed Catholic, principles and devotion (Hymns 309 to 312 discreetly provide a little Benediction Manual), and set the hymns in the context of the Liturgical Year and the daily round of the Divine Office. Thus did it commend itself across the Church of England other than in Evangelical circles until it became seen as the established hymnal of the Established Church to some degree. The hymnwriter and priest, Sir Henry Williams Baker, was the first words editor and his influence was enduring long after he was succeeeded by William Monk. But from then on the overall editor was a musician as far ahead as the familiar Hymn Ancient & Modern Revised of 1950. The editorial principles had thus long become musicological and hymnographical. Meanwhile many Anglo-Catholics had moved on to the 1906 English Hymnal, with words content edited by an eminent group of Tractarian and Anglo-Catholic scholars under the chairmanship of the liturgist and art historian Percy Dearmer (more truly a theologically liberal Catholic) and music put together by a young Ralph Vaughan Williams as music editor. Although an agnostic, he was steeped in the English choral and folk music traditions, and thus had a ready ear for making full use of the Gregorian hymn melodies in the sytematic way prescribed by the words editors. It says something of Vaughan Williams that for the 1930 second edition of the English Hymnal he abandoned his own settings of the Sarum melodies (along with a less successful version of his tune for For all the Saints, Sine Nomine) in favour of those by J H Arnold (see above). Whether a church used the English Hymnal or Hymns Ancient and Modern has been something of a badge of belonging to the Church of England, right into recent times. In the 1960s and 70s parishes using Hymns Ancient and Modern Standard might tend to be Low or middle-of-the road; English Hymnal was used in identifiably Anglo-Catholic churches, while its cut-down and supplemented version the English Hymnal Service Book tended to be used in middle-of-the-road churches "on the high side" - it was especially designed to meet the needs of the weekly "Parish Communion" movement; Hymns Ancient and Modern Revised could be found in parishes with a strong choral tradition, or regular middle-of-the-road or Broad Church parishes, or the more obviously High Church parishes. The Evangelicals had their own range of books too. The hymn-writing explosion of the 1970s and since, with a succession of supplements and new hymnals to keep pace, has largely broken down the chance of identifying where a parish's churchmanship stood from the hymnbook it uses. But the history of these books and how they were used, and the vision with which they were devised, is worth remembering when talking about "the Anglo-Catholic tradition" and "Anglican patrimony". There is no one normative tradition. In fact Anglican patrimony, bu its very nature, being something that has been forged in a conversation and dialogue between many tendencies and positions, has many strands. Just as they helped to form each other in an Anglican setting, so they can profitably converse with and contribute to the Western Catholic tradition on a larger scale.
A simple illustration of this is the Entrance Hymn, John Mason Neale's of St John Damascene's Aisomen pantes laoi, from the Canon for Matins of St Thomas Sunday (Low Sunday) in the Byzantine rite, Come ye faithful, raise the strain. We have already commented on how the text represents a positive contribution of the Anglican patrimony mediated to the wider Catholic Church through full communion, but not the music. At the Cambridge and Aylesford diaconal ordinations, the tune used was Ave virgo virginum, said to be a tune from Cologne in 1584, but according to the eminent carolist, priest and musicologist George Woodward it is by Johann Horn (also known as Roh), who rose to become the Bishop of the Unity of (Bohemian) Brethren and who provided his Church with a hymnal in 1544, which included this tune, said to be a version of a medieval melody. So it is not clear whether it is a Marian tune in origin, or a tune Bishop Johann wrote for his Gesangbuch. It is known in Anglican circles as the English Hymnal tune to this hymn, possibly thought to be more "Catholic" than other tunes because of its association with the words of Ave Virgo Virginum. One can imagine Protestants and Catholics taking each others' tunes in the period and fitting them to words expressing their own theology, just as the Arians and Catholics had done in the fourth century. The followers of Hus and Wycliffe regarded themselves as Catholics.
Different historic hymnbooks give tunes by Samuel Sebastian Wesley and Sir Arthur Sullivan, but the main tune to prevail was St John Damascene by Arthur Henry Brown (1830-1926), the self-taught organist of St Edward's, Romford, and Brentwood Parish Church. He was a keen supporter of the Oxford Movement and its theological and consequent liturgical objectives, and was - lo and behold - a leading light in the Gregorian Association and the promotion of planichant in the services of the Church of England. St John Damascene is the fine Hymns Ancient & Modern tune, but as a Victorian composition it is preferred, true to the ethos of the English Hymnal, to a tune from the Renaissance period, believed to be of Catholic provenance but in fact Hussite. Ave Virgo is an excellent hymntune and belongs to the Anglican patrimony that descends from the musicological expertise of Vaughan Williams working on the English Hymnal and George Woodward working on his Songs of Sion (1923). But for a tune that was written from within the Oxford Movement an expressly to serve its ecclesiological, liturgical and hymnodical objectives (he set several other texts translated by Neale), it is to St John Damascene that we should look - and its writer who did so much to promote the identification of his Church with the wider Catholic Church, and thus the corporate reunion that is being realised in the Ordinariate.
Brown also composed Saffron Walden, tune to the very moving devotional and occasional Holy Communion hymn, Just as I am, without one plea.
The prayer of thanksgiving for previous Anglican ministry was included in the text of the Order of Service (in some places it was inserted verbally) at the intended place, prior to the Litany of the Saints. "Holy Mary, Mother of God" was replaced by "Our Lady of Walsingham". In other ordination liturgies, the first was treated as a given and the latter added, like "Blessed John Henry Newman" and the Carmelite saints.
Veni Creator was sung according to the translation by Bishop John Cosin (Anglican Bishop of Durham 1660-1672), who was responsible in large measure for the Restoration Prayer Book of 1662, conceived along "Catholic but Reformed lines", but stopping short of the more explicitly Catholic eucharistic doctrine that had caused such great trouble for Charles I in Scotland in 1637. Some, like the Anglican Association, hold him to be a proto-Anglo-Catholic, but in fact he was opposed to the Roman Catholicism both as a belief-system and a manifestation of the organised Church of Christ. In exile with Charles II in France he befriended Huguenots rather than Catholics and on his return was concerned that the reasserted Anglican settlement should not exclude Protestants, especially the Presbyterians. Hence the inability of the Anglican liturgy to articulate unequivocally Catholic, Calvinist, Lutheran doctrine; hence its deliberate openness to interpretation. His approach was undoubtedly conciliatory for the times, but his lasting legacy is of qualifying everyone's belief through endorsement, or at least legitimate admission, of all. His own eucharistic doctrine and belief about the Church he believed wholeheartedly, but he did not understand that it is difficult for the Church to be unified, if it lacks doctrinal integrity too. Cosin's hymn comes from the Anglican Ordinal, from the Ordering of Priests and the Consecration of Bishops. There is does not pertain to the Making of Deacons. This is perhaps a hangover from the pre-Reformed understanding of presbyters and bishops in the same anointed priesthood. The "Mechlin" tune customary among Anglicans for this translation, not the restored version of the tune that has emerged thanks to Solesmes. But this combination of a version of a tune and some hallowed words is a precious part of Anglican history and experience, and it justly forms a part of the living patrimony Ordinariate members bring to the Catholic Church.
The Offertory Hymn was Newman's Praise to the Holiest in the height. The words need no further comment, but it is worth considering the choice of tune. At the reception of the Southwark Groups (for whom these pastors are now ordained deacons in the Catholic Church) the tune selected was Sir Arthur Somervell's soaring Chorus Angelorum, given in Hymns Ancient and Modern Revised (interestingly it was also taken up in the Catholic collections, The Parish Hymn Book of 1965 and The New Catholic Hymnal of 1971). The classic Ancient & Modern tune is Gerontius by the Revd John Bacchus Dykes (1823-76), vicar of St Oswald's, Durham, and one of the most gifted and prolific of Victorian tune writers for the A&M venture. He also wrote still much loved tunes for Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty (Nicaea), The King of love my shepherd is (Dominus regit me) and Eternal Father, strong to save (Melita)). He belonged resolutely to the Ritualist persuasion of the increasingly identifiable High Church party and was a keen member of the fraternity of priests founded in 1855 to promote Catholic life, faith, devotion and liturgical observance in the Church of England as well as the union of Christendom with the Bishop of Rome: the Society of the Holy Cross (it still exists although its stress and emphasis is on an Anglican version of Catholicism, rather than on the need for Catholicism's transformative on Anglicanism). But the tune for Praise to the holiest from this early paragon of the Anglo-Catholic element of Anglican patrimony has yet to find an outing in its natural habitat, the Ordinariate. Doubtless the day will come.
