The Catholic League

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity: 25 January Overall Intention

2012-01-25T00:01:00.000Z

The Unity of all Humanity in the Charity and Truth of Christ

Father, we pray for the Unity of Christians. Forgive us the sin which separates us and maintains divisions among us. May your Spirit penetrate all our souls and draw us closer to Christ in holiness. Today we pray for the unity of all humanity in the charity and truth of Christ. Give all human beings, your children, an ever greater holiness; and lead us along your path, to unity in the love and truth of Christ.

Lord in your mercy: Hear our prayer.

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity
Paul Couturier, Apostle of Unity

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity: 24 January Intention

2012-01-24T00:01:00.001Z

The Sanctification of People in other Faiths

Father, we pray for the Unity of Christians. Forgive us the sin which separates us and maintains divisions among us. May your Spirit penetrate all our souls and draw us closer to Christ in holiness. Give us an ever greater holiness and lead us along your path, to unity in the love and truth of Christ. We pray today for people of other faiths. May we and they be enlightened by your Spirit, walk before you with a sincere heart, be made more perfect witnesses to your love and advance on the way of salvation.

Lord in your mercy: Hear our prayer.

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity: 23 January Intention

2012-01-23T00:01:00.005Z

The Sanctification of the Jewish People

Father, we pray for the Unity of Christians. Forgive us the sin which separates us and maintains divisions among us. May your Spirit penetrate all our souls and draw us closer to Christ in holiness. Give us an ever greater holiness and lead us along your path, to unity in the love and truth of Christ. We pray today for the Jewish people. By faith may they continue with us to advance in love of your name and attain the fullness of redemption.

Lord in your mercy: Hear our prayer.

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity: 22 January Intention

2012-01-22T00:01:00.000Z

The Sanctification of all Protestant Christians

Father, we pray for the Unity of Christians. Forgive us the sin which separates us and maintains divisions among us. May your Spirit penetrate all our souls and draw us closer to Christ in holiness. Today we pray for all Protestant and Pentecostal Christians. Give Evangelical, Reformed and Pentecostal Christians, with all Christians together, an ever greater holiness and lead us all along your path, to unity in the love and truth of Christ.

Lord in your mercy: Hear our prayer.

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity
Paul Couturier, Apostle of Unity

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity: 21 January Intention

2012-01-21T00:01:00.001Z

The Sanctification of Anglican Christians

Father, we pray for the Unity of Christians. Forgive us the sin which separates us and maintains divisions among us. May your Spirit penetrate all our souls and draw us closer to Christ in holiness. Today we pray for all Anglican Christians. Give Anglicans and all Christians an ever greater holiness and lead us all along your path, to unity in the love and truth of Christ.

Lord in your mercy: Hear our prayer.

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity
Paul Couturier, Apostle of Unity

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity: 20 January Intention

2012-01-20T00:01:00.001Z

The Sanctification of Orthodox Christians

Father, we pray for the Unity of Christians. Forgive us the sin which separates us and maintains divisions among us. May your Spirit penetrate all our souls and draw us closer to Christ in holiness. Today we pray for all Orthodox Christians. Give Orthodox and all Christians an ever greater holiness and lead us all along your path, to unity in the love and truth of Christ.

Lord in your mercy: Hear our prayer.

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity
Paul Couturier, Apostle of Unity

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity: 19 January Intention

2012-01-19T00:01:00.002Z

The Sanctification of Catholic Christians

Father, we pray for the Unity of Christians. Forgive us the sin which separates us and maintains divisions among us. May your Spirit penetrate all our souls and draw us closer to Christ in holiness. Today we pray for all Catholic Christians. Give Catholics and all Christians together an ever greater holiness and lead us all along your path, to unity in the love and truth of Christ.

Lord in your mercy: Hear our prayer.

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity
Paul Couturier, Apostle of Unity

The Holy Father at the Opening of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

2012-01-18T23:25:00.002Z

At the General Audience on Wednesday, 18 January 2012:

Dear brothers and sisters,
Today marks the beginning of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, which for more than a century has been celebrated by Christians of all Churches and ecclesial Communities, in order to invoke that extraordinary gift for which the Lord Jesus Himself prayed during the Last Supper, before His Passion: “that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me” (John 17:21). The practice of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity was introduced in 1908 by Father Paul Wattson, founder of an Anglican religious community that subsequently entered the Catholic Church. The initiative received the blessing of Pope St. Pius X and was then promoted by Pope Benedict XV, who encouraged its celebration throughout the Church with the Brief, Romanorum Pontificum, promulgated Feb. 25, 1916.