At Aylesford the tune chosen was that which is much beloved by English Roman Catholics, the noble Billing, by Sir Richard Runciman Terry. This has only fairly recently come to the attention of Anglicans, thanks to English Praise, the 1976 supplement to the English Hymnal and thus rival to 100 Hymns for Today, the first supplement to Hymns Ancient & Modern Revised, which came out in 1969. These supplementary collections stress the significance within internal Anglican identities of the stable of hymnbooks you use. Some parishes mixed traditions at this point, but really both supplements were not "for Today" after all; they were either backward-looking efforts at correction and amplification, or they were stuck in an outdated view, even then, of what could be permissible as contemporary. They even mark the unravelling of the coherence of the Anglican liturgical and hymnographical traditions in the late 1960s and 1970s, the emergence (driven by compelling new material from Free Church sources) of the philosophy that with "what works" while congregations begin to decline as society changes and faith is put in novelty, "anything goes". Hence the case for the worship-song later and the diminution of doctrinal content in music selected for worship in all Western traditions; hence the disappearance of the the sung psalms so extensively in Anglican parishes; and, in Anglo-Catholic circles, hence the turning to the Roman Catholic Church's newly reformed and simple liturgy, partly for a sense of bearing, and partly as a unifying factor in a Church of England that was letting go of its own classic tradition, less out of reform from within its tradition than of modern response to shifting times and conditions. Billing has gradually captured people's imagination in a number of denominations. In some corners of Anglo-Catholicism it started out as a badge of being "advanced" in churchmanship through using the "Roman" tune. But its compelling success is because it is a perfect fit. It makes no attempt to reflect the words and their sentiments like Gerontius does. Like all tunes for this hymn, it is in a major key, E flat, with a tone of solid confidence, contrasted with some minor tone B flat minor and F minor in the third line that suit the gravity of this point in the last two verses, Compare this with Gerontius in A with its rich sharpness, using the F sharp major and B minor in the third line to offer an air of lamentation more suited to the hymn's use in Passiontide. Chorus Angelorum (also known as Somervell, after its composer) is in E flat major, like Billing, and in 3:4 time makes no attempt to paint the words but instead reflects the praises of the angel hosts as expressed in Newman's Dream of Gerontius itself. As we have noted before, the tune is a setting from an oratorio and so this tune is very much a choir-piece. That said, there is a handful of hymns that can bear several tunes, suited to different occasions and moods, especially if the words are sung frquently. Praise to the Holiest is one such hymn deserving of its own repertoire of tunes - others could be O Jesus I have promised to serve thee to the end (Thornbury or Day of Rest), O thou who at thy eucharist didst pray (Song 1 or Unde et memores), At the Name of Jesus (Evelyns or King's Lynn), We pray the, heavenely Father (Merionydd or Dies Dominica, see below), O for a thousand tongues to sing (Richmond, Lydia or Lyngham), Jesus shall reign where'er the sun (Truro or Rimington) or (as we have discussed) Come ye faithful raise the strain (Ave Virgo Virginum or St John Damascene). Some of these choise reflect the historic usage of one or the other of the main hymnbooks familiar to Anglo-Catholics historically. They indicate how "Anglican patrimony" is no more a monolith than that of the Catholic Church - it is varied and many layered. Indeed this very array of rich gems to choose from is integral to the patrimony that Anglican have to offer to the rest of the Universal Church as members of the one Body of Christ.
So Billing is, you might think, unquestionably the favourite tune now. But where does it fit with the Patrimony that the Ordinariate is supposed to embody? Even allowing for a legitimate development to the liturgical culture, and indeed the exchange of treasures proper to ecumenical rapprochement and closer communion, is now the time to prefer it over tunes with a long Anglican pedigree and indeed a more historic association with Newman's words? Billing was supplied by Terry to appear in the 1912 Westminster Hymnal, of which he was the musical editor. This was issued as "the only collection authorised by the Hierarchy". Terry was a pioneer (at first at Downside Abbey with its school) in the revival of Renaissance music, notably the Catholic English composers Shephard, Philips, Byrd and Tallis. He continued this restoration work while first director of music at Westminster Cathedral, where from the outset he implemented the execution of plainchant according to the principles of Solesmes, following Pope St Pius X's motu proprio on Church music, Tra le Sollecitudini. His influence on succeeding generations of church musicians has been considerable, not least in the maintenance and development of the choir he established at Westminster with its world-renowned expertise in Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony, but also on other manifestations of English choral worship, the Anglican cathedrals, where likewise Gregorian chant has become more prominent (e.g. at Men's or Boy's only Evensongs) and the corpus of Renaissance and Tudor music has lodged itself (see this post on the influence of E H Fellowes restoring this patrimony to Anglicans). Terry is credited with the first liturgical performances of the Three and Five Part Masses of Byrd and Tallis' Lamentations. He was now narrowly Catholic musicologist either, having worked on part of a definitive collection of Händel's work, modern editions of Calvin's Psalter of 1539 and the Scottish Psalter of 1635, and the revival of a great series of Tudor anthems and motets in Latin and English from both Catholic and Protestant composers (for instance, Thomas Morley was a Protestant Cathedral organist, and the leading Elizabethan secular composer, but he was a devoted disciple of his master, the Catholic William Byrd, whose style he at first imitated in his own sacred music. So here is an "apostolic succession" - the roots of classic Anglican church Tudor music, once revived and restored in the nineteenth and twnetieth centuries to Catholics and Anglicans alike, reveal they lie in the music of the Catholic liturgy). But long before the official endorsement of Terry's great tune in 1912, Catholics and Anglicans had been singing Newman's verses to long established tunes, from not long after it first appeared in print in 1865. Within three years it was in the new supplement to Hymns Ancient & Modern, paired by Monk with Dykes' newly commissioned tune, Gerontius.
For copyright reasons, other Anglican collections were forced to use other tunes in the same measure of 8.6.8.6 (e.g. James Turle's Westminster). But what did Catholics use before Terry's tune came along? One tune in this metre, adapted for use in Catholic non-litrugical vernacular services, is the English Hymnal's tune for Praise to the Holiest - Richmond. This is also used as the tune for Charles Wesley's O for a thousand tongues to sing and the semi-Unitarian Samuel Johnson's City of God, how broad and far - unintentionally open to the most papalist of interpretations as paean to the One Church: Unharmed upon th eternal Rock the eternal City stands. It was written by Thomas Haweis, an Anglican clergyman of strong Evangelical convictions who also moved in the circle of the Countess of Huntingdon and served as her chaplain (the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion had begun in Methodism but found itself, like Wesley's own Connexion rejected from the fellowship of "Anglican comprehensiveness", like others since. Unlike Wesley, the Countess was drawn to Calvinism doctrine and this put them into public disagreement. In the end her Connexion's chapels mostly came into the Congregationalist Church (she had once been great friends with the father of English hymnody and leading Independent preacher or Dissenter, Isaac Watts), nowadays represented by the United Reformed Church.) Haweis had been a leading light in the London Missionary Society, an agency of the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion, and is credited with ensuring the Tahiti came first to be evangelised. Richmond may have been written for his hymn, O thou from whom all goodness flows (he also wrote the Christmas classic with a tune by Händel, Joy to the world). But the tune is only known to us nowadays in the form and harmony to which it was adapted by our friend, Samuel Webbe the Younger, organist of the Spanish Embassy Chapel sometime after 1817 and then St Patrick's Catholic Chapel in Liverpool. In 1800 he had published, with his eminent composer-father, a Collection of Original Psalm Tunes (melodies used by other English-speaking Christians for singing the metrical psalms to) and so there was evidently a custom of borrowing tunes and even texts from elsewhere in the field of English worship material that could be used at Catholic (extra-liturgical) services. Hence Richmond's use in the worship of Catholics; hence its transmission through adoption in the Free Churches for a range of hymns; hence its availability to be taken up by the music editor of the English Hymnal, Ralph Vaughan Williams, as the preferred tune for Praise to the Holiest. It has elements therefore of Cathoic patrimony, Dissenting patrimony, and Anglican patrimony and one would hope that it is deservedly conserved within the patrimony of the Ordinariate. Usually in D major, its tone is of bright confidence. Never modulating to a minor key, it makes no attempt to paint the words., other than to set forward the mystery of salvation doxologically. The English Hymnal was opposed to Victorian sentiment in music or self-regarding devotionalism in the words: its principle was of objective praise according to the liturgy and even hymns where "I" occurs are focussed on the Father or Christ, rather than personal feeling. The choice of Richmond skilfully reflects this aversion to sentiment. Perhaps though, Vaughan Williams might have done well to replace it with Billing at his 1933 revision of the English Hymnal. But he couldn't - by then it was already badged as the tune of the Catholics.