The octave of prayer was developed and perfected in the 1930s by Abbé Paul Couturier of Lyon, who promoted prayer “for the unity of the Church as Christ wills, and in accordance with the instruments He wills.” In his later writings, Abbé Couturier sees this Week as a way of allowing the prayer of Christ to “enter into and penetrate the entire Christian Body”; it must grow until it becomes “an immense, unanimous cry of the whole People of God” who ask God for this great gift. And it is precisely during the Week of Christian Unity that the impetus given by the Second Vatican Council toward seeking full communion among all of Christ’s disciples, each year finds one of its most efficacious expressions. This spiritual gathering, which unites Christians of all traditions, increases our awareness of the fact that the unity to which we tend will not only be the result of our efforts, but will rather be a gift received from above, a gift for which we must constantly pray.

Each year, the booklets for the Week of Prayer are prepared by an ecumenical group from a different region of the world. I would like to pause to consider this point. This year, the texts were proposed by a mixed group comprised of representatives of the Catholic Church and of the Polish Ecumenical Council, which includes the country’s various Churches and ecclesial Communities. The documentation was then reviewed by a committee made up of members of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity and of the Faith and Order Commission of the Council of Churches. This work, carried out together in two stages, is also a sign of the desire for unity that animates Christians, and of the awareness that prayer is the primary way of attaining full communion, since it is in being united with the Lord that we move toward unity.

The theme of the Week this year - as we heard - is taken from the First Letter to the Corinthians: “We Will All Be Changed By the Victory of Our Lord Jesus Christ” - His victory will transform us. And this theme was suggested by the large ecumenical Polish group I just mentioned, which - in reflecting on their own experience as a nation -- wanted to underscore how strong a support the Christian faith is in the midst of trial and upheaval, like those that have characterized Poland’s history. After ample discussion, a theme was chosen that focuses on the transforming power of faith in Christ, particularly in light of the importance it has for our prayer for the visible unity of Christ’s Body, the Church. This reflection was inspired by the words of St. Paul who, addressing himself to the Church of Corinth, speaks about the perishable nature of what belongs to our present life - which is also marked by the experience of the “defeat” that comes from sin and death - compared to what brings us Christ’s victory over sin and death in His paschal mystery.

The particular history of the Polish nation, which knew times of democratic coexistence and of religious liberty - as in the 16th century - has been marked in recent centuries by invasions and defeat, but also by the constant struggle against oppression and by the thirst for freedom. All of this led the ecumenical group to reflect more deeply on the true meaning of “victory” - what is victory? - and “defeat.” Compared with “victory” understood in terms of triumphalism, Christ suggests to us a very different way, one that does not pass by way of force and power. Indeed, He affirms: “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all” (Mark 9:35). Christ speaks of a victory through suffering love, through mutual service, help, new hope and concrete comfort given to the least, to the forgotten, to those who are rejected. For all Christians, the highest expression of this humble service is Jesus Christ Himself - the total gift He makes of Himself, the victory of His love over death on the Cross, which shines in the light of Easter morning.

We can take part in this transforming “victory” if we allow ourselves to be transformed by God - but only if we work for the conversion of our lives, and if this transformation leads to conversion. This is the reason why the Polish ecumenical group considered particularly fitting for their own reflection the words of St. Paul: “We will all be changed by the victory of Christ, Our Lord” (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:51-58).

The full and visible unity of Christians for which we long demands that we allow ourselves to be ever more perfectly transformed and conformed to the image of Christ. The unity for which we pray requires interior conversion, both communal and personal. It is not simply a matter of kindness and cooperation; above all, we must strengthen our faith in God, in the God of Jesus Christ, who has spoken to us and who made Himself one of us; we must enter into new life in Christ, which is our true and definitive victory; we must open ourselves to one another, cultivating all the elements of that unity that God has preserved for us and gives to us ever anew; we must feel the urgency of bearing witness before the men of our times to the living God, who made Himself known in Christ.