A good deal of the music for the Ordinary of the Mass quite rightly reflects Aysleford's role as a pilgrimage Church - the famous responsorial setting from Lourdes featured prominently. This is a version of the mass which has transcended the ecumenical divide between Catholics and Anglicans and has become much loved by all.
Next the choir sang Ave verum Corpus, to the music of Sir Edward Elgar. This is another Catholic composer who occasionally composed for the Anglican liturgy and, as Master of the King's Musick, the Court. But this piece is one of three motets, Opus 2, published in 1887 for the Catholic Church of St George in Worcester, where he was organist in succession to his father. Elgar spoke of the great influence of the music at Worcester Cathedral on him, so here once more we can detect the interweaving of Catholic and Anglican patrimonies in a shared musical culture, respectively influencing their liturgical manifestation. We have seen how this was the case earlier in the century with the revival of Renaissance and Classical sacred music, as well as in plainsong. With Ave verum, we have a piece of music composed by a Catholic for the Catholic mass, having been influenced by the Anglican choral tradition at the point when it was being considerably renewed and raised in its standards, and also a piece that has long been borrowed and loved by Anglican choirs. A great deal of Anglican patrimony, and English Catholic patrimony, has more to do with what is received and held in common than at first appears.
Two congregational hymns are then given. First Newman's Firmly I believe and truly (also from the Dream of Gerontius). This did not make it into Hymns Ancient and Modern with Praise to the Holiest, but it at last arrived in the 1950 Revised edition, set to William Boyce's stately eighteenth century tune Halton Holgate. Here again we see what kind of Anglican you are by the tune your parish sings. For in more self-consciously Anglo-Catholic churches using the English Hymnal you sang the Cardinal's confession of faith in the Trinity and the binding teaching authority of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church to Shipston. One of the most appealing features of the English Hymnal is its remarkable work of conservation of folk tunes that would otherwise have died out. Partly out of Romanticism, partly out of an Anglo-Catholic incarnationalist Christian socialist respect for the arts and crafts perfected by working people on the land, Anglo-Catholics were among those who sought to conserve, revive, reanimate folk traditions. Some hoped to resurrect the life and religion of the medieval village from before the Reformation changes. At any rate, the collaboration of Vaughan Williams, Martin Shaw and Percy Dearmer (respectively organist and vicar of St Mary's, Primrose Hill in Hampstead) on the new Anglo-Catholic hymnbook coincided with a wide interest in English carols, folk music and dancing. The tune was collected at Halford, near Shipston-on-Stour in Warwickshire, a piece of pure English heritage that serves a great text written by the most illustrious English preacher and theologian of his generation, the Catholic Cardinal Newman, and how those words were taken to heart by Anglo-Catholics with a vision of the whole and undivided Church in the twentieth century. Terry's Westminster Hymnal sets the words to a German Catholic melody from Johann Corner's Gross Catholisch Gesangbuch of 1631 published at Cologne. Here it was sung to St Bernard of Cluny's hymn to Our Lady, Omni die dic Mariae, better known as Daily, daily sing to Mary. Although this hymn in English is often sung to the lilting Daily, Daily (said to be derived "from a French Paroissien", that is service book for the parish liturgy in French dioceses), some Catholic hymnbooks set it to the German tune still. The tune in more faithful arrangement of the melody and its rhythm in Corner's collection is to be found in the English Hymnal at number 120, where it sets a now discarded Good Friday hymn by Archbishop Maclagan of York (1826-1910).
In 1895 Maclagan had declared, "Reunion is in the air, on every side we hear the cry for unity," as the famous commission met in Rome to open up again and this time finally resolve the question of Anglican Orders, only to see his hopes dashed the next year with the issue of Apostolicae Curae declaring them absolutely null and utterly void. (The reply in 1897 to Leo XIII from Maclagan and Archbishop Frederick Temple of Canterbury effectively reopened the question, leading directly to a reaffirmation of the continued need for prayer for unity and indirectly to the fresh examination of issues at the informal Malines Conversations 1921-25. The Union of Bonn between Anglicans and Old Catholics (who supplied the so-called Dutch Touch of valid episcopal ordination according to the essential Catholic form and matter) further affected the question as did a change in Catholic teaching on the essential form and matter. But in 2008 Cardinal Kasper revealed that the intention of the Vatican formally to reopen the question in the service of unity had been abandoned following the Church of England's decision in principle to take steps towards the ordination of women to the episcopate, which the Catholic Church sees as finally taking the Anglican Communion beyond the bounds permitted by the ancient common tradition.)
Celebration Hymnal and Hymns Old & New set Firmly I believe and truly to the English Hymnal arrangement of Omni Die by William Smyth Rockstro (1823-95 fellow-student at the Leipzig Conservatoire, friend and biographer of Mendelssohn and composer of salon music), as an improvement on the Westminster Hymnal version. Other Catholic hymnbooks follow the Anglican suggestions of Stuttgart (Bethlehem, of noblest cities) Halton Holgate or Shipston. Shipston is a bit of an Anglo-Catholic badge, but it has a history that is deeper and perhaps, in any case, more confidently and purposefully carries these weighty words than any of the other tunes.
The second Holy Communion hymn was Vincent Stuckey Stratton Coles' We pray thee, heavenly Father. He was librarian and chaplain of the enduring memorial to the work and influence on the formation of discipleship in the Church among young undergraduates at Oxford and the promotion of scholarly and theological study of the faith, The Pusey House in St Giles, rising to be its principal from 1897-1909. He embodies Victorian Anglican patrimony in the Tractarian and Anglo-Catholic tradition of that generation. His eucharistic hymn is an enduring example of the Anglican tradition of teaching doctrine through doxology, specifically teaching Catholic faith and devotion through giving the faithful hymns by which to sing them in worship. Here it is a prayer for a fruitful Communion through the The Victorian Ancient and Modern tune is Dies Dominica by Dykes and the English Hymnal tune is the now unused Caerlleon, offering another Welsh tune, Merionydd, as an alternative. It is this tune, by W. Lloyd, that was used Aylesford. It is not surprising that the English Hymnal wins hands down for its words, and why even the users of the appealing tune by Dykes prefer them to those in Hymns Ancient and Modern. Although both are verses by Coles, the import of the hymn is eucharistic but quite different in each hymnal.
Here are the four verses as they appear in the English Hymnal:
And here are the second, third and fourth verses, written in 1871 for a Confirmation class while curate at Wantage, as they appear in Hymns Ancient & Modern:
Be thou our Guide and Helper,
Perhaps the hymn (especially the first four verses) did duty as a hymn for the confirmandi to sing as the priest recited quietly the Roman Canon that he had inserted after the Prayer of Consecration in the Prayer Book Office of Holy Communion. The last three verses seem aptly to modulate into a prayer for fruitful Communion, which is immediately distributed at this point in the old Anglican rite, prior thus to the Lord's Prayer. Clearly it is important to be discriminating in mediating elements of the Anglican Church's patrimony to the wider Catholic Church in the Ordinariate.
Finally, the service ended with the great hymn to Our Lady of Walsingham popular at the Anglican shrine, sung to Pilgrims by the eminent Victorian organist Henry Smart, Joy to thee, Queen. Thus the liturgy began and ended on the ascription of joy in the risen Lord to the Mother of God.