The Second Vatican Council put the ecumenical pursuit at the center of the Church’s life and work: “The Sacred Council exhorts all the Catholic faithful to recognize the signs of the times and to take an active and intelligent part in the work of ecumenism” (Unitatis redintegratio, 4). Blessed John Paul II stressed the essential nature of this commitment, saying: “This unity, which the Lord has bestowed on his Church and in which he wishes to embrace all people, is not something added on, but stands at the very heart of Christ’s mission. Nor is it some secondary attribute of the community of his disciples. Rather, it belongs to the very essence of this community (Ut unum sint, 9). The ecumenical task is therefore a responsibility of the whole Church and of all the baptized, who must make the partial, already existing communion between Christians grow into full communion in truth and charity. Therefore, prayer for unity is not limited to this Week of Prayer but rather must become an integral part of our prayer, of the life of prayer of all Christians, in every place and in every time, especially when people of different traditions meet and work together for the victory, in Christ, over all that is sin, evil, injustice, and that violates human dignity.

From the time the ecumenical movement was born over a century ago, there has always been a clear recognition of the fact that the lack of unity among Christians prevents the Gospel from being more effectively proclaimed, since it jeopardizes our credibility. How can we give a convincing witness if we are divided? Certainly, as regards the fundamental truths of the faith, much more unites us than divides us. But divisions remain, and they concern even various practical and ethical questions - causing confusion and distrust, and weakening our ability to hand on Christ’s saving Word. In this regard, we do well to remember the words of Blessed John Paul II, who in the Encyclical Ut unum sint, speaks of the damage caused to Christian witness and to the proclamation of the Gospel by the lack of unity (cf. no. 98,99). This is a great challenge for the new evangelization, which can be more fruitful if all Christians together announce the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and give a common response to the spiritual thirst of our times.

The Church’s journey, like that of peoples’, is in the hands of the Risen Christ, who is victorious over the death and injustice that He bore and suffered on behalf of all mankind. He makes us sharers in His victory. Only He is capable of transforming us and making us - from weak and hesitant men - into strong and courageous people working for good. Only He can save us from the negative consequences of our divisions. Dear brothers and sisters, I invite everyone to be more intensely united in prayer during this Week for Unity, so that common witness, solidarity and collaboration may grow among Christians, as we await the glorious day when together we may profess the faith handed down by the Apostles, and together celebrate the Sacraments of our transformation in Christ.

By his teaching, his example and his paschal mystery, the Lord has shown us the way to a victory obtained not by power, but by love and concern for those in need. Faith in Christ and interior conversion, both individual and communal, must constantly accompany our prayer for Christian unity. During this Week of Prayer, let us ask the Lord in a particular way to strengthen the faith of all Christians, to change our hearts and to enable us to bear united witness to the Gospel. In this way we will contribute to the new evangelization and respond ever more fully to the spiritual hunger of the men and women of our time.

© Copyright 2012 - Libreria Editrice Vaticana

Solemn Evensong: for the First Anniverary of the Ordinariate: Some Patrimonial Reflections

2012-01-18T08:36:00.007Z

Fr Mark Woodruff writes:

Just after the New Year, I went to the Cotswolds to visit a retired evangelical Anglican archdeacon friend of mine. Without hesitation I would say that he is western Catholic, a true churchman, to his finger tips. The retreats for priests he used to give were pearls of the Wisdom of the Scriptures and the Church’s Tradition he had received in the Church of England and was passing on to those who had ears to hear. One of the things that has united the Anglican archdeacon and the Catholic priest, grateful for his own roots and formation in the Church of England, is our love for the rites of the Book of Common Prayer, with its daily rhythm of Morning and Evening Prayer, the pastoral offices and the “noble simplicity” of its Office of Holy Communion. Once, he asked Graham Leonard, the retired bishop of London, whether there was anything he regretted about becoming a Roman Catholic. “I don’t regret anything for a single minute; but the one thing I really do miss is Evensong. We have nothing quite like it.” My archdeacon friend said he had always regarded Evensong as a perfect tool for pastoral mission, with its near perfect structure of reverent beauty, music, preaching, Scriptures and prayer, for drawing in those who were moved to worship but not yet ready for the sacramental life. “The Catholic Church should really give some thought to adopting Anglican Evensong,“ he said. “But it has!” I replied; “and I am going to Choral Evensong as a service fully of the Catholic Church next weekend.” He was as moved as I was to think that this peerless liturgy, increasingly difficult to find even in Anglican parishes, has been embraced as a treasure by the Catholic Church from the Anglican tradition, as a foretaste of the unity of all Christendom in which all our churches will own the gifts given to each other for the Universal Church.

18 years ago I gave away my surplices, scarves and hood to friends, as I prepared to enter into the fullness ofcommunion in the Catholic Church. I was one of many who was told by Cardinal Hume to “bring your Anglicanism with you”; but there were some aspects of it that lamentably I was leaving behind - “friends I have loved long since and lost awhile,” you might say. One of these was classic Anglican worship. From now on, I participated in it as an ecumenical guest. It was my tradition, yet it wasn’t. As a former Anglican cathedral precentor, this was something I loved inside out, but could never really contribute to or participate in from my place within Christ’s Church as a Catholic. Until now.

On Sunday, I joined over a dozen priests, his excellency the Ordinary of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, Bishop Peter Elliot of Melbourne, Australia, the Abbot and several of the brethren of Farnborough, a dozen Knights of Malta and a congregation of hundreds for Solemn Evensong at the Westminster diocese’s Church of St James, Spanish Place in London to give thanks for the first year of life of the Ordinariate of our Lady of Walsingham. St James’ was the perfect setting. It may have a venerable history as the Chapel of the Embassy of Spain in origin; but it is also a neo-Gothic English church in the Early English style (with some transitional-Norman features) and you could be forgiven for thinking you were in a corner of Westminster Abbey, Salisbury Cathedral or Christ Church, Dublin. It felt like this was Anglican Evensong on home territory.

As the liturgy progressed, a profound sense visited me, that something that I had laid down for the sake of Catholic communion was being restored to me. It took me back to my teenage membership of the choir at St Paul’s Marton in Lancashire, which somehow integrated a Roman-oriented feel to the conduct of worship with the traditional services and music of the Church of England – Ireland in F, and Stanford in B flat (under the gently but impassioned direction of Mr Ray Fishwick).I had suggested to Fr Christopher Pearson of the Ordinariate, who organised the celebration, that to be truly Anglican he and his brethren should wear surplice, scarf and hood. Of course, not many of them had either possessed or used this vesture in their Anglican days. So, here we were, nearly forty years later, processing into Evensong in cassock and cotta to the strains of Anglican choral music, just like Fr John Cayton and Fr Maurice Haigh in Marton of yore. Of course this was Solemn Evensong and it struck me how like in dignity and simplicity the ceremony was when I was a student at the College of the Resurrection at Mirfield. I was deeply inspired; I knew every word by heart and every note of the music, down to the harmony of the chants and hymns. Afterwards, speaking to seasoned Catholics, to generous Anglican friends who had come specially - in support and out of affinity – and to many newly made friends among the faithful and clergy of the Ordinariate, we discussed time and again the point that had dawned on us: that there was nothing distinctive of Anglicanism that could not be lived in communion with the Catholic Church as it now is. Nothing that is true of the classic Anglican tradition, its orthodox teaching and its liturgical and spiritual treasury, requires separation for protecting its integrity or principles.

Prior to Evensong, the organist, Iestyn Evans, played Herbert Howells’ Psalm Prelude Set One, Number One (opus 32). This is perhaps the most famous, soul-searching and best loved of his organ pieces. Howells’ music for the organ and the services of the Anglican Church has such a distinctive voice that, beyond the cornerstone laid by the music of Charles Villiers Stanford, it has set the tone for what we now instinctively recognise as the characteristic style of Anglican liturgical singing and organ improvisation. He was a student of Stanford, Hubert Parry and Charles Wood at the Royal College of Music, following earlier training under Herbert Brewer at Gloucester Cathedral. It is a nice coincidence that one of his earliest pieces of liturgical music, the Mass in the Dorian Mode, was first performed at Westminster Cathedral soon after he arrived at the College, thanks to the interest of Richard Runciman Terry, the cathedral’s great first director of music. The first set of Psalm Preludes dates from 1915-16; and the first piece especially betrays the profound effect on him of Vaughan Williams and his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis that had so moved him at the 1910 Three Choirs Festival. Dating from the First World War, each Psalm Prelude in this set, arguably, should be considered alongside the war poets, with the events at Ypres, Gallipoli and Verdun. Set One, Number One is a meditation on Psalm 34.6: This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles.