The Ordination Liturgy began with the Regina Caeli, sung in the form known throughout the Anglican Catholic world, the metrical verse, Joy to thee, O Queen of Heaven. It seems to be unfamiliar to current Catholic usage. Where the Regina Caeli is sung at all, it tends to be in Latin to the Gregorian tune or in English to a modern melody. So Joy to thee is assumed to be of Anglo-Catholic provenance. But there it is at no. 263a of the Westminster Hymnal of 1939 (but not that of 1912) with the Imprimatur of E Morrogh Bernard, Vicar General of the Westminster diocese. Incidentally, Bishop David Mathew writes of vernacular hymns sung outside the Liturgy in the Preface of "the homely Catholic services in the last fifty years, with their loud and draughty singing".
That Joy to thee is an English metrical version of the Regina Caeli Easter Marian antiphon served to popularise it in Anglicanism and win it a readier acceptance in a communion that had for centuries eschewed direct invocation of the saints in its worship (other than in the Benedicite and the Benedictus and even there not for intercessory purposes). It seems not to be in current Catholic usage, but it has remained much loved in Anglican churches with a leaning towards the Catholic tradition, not least those that are strongly attached to the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. The benefit of a strophic verse in the vernacular and a familiar hymn-tune mean, however, that some Anglicans were able to keep this flag flying and their heirs were proud to wave it at Aylesford.
The name of the translator, as with a lot of "hymns doing duty" of this age, is not immediately known. Any reader who can shed light on his or her identity would be doing liturgical and hymnographical history a service by sharing their intelligence. The usual melody is the same as that used for the great hymn of Easter morning, Jesus Christ is risen today, verses based on the 14th century hymn Surrexit Christus hodie and included in the Lyra Davidica of 1708. Subsequently Charles Welsey elaborated on these verses, but we do not know for certain who was their originator. The emergence of the exhilarating tune, ranging from middle C to top E (a range exceeded rarely for congregational singing - even Hark! the Herald Angels sing, with its two top Es at the last couplet in the verse and the beginning of the chorus too, eases the range by go down no further than D), seems to be contemporary with the emergence of the English words at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It is possible that it set an eight-line hymn, setting the tune that we sing to the Alleluias to seven syllables as for the lines in the rest of the verses (and some parts of the Church use it for singing thus to At the Lamb's high feast we sing). But we know the tune to a version arranged by William Henry Monk, editor of the essentially Anglo-Catholic Hymns Ancient and Modern - a true bearer of Anglican patrimony.
Its fair to say that, here, Anglican patrimony is best seen (as with the rest of the Church's tradition) not as something static or there to be harvested from the past, but as a living and ever progressing phenomenon. Depending on how you look at it, this patrimony reinvents itself for the age and stage which it finds itself addressing, or it is an instance of the organic development of the great Tradition itself, according to its gifts, its lights, its times. Monk was something of a prodigy. Soon seen as a gifted composer and keyboard performer, by 18 he was organist of St Peter's Eaton Square in Belgravia, close to Buckingham Palace, which partly stands in its parish. Two years later in 1843 he was organist of the more confidently aristocratic St George's Albermarle Street (now only dimly recalled by the St George's Hotel which stands on its site and which until only recently retained its identity as the still just about smart back entrance to Brown's), before moving even more loftily in 1845 to St Paul's Portman Square, a proprietary chapel for the Portman family's fashionable property speculation that grew out of a goat's milk farm holding they presciently secured in the reign of Queen Mary I and which they retain to this day. Another two years, and William was off again, this time to be choirmaster and then organist of King' College in the Strand.
A five year stint there enabled him to institute some changes to the worship, prompted by William Dyce, the eminent Pre-Raphaelite painter, frescoist (notably in the Robing Room of the Palace of Westminster) and art and design theorist, who was Professor of Fine Arts at King's at the time. A man of formidable learning in a range of fields, Dyce (1806-1864) was a gifted organist, passionate about sacred music of the highest artistic merit. In 1841 he had founded the Motett Society to promote the revival of "early music" and in 1843 published a noted version of the Book of Common Prayer, with an essay on Gregorian chant and its adaptation to English texts. Think of this taking place in the same period as the growing popularisation of Bach's choral and organ works, Samuel Wesley and Vincent Novello promoting the liturgical music of other masters from Palestrina to Mozart, the decay of the measured method of executing plainchant that had held sway since the sixteenth century and was still the "working assumption" for Catholic and Anglican musicians in England alike. For example, Samuel Webbe the elder, 1740-1816, famed organist of the Sardinian Embassy Chapel, includes in his Essay on the Church Plain Chant such tunes as Veni Sancte Spiritus for the Golden Sequence, indicating how "plainchant" was seen rhythmically and melodically (and indeed modally) at the time. Consider too Giovanni Guidetti's Directorium Chori of 1582 - known to Anglicans as the source of the tune Aeterna Christi Munera, with its slightly freer but nevertheless measured rhythm and its setting effectively in F major rather than its native Mode 7 - was regarded by Sir John Stainer as an authoritative source for "the Ancient Plain-Song" in his Cathedral Prayer Book of 1891.
But think too of the fervour of Cardinal Wiseman and a new generation of Catholic musicians about to convince the First Synod of Westminster in 1852 that plainchant was the ideal form of church music. 1848 saw the publication of the Mechlin Gradual (Mechlin is Malines, or modern-day Mechelen in Flanders, see city of the Belgian primate. The illustrious Cardinal Mercier hosted the famous Malines Conversations in 1921-25 at which the idea of corporate reunion became part of the ecumenical DNA and the concept of the Anglican Church "united not absorbed" was imagined by Dom Lambert Beauduin, founder of the classical Liturgical Movement, also at the instigation of Cardinal Mercier in 1907). The Mechlin Gradual presented plainchant in a more accessible way for choirs; it also tried to recover the modality of medieval chant from the conventions of major and minor, as well as some of its lightness and speed. But it still reproduced the truncation of melodies that had been going on since the sixteenth century for "ease" of execution and it followed the tradition of reworking the text and music to align the word and musical accents. It was only a halfway step towards a distinctive type of rhythm for plainchant that could mark it out from the metres and theory of more recent classical sacred music and that enable it to be sung more freely and swiftly. Indeed it was already seen as a debased for of the chant, for all its influence throughout the rest of the nineteenth century and beyond (it was founded on the 1614 codification of the Graduale Romanum by Raimondi of the Medicean Press in Rome, revered because it was believed to be the work of the inspired Palestrina, which was not the case). From 1883 Dom Prosper Guéranger and his monks at the newly refounded Abbey at Solesmes had been working on recovering plainchant - the Gregorian restoration - from its best, most venerable and musicologically reliable sources, although the first fruits were not to be published for external dissemination until 1864.
Here we have two impulses in the drive to restore plainchant in Catholic circles. The first sees plainchant as essentially the same as other kinds of music - ancient and venerable in origin but forming part of the same body of music familiar in the London chapels and (for instance) the northern parishes where choral composing in classical styles was rich and vibrant in its own right, as well as attuned to the movement to emulate the style of Renaissance polyphony. So the harmonising is contemporary with classical and early Victorian tastes, and non-strophic texts (e.g. psalm and canticle verses, or antiphons) are sung slowly to fit more easily a metrical accompaniment. The second impulse is to set plainchant as a genre of music in its own right, with its own rhythmic culture, modality and pre-eminence as the musical vehicle for the offering of the Latin Roman rite's liturgy. This has been described as Ultramontane, but it is borne in the period of monastic renewal following the restoration of the Catholic Church in its integrity in France after a history of Neo-Gallicanism since the seventeenth century (in which about half of dioceses obeserved their own semi-invented rites), the Revolution that proscribed public worship and the uncertain restoration of a mix of the Roman and various diocesan rites. Guéranger wanted the Catholics of France to cleave no longer to a romantic idea of an independent national Catholic Church, not only because the invented rites drew on a misreading of the medieval sources from which they had been drawn, but because he wanted all the Catholic Church to recover its unity and identity in a rediscovery and a re-reception (as we might say today) of its own tradition. This meant an absolute fidelity to the Roman rite for the sake of the unity and cohesion of the Church at a time of both renewal and direct challenge. Wiseman, for his part, did not want the emancipated Catholic Church in England that he led to be stuck in the past that had seen it through harsh times in isolation, but to reconnect with the wider Catholic Church at a time of spiritual, liturgical, pastoral, monastic and evangelistic renewal. For both, in different ways, a distinctive plainchant, newly re-invigorated, would signal the Church's unbreakable solidarity, its loyalty to Rome as the keystone to Catholic unity and identity (Pius IX approved the Mechlin Gradual when it came out and it would not be until 1903 that Pope Pius X was finally free to assign the custody of the Roman rite's chant to the monks of Solesmes).
The perspective of Anglicans was slightly different. It is a mistake, such as many have made, to view the recovery of plainsong in England solely through Anglican eyes and its role in the revival of the religious life (notably at Cowley with the Society of St John the Evangelist for man and Wantage with the Community of St Mary the Virgin for women; the name of the Revd George Herbert Palmer is significant for both - he was organist for the former and his adaptations published by the latter). At this period, Anglican interest in plainchant is not motivated by Ultramontane concerns to demonstrate the unity of the Catholic Church through the use of the Roman rite in music restored to its pre-eminent form and condition. The old Roman sources (the Medicean Graduale Romanum, Guidetti's Directorium, the Mechlin book, etc) are taken as authorities for some of the "Ancient" features of, for instance, Monk's Hymns Ancient and Modern, but Anglican scholarship is looking (as the Neo-Gallicans had done) at the treasures of the Sarum rite in search of a something distinctively English by which the Church of England, newly confronted with the questions as to its authenticity and integrity by Newman and the Tractarians, could account for itseld and assert its claims by retracing steps to some different historical roots rather than in terms of identification with the wider tradition as it was trying to recover itself. Of course, the objective that Dyce was articulating as an Anglican was to re-appropriate from this "ancient tradition", for all the imperfections with which it had been transmitted up to then, chant that could be sung to the English Liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer.
But when Monk became music editor of Hymns Ancient & Modern in 1857 the assumptions about plainchant - even in an English form - were a mix of the old, slow and measured style (no wonder the creativity of the nineteenth century supplanted it with new hymntunes - e.g. Webbe's Melcombe - known to Anglicans as the tune for New every morning, but it was possibly written for a Vespers office hymn at the Sardinian or Portuguese Embassy chapel, and St Thomas, written as a "Motett", probably for Tantum Ergo at Benediction or an Offertory. It is no wonder Anglo-Catholics picked up on this use of the tunes), with the freer style of the Mechlin Gradual and with the resurrection of Sarum tunes and versions of Gregorian melodies, yet rendered in the same styles (for heavily measured choral settings of plainchant hymn melodies, see Hymns Ancient & Modern Standard, Nos. 1 and 2, with their "Proper Sarum Melody". The 1924 version has freer accompaniments for the chant tunes. Compare the measured (and choral) setting of the Mechlin O Salutaris tune with its freer alternative at No. 311).
Thus Dyce and Monk deserve some credit for giving to Anglican worship two things. First a way of singing some of the chant of the historic Ecclesia Anglicana in a more systematic and dynamic way that had been conceivable before. Secondly they inaugurated a developed tradition and expertise for singing Gregorian chant in English that grew in popularity among aspirational clergy and their congregations desirious of demonstrating, for evangelistic, apologetical and eventually ecumenical purposes, the Catholic origins and identity of their Church and its liturgical life. This took root in the revival of religious life; it was alive to developments in Catholic liturgical performance and research; it was founded in the highest scholarly research in liturgy and hymography (the names of Frank Edward Brightman and John Mason Neale came to be outstanding in these fields respectively); and was scrupulous in its adherence to the principles of Solesmes. Illustrious figures include Francis Burgess of the Gregorian Association, George Herbert Palmer, Bishop Walter Frere CR and Sir John Stainer at the Plainsong & Medieval Music Society, and J H Arnold (whose peerless settings of the Sarum hymns populate that 1930 edition of the English Hymnal) through the later nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. One of the things that the Catholic Anglophone world has found it difficult to do is to develop a musical language for the reformed Roman rite in the vernacular that is faithful to and drinks deep from its own tradition, so relatively recently recovered. But Anglicanism offers a tradition of singing Gregorian chant in England that even predates the abolition of the Sarum rite and waxed and waned since Merbecke set the First Prayer Book and adaptations of chants survived even beyond the Commonwealth's disruption; it also painstakingly recreated this patrimony and for well over a hundred years has built the resources and knowledge for rendering the Liturgy in English to Gregorian chant. Some parts of the Church of England favoured the Sarum variation of chants as part of an Anglican distinctiveness to their sense of Catholicity; others favoured Roman and Solesmes forms in view of their orientation towards wider Catholicism and their aspiration to identify their Church more closely with the Catholic Church, even while singing in English. It seems that, all told, this a valuable piece of Anglican patrimony to offer the Catholic Church in this age - the memory and knowledge of singing plainchant in English. Just because, as in the mid-nineteenth century, this is something that will need researching and restoring because it has tended to fall out of use in the last few decades does nothing to question the value of such an exercise - and it is a matter of rejoicing that, especially in the States, these old Anglican resources are finding a new lease of life in various circles and indeed encouraging contemporary Catholic musical scholars to develop sound adaptations of Gregorian chant for the singing of the Proper of the Roman Mass in the vernacular.
Monk carried forward his work to implement plainchant psalmody and Offices, as well as choral music suited to the cycle of the Prayer Book's liturgical year, when he took up the position of Organist at St Matthias's Church, Stoke Newington in 1852. But it was his arrangement of hymn tunes that brought him to the attention of those planning a new hymn book to enhance the observances of the Anglican liturgy with the resource of a treasury of hymns from throughout the Church's tradition, East and West, Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant. He was appointed music editor of Hymns Ancient and Modern in 1857 and we have the book first published in 1861 to thank for such indelibly imprinted tunes in English hymn-singing as: Eventide, for Abide with me; Merton for Hark! A thrilling voice is sounding; Evelyns for At the Name of Jesus; St Ethelwald for Soldier of Christ, arise and - importantly - Unde et memores for And now, O Father, mindful of the love, a hymn written to be sung during the subdued recitation of the Roman Canon in English or Latin by the more advanced Anglo-Catholic clergy.
We remarked earlier that Hymns Ancient & Modern was an Anglo-Catholic book. We say this because it was the most successful at providing a collection of hymns for use in Anglican worship which served the set litrugy of the Book of Common Prayer, enhanced and brought out its doctrine in pursuit of Tractarian, indeed Catholic, principles and devotion (Hymns 309 to 312 discreetly provide a little Benediction Manual), and set the hymns in the context of the Liturgical Year and the daily round of the Divine Office. Thus did it commend itself across the Church of England other than in Evangelical circles until it became seen as the established hymnal of the Established Church to some degree. The hymnwriter and priest, Sir Henry Williams Baker, was the first words editor and his influence was enduring long after he was succeeeded by William Monk. But from then on the overall editor was a musician as far ahead as the familiar Hymn Ancient & Modern Revised of 1950. The editorial principles had thus long become musicological and hymnographical. Meanwhile many Anglo-Catholics had moved on to the 1906 English Hymnal, with words content edited by an eminent group of Tractarian and Anglo-Catholic scholars under the chairmanship of the liturgist and art historian Percy Dearmer (more truly a theologically liberal Catholic) and music put together by a young Ralph Vaughan Williams as music editor. Although an agnostic, he was steeped in the English choral and folk music traditions, and thus had a ready ear for making full use of the Gregorian hymn melodies in the sytematic way prescribed by the words editors. It says something of Vaughan Williams that for the 1930 second edition of the English Hymnal he abandoned his own settings of the Sarum melodies (along with a less successful version of his tune for For all the Saints, Sine Nomine) in favour of those by J H Arnold (see above). Whether a church used the English Hymnal or Hymns Ancient and Modern has been something of a badge of belonging to the Church of England, right into recent times. In the 1960s and 70s parishes using Hymns Ancient and Modern Standard might tend to be Low or middle-of-the road; English Hymnal was used in identifiably Anglo-Catholic churches, while its cut-down and supplemented version the English Hymnal Service Book tended to be used in middle-of-the-road churches "on the high side" - it was especially designed to meet the needs of the weekly "Parish Communion" movement; Hymns Ancient and Modern Revised could be found in parishes with a strong choral tradition, or regular middle-of-the-road or Broad Church parishes, or the more obviously High Church parishes. The Evangelicals had their own range of books too. The hymn-writing explosion of the 1970s and since, with a succession of supplements and new hymnals to keep pace, has largely broken down the chance of identifying where a parish's churchmanship stood from the hymnbook it uses. But the history of these books and how they were used, and the vision with which they were devised, is worth remembering when talking about "the Anglo-Catholic tradition" and "Anglican patrimony". There is no one normative tradition. In fact Anglican patrimony, bu its very nature, being something that has been forged in a conversation and dialogue between many tendencies and positions, has many strands. Just as they helped to form each other in an Anglican setting, so they can profitably converse with and contribute to the Western Catholic tradition on a larger scale.