Then came George Thalben-Ball’s Elegy. Thalben Ball was a fellow student of Howells’, a prodigious pianist, who gave the first English performance of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto at the Royal College of Music at the age of 19. He became organist of the Temple Church, taking its choir to international fame with the recording of Mendelssohn’s Hear my Prayer and its solo, O for the wings of a dove. The BBC’s daily service on the radio during the Second World War came from the Temple and the Elegy began as an improvisation when the service ended a few minutes earlier than expected one day. It was an immediate “hit” with the public.

Then the procession of the Ordinary and other clergy made its way into church with Sir Hubert Parry’s Introit for the Coronation of King Edward VII in 1902, I was glad when they said unto me, We will go into the house of the Lord (Psalm 122, Laetatus sum). The striking introduction and the interplay of choirs and organ or brass fanfares were actually written for a new version, for the coronation of King George V. Parry’s original was more reverential in tone. The rewritten piece, however, has been used time and again to match national and local services of joyful celebration ever since. It is known to be a great favourite of the Prince of Wales’, who urged it be used for the Bridal Procession at the marriage of his son, now HRH the Duke of Cambridge, to Kate Middleton.

The responses (which are vestiges of the recitation of Psalm 51 (the Miserere) at a dawn vigil and Psalm 70 (Deus in adiutorium) as an introductory psalm at offices) were sung to the setting by Bernard Rose written for Magdalen College, Oxford (which will figure again later). Since publication in 1961, their popularity has never waned. Strangely, they were intoned by a member of the choir, not the Officiant or another precenting priest.

Psalms 114 (In exitu Israel) and 115 (Non nobis, Domine) followed, sung exquisitely to familiar Anglican chants. The choice was a perfect match for the words, as the writer cannot remember which chant was used: possibly the Reverend Sir Frederick Gore Ouseley’s double chant in A flat. If so, Ouseley is an embodiment of the nineteenth century nineteenth century English church music and Anglo-Catholic patrimony. A baronet, he was ordained to serve as curate at St Paul’s, Knightsbridge, and its foundation to exemplify the ideals of the Tractarian and Ritualist revival, St Barnabas’, Pimlico. He rose to be Professor of Music at Oxford and founded St Michael’s College, Tenbury Wells, his school for the renewal and revival of English choral church music. His chants and other settings of the Anglican liturgy were thus written to bring that revival about. His most famous student and disciple was Sir John Stainer, his organist at St Michael’s for a while, who not only eventually succeeded him as Professor of Music, but also raised standards in cathedral worship from his influential posts as organist at Magdalen College, Oxford and then at St Paul’s Cathedral. His researches into early music began to establish in English liturgy the treasures of Tudor composers, unheard for centuries. He was also a champion of the adaptation and revival of plainsong in Anglican worship. Thus he was at the heart of a movement, led from the cathedrals he influenced, to bring high aspirations even into small parishes for excellent choral leadership of psalm-singing, hymns and anthems.

In a slight departure from the order of Evensong, the lessons were introduced and ended in the same way as in the new Roman Missal (“A reading from….” and “The Word of the Lord: Thanks be to God”). This is not the custom even at Roman rite Vespers or Readings. Let us hope that at future Evensongs the classic and familiar forms will be allowed their rhythms: “Here beginneth the seventh verse of the fifteenth chapter of the Book Deuteronomy” and “Here endeth the First Lesson.” The second lesson was from II Thessalonians 2. 13-14.

Although in Anglicanism, both in the Catholic tradition and in the Cathedrals, it can be customary to sing an office hymn after the first lesson and before the Magnificat (a tradition consolidated with the publication of the English Hymnal in 1906, which gave a complete set for Morning and Evening Prayer, mostly translated by John Mason Neale and set to the Sarum form of the tunes), this practice was not followed at St James’, even though it was a Solemn Evensong and incense was to be prepared for the Ordinary to cense the altar. Monsignor Newton was attended throughout by two deacons, one transitional and the other permanent, each vested in dalmatics.