A simple illustration of this is the Entrance Hymn, John Mason Neale's of St John Damascene's Aisomen pantes laoi, from the Canon for Matins of St Thomas Sunday (Low Sunday) in the Byzantine rite, Come ye faithful, raise the strain. We have already commented on how the text represents a positive contribution of the Anglican patrimony mediated to the wider Catholic Church through full communion, but not the music. At the Cambridge and Aylesford diaconal ordinations, the tune used was Ave virgo virginum, said to be a tune from Cologne in 1584, but according to the eminent carolist, priest and musicologist George Woodward it is by Johann Horn (also known as Roh), who rose to become the Bishop of the Unity of (Bohemian) Brethren and who provided his Church with a hymnal in 1544, which included this tune, said to be a version of a medieval melody. So it is not clear whether it is a Marian tune in origin, or a tune Bishop Johann wrote for his Gesangbuch. It is known in Anglican circles as the English Hymnal tune to this hymn, possibly thought to be more "Catholic" than other tunes because of its association with the words of Ave Virgo Virginum. One can imagine Protestants and Catholics taking each others' tunes in the period and fitting them to words expressing their own theology, just as the Arians and Catholics had done in the fourth century. The followers of Hus and Wycliffe regarded themselves as Catholics.
Different historic hymnbooks give tunes by Samuel Sebastian Wesley and Sir Arthur Sullivan, but the main tune to prevail was St John Damascene by Arthur Henry Brown (1830-1926), the self-taught organist of St Edward's, Romford, and Brentwood Parish Church. He was a keen supporter of the Oxford Movement and its theological and consequent liturgical objectives, and was - lo and behold - a leading light in the Gregorian Association and the promotion of planichant in the services of the Church of England. St John Damascene is the fine Hymns Ancient & Modern tune, but as a Victorian composition it is preferred, true to the ethos of the English Hymnal, to a tune from the Renaissance period, believed to be of Catholic provenance but in fact Hussite. Ave Virgo is an excellent hymntune and belongs to the Anglican patrimony that descends from the musicological expertise of Vaughan Williams working on the English Hymnal and George Woodward working on his Songs of Sion (1923). But for a tune that was written from within the Oxford Movement an expressly to serve its ecclesiological, liturgical and hymnodical objectives (he set several other texts translated by Neale), it is to St John Damascene that we should look - and its writer who did so much to promote the identification of his Church with the wider Catholic Church, and thus the corporate reunion that is being realised in the Ordinariate.
Brown also composed Saffron Walden, tune to the very moving devotional and occasional Holy Communion hymn, Just as I am, without one plea.
The prayer of thanksgiving for previous Anglican ministry was included in the text of the Order of Service (in some places it was inserted verbally) at the intended place, prior to the Litany of the Saints. "Holy Mary, Mother of God" was replaced by "Our Lady of Walsingham". In other ordination liturgies, the first was treated as a given and the latter added, like "Blessed John Henry Newman" and the Carmelite saints.
Veni Creator was sung according to the translation by Bishop John Cosin (Anglican Bishop of Durham 1660-1672), who was responsible in large measure for the Restoration Prayer Book of 1662, conceived along "Catholic but Reformed lines", but stopping short of the more explicitly Catholic eucharistic doctrine that had caused such great trouble for Charles I in Scotland in 1637. Some, like the Anglican Association, hold him to be a proto-Anglo-Catholic, but in fact he was opposed to the Roman Catholicism both as a belief-system and a manifestation of the organised Church of Christ. In exile with Charles II in France he befriended Huguenots rather than Catholics and on his return was concerned that the reasserted Anglican settlement should not exclude Protestants, especially the Presbyterians. Hence the inability of the Anglican liturgy to articulate unequivocally Catholic, Calvinist, Lutheran doctrine; hence its deliberate openness to interpretation. His approach was undoubtedly conciliatory for the times, but his lasting legacy is of qualifying everyone's belief through endorsement, or at least legitimate admission, of all. His own eucharistic doctrine and belief about the Church he believed wholeheartedly, but he did not understand that it is difficult for the Church to be unified, if it lacks doctrinal integrity too. Cosin's hymn comes from the Anglican Ordinal, from the Ordering of Priests and the Consecration of Bishops. There is does not pertain to the Making of Deacons. This is perhaps a hangover from the pre-Reformed understanding of presbyters and bishops in the same anointed priesthood. The "Mechlin" tune customary among Anglicans for this translation, not the restored version of the tune that has emerged thanks to Solesmes. But this combination of a version of a tune and some hallowed words is a precious part of Anglican history and experience, and it justly forms a part of the living patrimony Ordinariate members bring to the Catholic Church.
The Offertory Hymn was Newman's Praise to the Holiest in the height. The words need no further comment, but it is worth considering the choice of tune. At the reception of the Southwark Groups (for whom these pastors are now ordained deacons in the Catholic Church) the tune selected was Sir Arthur Somervell's soaring Chorus Angelorum, given in Hymns Ancient and Modern Revised (interestingly it was also taken up in the Catholic collections, The Parish Hymn Book of 1965 and The New Catholic Hymnal of 1971). The classic Ancient & Modern tune is Gerontius by the Revd John Bacchus Dykes (1823-76), vicar of St Oswald's, Durham, and one of the most gifted and prolific of Victorian tune writers for the A&M venture. He also wrote still much loved tunes for Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty (Nicaea), The King of love my shepherd is (Dominus regit me) and Eternal Father, strong to save (Melita)). He belonged resolutely to the Ritualist persuasion of the increasingly identifiable High Church party and was a keen member of the fraternity of priests founded in 1855 to promote Catholic life, faith, devotion and liturgical observance in the Church of England as well as the union of Christendom with the Bishop of Rome: the Society of the Holy Cross (it still exists although its stress and emphasis is on an Anglican version of Catholicism, rather than on the need for Catholicism's transformative on Anglicanism). But the tune for Praise to the holiest from this early paragon of the Anglo-Catholic element of Anglican patrimony has yet to find an outing in its natural habitat, the Ordinariate. Doubtless the day will come.
At Aylesford the tune chosen was that which is much beloved by English Roman Catholics, the noble Billing, by Sir Richard Runciman Terry. This has only fairly recently come to the attention of Anglicans, thanks to English Praise, the 1976 supplement to the English Hymnal and thus rival to 100 Hymns for Today, the first supplement to Hymns Ancient & Modern Revised, which came out in 1969. These supplementary collections stress the significance within internal Anglican identities of the stable of hymnbooks you use. Some parishes mixed traditions at this point, but really both supplements were not "for Today" after all; they were either backward-looking efforts at correction and amplification, or they were stuck in an outdated view, even then, of what could be permissible as contemporary. They even mark the unravelling of the coherence of the Anglican liturgical and hymnographical traditions in the late 1960s and 1970s, the emergence (driven by compelling new material from Free Church sources) of the philosophy that with "what works" while congregations begin to decline as society changes and faith is put in novelty, "anything goes". Hence the case for the worship-song later and the diminution of doctrinal content in music selected for worship in all Western traditions; hence the disappearance of the the sung psalms so extensively in Anglican parishes; and, in Anglo-Catholic circles, hence the turning to the Roman Catholic Church's newly reformed and simple liturgy, partly for a sense of bearing, and partly as a unifying factor in a Church of England that was letting go of its own classic tradition, less out of reform from within its tradition than of modern response to shifting times and conditions. Billing has gradually captured people's imagination in a number of denominations. In some corners of Anglo-Catholicism it started out as a badge of being "advanced" in churchmanship through using the "Roman" tune. But its compelling success is because it is a perfect fit. It makes no attempt to reflect the words and their sentiments like Gerontius does. Like all tunes for this hymn, it is in a major key, E flat, with a tone of solid confidence, contrasted with some minor tone B flat minor and F minor in the third line that suit the gravity of this point in the last two verses, Compare this with Gerontius in A with its rich sharpness, using the F sharp major and B minor in the third line to offer an air of lamentation more suited to the hymn's use in Passiontide. Chorus Angelorum (also known as Somervell, after its composer) is in E flat major, like Billing, and in 3:4 time makes no attempt to paint the words but instead reflects the praises of the angel hosts as expressed in Newman's Dream of Gerontius itself. As we have noted before, the tune is a setting from an oratorio and so this tune is very much a choir-piece. That said, there is a handful of hymns that can bear several tunes, suited to different occasions and moods, especially if the words are sung frquently. Praise to the Holiest is one such hymn deserving of its own repertoire of tunes - others could be O Jesus I have promised to serve thee to the end (Thornbury or Day of Rest), O thou who at thy eucharist didst pray (Song 1 or Unde et memores), At the Name of Jesus (Evelyns or King's Lynn), We pray the, heavenely Father (Merionydd or Dies Dominica, see below), O for a thousand tongues to sing (Richmond, Lydia or Lyngham), Jesus shall reign where'er the sun (Truro or Rimington) or (as we have discussed) Come ye faithful raise the strain (Ave Virgo Virginum or St John Damascene). Some of these choise reflect the historic usage of one or the other of the main hymnbooks familiar to Anglo-Catholics historically. They indicate how "Anglican patrimony" is no more a monolith than that of the Catholic Church - it is varied and many layered. Indeed this very array of rich gems to choose from is integral to the patrimony that Anglican have to offer to the rest of the Universal Church as members of the one Body of Christ.
So Billing is, you might think, unquestionably the favourite tune now. But where does it fit with the Patrimony that the Ordinariate is supposed to embody? Even allowing for a legitimate development to the liturgical culture, and indeed the exchange of treasures proper to ecumenical rapprochement and closer communion, is now the time to prefer it over tunes with a long Anglican pedigree and indeed a more historic association with Newman's words? Billing was supplied by Terry to appear in the 1912 Westminster Hymnal, of which he was the musical editor. This was issued as "the only collection authorised by the Hierarchy". Terry was a pioneer (at first at Downside Abbey with its school) in the revival of Renaissance music, notably the Catholic English composers Shephard, Philips, Byrd and Tallis. He continued this restoration work while first director of music at Westminster Cathedral, where from the outset he implemented the execution of plainchant according to the principles of Solesmes, following Pope St Pius X's motu proprio on Church music, Tra le Sollecitudini. His influence on succeeding generations of church musicians has been considerable, not least in the maintenance and development of the choir he established at Westminster with its world-renowned expertise in Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony, but also on other manifestations of English choral worship, the Anglican cathedrals, where likewise Gregorian chant has become more prominent (e.g. at Men's or Boy's only Evensongs) and the corpus of Renaissance and Tudor music has lodged itself (see this post on the influence of E H Fellowes restoring this patrimony to Anglicans). Terry is credited with the first liturgical performances of the Three and Five Part Masses of Byrd and Tallis' Lamentations. He was now narrowly Catholic musicologist either, having worked on part of a definitive collection of Händel's work, modern editions of Calvin's Psalter of 1539 and the Scottish Psalter of 1635, and the revival of a great series of Tudor anthems and motets in Latin and English from both Catholic and Protestant composers (for instance, Thomas Morley was a Protestant Cathedral organist, and the leading Elizabethan secular composer, but he was a devoted disciple of his master, the Catholic William Byrd, whose style he at first imitated in his own sacred music. So here is an "apostolic succession" - the roots of classic Anglican church Tudor music, once revived and restored in the nineteenth and twnetieth centuries to Catholics and Anglicans alike, reveal they lie in the music of the Catholic liturgy). But long before the official endorsement of Terry's great tune in 1912, Catholics and Anglicans had been singing Newman's verses to long established tunes, from not long after it first appeared in print in 1865. Within three years it was in the new supplement to Hymns Ancient & Modern, paired by Monk with Dykes' newly commissioned tune, Gerontius.
For copyright reasons, other Anglican collections were forced to use other tunes in the same measure of 8.6.8.6 (e.g. James Turle's Westminster). But what did Catholics use before Terry's tune came along? One tune in this metre, adapted for use in Catholic non-litrugical vernacular services, is the English Hymnal's tune for Praise to the Holiest - Richmond. This is also used as the tune for Charles Wesley's O for a thousand tongues to sing and the semi-Unitarian Samuel Johnson's City of God, how broad and far - unintentionally open to the most papalist of interpretations as paean to the One Church: Unharmed upon th eternal Rock the eternal City stands. It was written by Thomas Haweis, an Anglican clergyman of strong Evangelical convictions who also moved in the circle of the Countess of Huntingdon and served as her chaplain (the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion had begun in Methodism but found itself, like Wesley's own Connexion rejected from the fellowship of "Anglican comprehensiveness", like others since. Unlike Wesley, the Countess was drawn to Calvinism doctrine and this put them into public disagreement. In the end her Connexion's chapels mostly came into the Congregationalist Church (she had once been great friends with the father of English hymnody and leading Independent preacher or Dissenter, Isaac Watts), nowadays represented by the United Reformed Church.) Haweis had been a leading light in the London Missionary Society, an agency of the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion, and is credited with ensuring the Tahiti came first to be evangelised. Richmond may have been written for his hymn, O thou from whom all goodness flows (he also wrote the Christmas classic with a tune by Händel, Joy to the world). But the tune is only known to us nowadays in the form and harmony to which it was adapted by our friend, Samuel Webbe the Younger, organist of the Spanish Embassy Chapel sometime after 1817 and then St Patrick's Catholic Chapel in Liverpool. In 1800 he had published, with his eminent composer-father, a Collection of Original Psalm Tunes (melodies used by other English-speaking Christians for singing the metrical psalms to) and so there was evidently a custom of borrowing tunes and even texts from elsewhere in the field of English worship material that could be used at Catholic (extra-liturgical) services. Hence Richmond's use in the worship of Catholics; hence its transmission through adoption in the Free Churches for a range of hymns; hence its availability to be taken up by the music editor of the English Hymnal, Ralph Vaughan Williams, as the preferred tune for Praise to the Holiest. It has elements therefore of Cathoic patrimony, Dissenting patrimony, and Anglican patrimony and one would hope that it is deservedly conserved within the patrimony of the Ordinariate. Usually in D major, its tone is of bright confidence. Never modulating to a minor key, it makes no attempt to paint the words., other than to set forward the mystery of salvation doxologically. The English Hymnal was opposed to Victorian sentiment in music or self-regarding devotionalism in the words: its principle was of objective praise according to the liturgy and even hymns where "I" occurs are focussed on the Father or Christ, rather than personal feeling. The choice of Richmond skilfully reflects this aversion to sentiment. Perhaps though, Vaughan Williams might have done well to replace it with Billing at his 1933 revision of the English Hymnal. But he couldn't - by then it was already badged as the tune of the Catholics.
A good deal of the music for the Ordinary of the Mass quite rightly reflects Aysleford's role as a pilgrimage Church - the famous responsorial setting from Lourdes featured prominently. This is a version of the mass which has transcended the ecumenical divide between Catholics and Anglicans and has become much loved by all.
During Holy Communion, the choir sang Tallis's
O Lord, give thy Holy Spirit into our hearts, and lighten our understanding, that we may dwell in the fear of thy Name all the days of our life, that we may know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.Thomas Tallis was a Catholic, teacher of William Byrd, and a Court composer through from the reign of Henry VIII to Elizabeth I. As such he composed music for the Catholic and Reformed liturgies. This piece is possibly from 1566, eight years into the firmly re-established Anglican Reformation. Some of Tallis' early pieces for the Reformed Chapel Royal (both Edward VI's and Elizabeth's) were adaptations of his Latin compositions, but others likes this were fresh compositions to reflect the expressiveness of the English syllables, both melodically and harmonically, as they are repeated and come to a resolution. It is very short but a great example of what has come to be known as the new style of English anthem, right at the source, therefore, of a great tradition of music and liturgy. It is wonderful to think of this thus quintessentially Anglican anthem by a Catholic composer set as a Communion motet in a Catholic liturgy which represents the cementing of the Anglican and Catholic traditions in "corportate reunion".