The canticles were to a setting by Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, from the magnificent Service in C from 1909. This is Irish Anglican patrimony. A Dubliner, he studied at Cambridge, Leipzig and Berlin. His orchestral music is strongly influenced by his German experience, and owes a debt especially to Brahms. His attitude to the Anglican Church to which he belonged, in comparing it to the Lutheran churches he encountered in Saxony and Prussia, would have been shared with many of his ordinary Anglican contemporaries in the second half of the nineteenth century: that the Church of England was a Protestant Church alongside and essentially like those of Germany. He had no Anglo-Catholic inclinations, but may have seen the need for Anglican liturgy to aspire to the musical standards and artistic traditions so vigorous historically in the Lutheran church-world. This interplay with the culture of fine Protestant sacred music was a factor in the creativity of some of the Renaissance and Baroque Catholic composers (as we have noted before); so it is interesting to note the musical absorbency of Anglicanism, too, in the century of the rediscovery of Bach’s music, and the long forgotten works of the first composers for the English liturgy. The craftsmanship of Stanford’s writing marked a turning point in the English tradition of church music and set high new standards. His pupils included Gustav Holst, Herbert Howells and Ralph Vaughan Williams; their calibre may have surpassed their master’s, but there is no doubt as to the debt they owe him for the skills he passed on to them. And even with their very different compositional styles and inspirations, it is still Stanford whose music seems to provide the familiar terra firma on which other forms of sacred Anglican church music, some earlier and some later, can stand and excel.

After the Third Collect, the rite of Evensong as authorised for use in the Ordinariate revealed a small detail that showed the effect of fullness of communion in the Catholic Church: as it is a custom to commemorate the dead at Vespers, the Ordinary greeted all the faithful and said, “May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.”

The anthem was Henry Balfour Gardiner’s lush Evening Hymn. This great favourite is one of the few compositions of his that survive. He was highly self-critical, probably destroying much of his own work while generously promoting that of others, both financially and as a conductor. Gustav Holst and Frederick Delius owed much to this man’s benefaction. Evening Hymn is really a sumptuous setting of the Compline hymn, Te lucis ante terminum and comes from the period he was teaching music at Winchester College.

The Ordinary’s glad and thoughtful sermon, a reflection on Newman’s thinking as he responded to the call of God to become a Catholic, and ending with an act of trust in God for the future and what may be called of the Ordinariate, may be found on the Ordinariate website.

The hymns – and their tunes - were all chosen by Mgr Newton himself. Thus Newman’s Praise to the Holiest in the height from the Dream of Gerontius was sung to Sir Arthur Somervell’s Chorus Angelorum. See our earlier post on this tune.

Ready for the Procession of the Blessed Sacrament, the choir sang O Salutaris Hostia by Edward Elgar. For a century and more, Anglican Catholics took devotion to the Blessed Sacrament to their heart. By them it was sung in English long before Roman Catholics followed suit, and by them it was maintained long after it practically disappeared from many Catholic parishes. So Benediction was in English, but O Salutaris and Tantum Ergo were in Latin. Elgar’s Catholic church music is remarkable because it belongs to the tradition of English Cathedral church music, for which he also wrote. Once again, here we see, long before the Decree on Ecumenism and Ut Unum Sint, an exchange of treasures and gifts, or at least giftedness, between the Anglican and Catholic churches. By the same token, both motets form part of the regular repertoire of Anglican choral foundations – far from just being Latin and Roman Catholic they have been warmly embraced as part of the Anglican patrimony for years. Tantum ergo was to the setting by Déodat de Séverac, the Provençal composer of operas and piano music, the promise of whose mature, melodic style was cut short at 49 in 1921.

The hymns for the Procession of the Blessed Sacrament, at which the Knights of Malta provided an escort and over which they carried the canopy, began with William Chadderton Dix’s Alleluia, sing to Jesus. Many of Dix’s hymns were conceived during a time of great depression, following a serious illness of which he almost died aged 29. It is thus a hymn of the deepest hope and confidence, and the phrases, “not as orphans are we left in sorrow now,” “shall our hearts forget his promise, “I am with you evermore?”” and “Earth’s Redeemer, plead for me” are thus especially poignant. But it did not come to public attention until publication in 1867, after which it was immediately snapped up for inclusion in the Anglo-Catholic Hymns Ancient and Modern as an Ascensiontide and Communion hymn. The tune, Hyfrydol, was by Dix’s mid-nineteenth century contemporary Rowland H. Prichard. The wedding of the verses and the perfect tune for them seems not to have come about until the inspired editing of the music of the English Hymnal in 1906 by Ralph Vaughan Williams, who rearranged the harmonies in the form familiar to most choirs today.

The second hymn was George Hugh Bourne’s Lord, enthroned in heavenly splendour from 1874. This is another Ascensiontide Communion hymn, perfectly fitting a Procession of the Blessed Sacrament into the Holy of Holies, the sanctuary. Vaughan Williams set this to another Welsh tune of rare and powerful melody in G minor, Bryn Calfaria; but most people prefer a Victorian tune in a major key; so at Evensong we followed the Ancient and Modern tradition and used Sir George Clement Martin’s St Helena from 1889. Martin followed Stainer as organist of St Paul’s Cathedral. He wrote the Te Deum that was sung on the steps of St Paul’s for the famous Diamond Jubilee open air service, celebrating Queen Victoria’s 60 years on the throne.

After a prayer for the Pope, we joined in saying before the Blessed Sacrament exposed the beautiful General Thanksgiving from the Book of Common Prayer. Generations of Anglican confirmation candidates had to know this, as well as the Commandments and the Creed, by heart. It was written not by Cranmer in the sixteenth century, but in 1661 by Edward Reynolds, a gentle Puritan, who had succeeded John Donne as Preacher at Lincoln’s Inn and later submitted to what looked like the final Presbyterian settlement of the Cromwellian Commonwealth. Yet he did not accept Presbyterianism as the sole doctrine or system to the exclusion of others, and did not differ from the teaching and order of the Church of England, provided it might rightly be governed. He believed, for instance, that bishops were acceptable as long as they were not prelates and sole rulers, but fellow-presbyters with the other ministers and governing in council with them. (This is not so dissimilar from the synodal form of governance provided by Anglicanorum Coetibus for the Ordinariates – or indeed from the spirit of Lumen Gentium!) Others were more resolute in their defence of the old order of the Church of England and lost their livings and office. Reynolds benefited from his moderation and equivocation, becoming Dean of Christ Church and Vice Chancellor of the University of Oxford, although he advocated mitigation and reason in the application of the Commonwealth Solemn League and Covenant, rather than intolerance and severity. It was his opposition to the Commonwealth’s later test of allegiance to the English state, so as finally to exclude the monarchy, that finally lost Reynolds his position of influence from the University of Oxford. He returned to his parish at Braunston and was soon given the living of St Lawrence Jewry in the City of London. With further change and uncertainty in church life, as well as the burden of an unstable constitution, sustained not, after all, by Parliament but by force of arms and dictatorship, it was Reynolds who preached before Parliament in April 1660, condemning the uncertainties and wrongs of the preceding years and calling for a settled constitution to be brought back in its old form. In May he was sent by Parliament to Breda in the Netherlands to ask King Charles II to return to England as monarch and accept a moderate form of episcopal governance in the Church. Upon the king’s Restoration, such was his renown for learning, preaching and personal holiness, Reynolds was appointed a Court preacher with nine other Presbyterian divines. On the basis of the king’s Royal Declaration calling for conciliation between the Anglican and Presbyterian parties, he accepted episcopal ordination and the see of Norwich. But his conciliatory efforts at the Savoy Conference (that had resulted from the Declaration) were to no avail; and Parliament, now solidly Anglican and in no mood for accommodating the Presbyterians, refused to back the King’s efforts at a settlement. He continued at Norwich, seeing himself as a chief presbyter among other presbyters, tireless in the relief of the poor and conciliatory to those who were now cast as Dissenters and Non-Conformists. A Puritan, he was not a Calvinist. He did not preach a narrow doctrine of election but an Evangelical proclamation of the gospel that is open to all. Of the Father, he wrote, “Adam looks on Him as a judge, and hides - the prodigal looks on Him as a father and returns”. The magnificent General Thanksgiving he wrote conveys his spirit of God’s generous love that provides freely “the means of grace and the hope of glory”. Its sense of relief at the restoration of order in society and government after years of strife, turmoil and bloodshed is expressed in blessing the Father of mercies. Its hope for unity and peace in the Church is found in the typically Puritan resolve on a simple, thankful life in God’s service and the pursuit of holiness. More or less the same sentiments were voiced by Fr Paul Couturier in the 1930s, when he called all Christians to pray that they might become united in their hearts and outdo each other in aspiring to an ever greater holiness that would inevitably bring them closer in union to Christ and thus each other. It is amazing that this prayer by a Presbyterian, Puritan, Evangelical bishop is now a prayer cherished in the Catholic Church. Perhaps Reynolds, if he had lived in the mid twentieth century would have readily recognised his own faith in the Church of Christ as it was expressed in the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church at Vatican II, Lumen Gentium. So perhaps this miracle in the lex orandi is nothing more than the natural outcome of the lex credendi we all held together all along.