Next the choir sang Ave verum Corpus, to the music of Sir Edward Elgar. This is another Catholic composer who occasionally composed for the Anglican liturgy and, as Master of the King's Musick, the Court. But this piece is one of three motets, Opus 2, published in 1887 for the Catholic Church of St George in Worcester, where he was organist in succession to his father. Elgar spoke of the great influence of the music at Worcester Cathedral on him, so here once more we can detect the interweaving of Catholic and Anglican patrimonies in a shared musical culture, respectively influencing their liturgical manifestation. We have seen how this was the case earlier in the century with the revival of Renaissance and Classical sacred music, as well as in plainsong. With Ave verum, we have a piece of music composed by a Catholic for the Catholic mass, having been influenced by the Anglican choral tradition at the point when it was being considerably renewed and raised in its standards, and also a piece that has long been borrowed and loved by Anglican choirs. A great deal of Anglican patrimony, and English Catholic patrimony, has more to do with what is received and held in common than at first appears.
Two congregational hymns are then given. First Newman's Firmly I believe and truly (also from the Dream of Gerontius). This did not make it into Hymns Ancient and Modern with Praise to the Holiest, but it at last arrived in the 1950 Revised edition, set to William Boyce's stately eighteenth century tune Halton Holgate. Here again we see what kind of Anglican you are by the tune your parish sings. For in more self-consciously Anglo-Catholic churches using the English Hymnal you sang the Cardinal's confession of faith in the Trinity and the binding teaching authority of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church to Shipston. One of the most appealing features of the English Hymnal is its remarkable work of conservation of folk tunes that would otherwise have died out. Partly out of Romanticism, partly out of an Anglo-Catholic incarnationalist Christian socialist respect for the arts and crafts perfected by working people on the land, Anglo-Catholics were among those who sought to conserve, revive, reanimate folk traditions. Some hoped to resurrect the life and religion of the medieval village from before the Reformation changes. At any rate, the collaboration of Vaughan Williams, Martin Shaw and Percy Dearmer (respectively organist and vicar of St Mary's, Primrose Hill in Hampstead) on the new Anglo-Catholic hymnbook coincided with a wide interest in English carols, folk music and dancing. The tune was collected at Halford, near Shipston-on-Stour in Warwickshire, a piece of pure English heritage that serves a great text written by the most illustrious English preacher and theologian of his generation, the Catholic Cardinal Newman, and how those words were taken to heart by Anglo-Catholics with a vision of the whole and undivided Church in the twentieth century. Terry's Westminster Hymnal sets the words to a German Catholic melody from Johann Corner's Gross Catholisch Gesangbuch of 1631 published at Cologne. Here it was sung to St Bernard of Cluny's hymn to Our Lady, Omni die dic Mariae, better known as Daily, daily sing to Mary. Although this hymn in English is often sung to the lilting Daily, Daily (said to be derived "from a French Paroissien", that is service book for the parish liturgy in French dioceses), some Catholic hymnbooks set it to the German tune still. The tune in more faithful arrangement of the melody and its rhythm in Corner's collection is to be found in the English Hymnal at number 120, where it sets a now discarded Good Friday hymn by Archbishop Maclagan of York (1826-1910).
In 1895 Maclagan had declared, "Reunion is in the air, on every side we hear the cry for unity," as the famous commission met in Rome to open up again and this time finally resolve the question of Anglican Orders, only to see his hopes dashed the next year with the issue of Apostolicae Curae declaring them absolutely null and utterly void. (The reply in 1897 to Leo XIII from Maclagan and Archbishop Frederick Temple of Canterbury effectively reopened the question, leading directly to a reaffirmation of the continued need for prayer for unity and indirectly to the fresh examination of issues at the informal Malines Conversations 1921-25. The Union of Bonn between Anglicans and Old Catholics (who supplied the so-called Dutch Touch of valid episcopal ordination according to the essential Catholic form and matter) further affected the question as did a change in Catholic teaching on the essential form and matter. But in 2008 Cardinal Kasper revealed that the intention of the Vatican formally to reopen the question in the service of unity had been abandoned following the Church of England's decision in principle to take steps towards the ordination of women to the episcopate, which the Catholic Church sees as finally taking the Anglican Communion beyond the bounds permitted by the ancient common tradition.)
Celebration Hymnal and Hymns Old & New set Firmly I believe and truly to the English Hymnal arrangement of Omni Die by William Smyth Rockstro (1823-95 fellow-student at the Leipzig Conservatoire, friend and biographer of Mendelssohn and composer of salon music), as an improvement on the Westminster Hymnal version. Other Catholic hymnbooks follow the Anglican suggestions of Stuttgart (Bethlehem, of noblest cities) Halton Holgate or Shipston. Shipston is a bit of an Anglo-Catholic badge, but it has a history that is deeper and perhaps, in any case, more confidently and purposefully carries these weighty words than any of the other tunes.
The second Holy Communion hymn was Vincent Stuckey Stratton Coles' We pray thee, heavenly Father. He was librarian and chaplain of the enduring memorial to the work and influence on the formation of discipleship in the Church among young undergraduates at Oxford and the promotion of scholarly and theological study of the faith, The Pusey House in St Giles, rising to be its principal from 1897-1909. He embodies Victorian Anglican patrimony in the Tractarian and Anglo-Catholic tradition of that generation. His eucharistic hymn is an enduring example of the Anglican tradition of teaching doctrine through doxology, specifically teaching Catholic faith and devotion through giving the faithful hymns by which to sing them in worship. Here it is a prayer for a fruitful Communion through the The Victorian Ancient and Modern tune is Dies Dominica by Dykes and the English Hymnal tune is the now unused Caerlleon, offering another Welsh tune, Merionydd, as an alternative. It is this tune, by W. Lloyd, that was used Aylesford. It is not surprising that the English Hymnal wins hands down for its words, and why even the users of the appealing tune by Dykes prefer them to those in Hymns Ancient and Modern. Although both are verses by Coles, the import of the hymn is eucharistic but quite different in each hymnal.
Here are the four verses as they appear in the English Hymnal:
We pray thee, heavenly Father,
to hear us in thy love,
and pour upon thy children
the unction from above;
that so in love abiding,
from all defilement free,
we may in pureness offer
our Eucharist to thee.
All that we have we offer,
All that we have we offer,
for it is all thine own,
all gifts, by thine appointment,
in bread and cup are shown;
one thing alone we bring not,
the wilfulness of sin,
and all we bring is nothing
save that which is within.
Within the pure oblation,
Within the pure oblation,
beneath the outward sign,
by that his operation, -
the Holy Ghost divine, -
lies hid the sacred Body,
lies hid the previous Blood,
once slain, now ever glorious,
of Christ, our Lord and God.
Wherefore, though all unworthy
Wherefore, though all unworthy
to offer sacrifice,
we pray that this our duty
be pleasing in thine eyes;
for praise, and thanks and worship,
for mercy and for aid,
the Catholic oblation
of Jesus Christ is made.
And here are the second, third and fourth verses, written in 1871 for a Confirmation class while curate at Wantage, as they appear in Hymns Ancient & Modern:
Be thou our Guide and Helper,
O Jesus Christ, we pray;
so may we well approach thee,
if thou wilt be the Way:
thou, very Truth, hast promised
to help us in our strife,
food of the weary pilgrim,
eternal Source of life.
And thou, Creator Spirit,
And thou, Creator Spirit,
look on us, we are thine;
renew us in thy graces,
upon our darkness shine;
that, with thy benediction,
upon our souls outpoured,
we may receive in gladness
the Body of the Lord.
O Trinity of Persons!
O Trinity of Persons!
O Unity most high!
On thee alone relying
thy servants would draw nigh;
unworthy in our weakness,
on thee our hope is stayed,
and blest by thy forgiveness
we will not be afraid.
Perhaps the hymn (especially the first four verses) did duty as a hymn for the confirmandi to sing as the priest recited quietly the Roman Canon that he had inserted after the Prayer of Consecration in the Prayer Book Office of Holy Communion. The last three verses seem aptly to modulate into a prayer for fruitful Communion, which is immediately distributed at this point in the old Anglican rite, prior thus to the Lord's Prayer. Clearly it is important to be discriminating in mediating elements of the Anglican Church's patrimony to the wider Catholic Church in the Ordinariate.
Finally, the service ended with the great hymn to Our Lady of Walsingham popular at the Anglican shrine, sung to Pilgrims by the eminent Victorian organist Henry Smart, Joy to thee, Queen. Thus the liturgy began and ended on the ascription of joy in the risen Lord to the Mother of God.
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