Before the Blessed Sacrament we stood for the Te Deum, to the setting in B flat by Stanford. At the Coronation of King Edward VII in 1902, choirs up and down the land chose to sing Sir George Martin’s Te Deum composed for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. But at Westminster Abbey, it was Stanford’s Te Deum in B flat that was chosen. Stanford composed a new fanfare and introduction for the occasion, based on the solemn intonation of Gregorian canticle verses in tone eight.

We genuflected, as I just about remember doing as a child, at “We therefore pray thee, help thy servants, whom thou hast redeemed with thy precious Blood”. After the Te Deum, we knelt at de Séverac’s Tantum Ergo, the versicle, response and Collect (in English), before the Ordinary gave us Benediction with the Blessed Sacrament. The Divine Praises were followed by Psalm 117 (Laudate Dominum) with its antiphon, Adoremus in aeternum, to the Roman (not Sarum) tone six.

The final voluntary was the Finale from Louis Vierne’s First Organ Symphony. Vierne was organist of Notre Dame de Paris from 1900 to 1937. He was a man who, throughout his life, suffered – from the almost full loss of his sight, the loss of his wife in a divorce, the loss of his two brothers in World War I and an organ in a terrible state of repair. He raised the funds in America to restore it and this kind of determination and patience deeply impressed his many pupils, who recognised it in his kindness and patience with them. This persevering and imperturbable faith, enduring life’s troubles, reveals itself in his music. In the Finale there is the joy and exultation, but also an air of vigorous effort and even some hint of anxiety. Perhaps it was the perfect piece to choose to end this magnificent and so gratifying celebration. As Mgr Newton said in his sermon, quoting Dag Hammarskjold, surveying an exhilarating and challenging first year, slightly daunted by what may lay ahead, but confident that all has been and will be in God’s hands, “For what has been, thanks; to what will be, yes.”

Fr Keith told me they originally doubted whether people would come up to London on a Sunday and that the special Evensong would only attract a few. The Church, however, was packed with members of the Ordinariate and its friends, both Catholic and Anglican. At the reception afterwards, the Ordinary was generous in his thanks to all those who had helped and encouraged him and the Ordinariate in the past year, including the Catholic League. But what the strong body of support showed was more than money and good will in the past: here was the strong desire to sustain this initiative into a brave future by the grace of God.

It also showed that there is not only an urgent need for the Ordinariate to obtain its own buildings as the focus and bases for its unique mission, life of worship and thus a vitally needed witness. There is evidently determined and reliable support that could help to bring this about – and clearly, judging by the hundreds who came, there is a need in people that is seeking to be met.

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity: 18 January Intention

2012-01-18T07:44:00.001Z

The Unity of all Christians

Father, your Son prayed on the night before he died that we his disciples might be one as the Father and the Son are one. Today we pray for the Unity of all Christians. Look not on our sins, but on the faith of your Church; and grant us the peace and unity that is in accordance with Christ's will.

Lord in your mercy: Hear our prayer.

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity
Paul Couturier, Apostle of Unity

New Year Newsletter - England's New Ecumenical Directions

2012-01-08T12:30:00.001Z

Fr Mark Woodruff writes:

The last couple of years have been pointing to a new future for the English Church. First, the several jurisdictions of the Orthodox Church in Britain that are part of overseas national or regional Churches decided to live and act together. From now on, we will be talking less of the Russian, Greek, Serbian and other Orthodox Churches in this country and more of an Orthodox Church of Great Britain. Archbishop Gregorios of Thyateira and Great Britain remains the ruling bishop of the churches belonging to the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in this kingdom, but he is now to be known more widely as the President of the Assembly of Orthodox Hierarchs of Great Britain. Orthodoxy is not composed of national and provincial churches like Anglicanism and Lutheranism; it is supposed to be a single entity and thus manifest the universal Church of Christ wherever it is found – a living reality and an ecumenical objective on which it is united even now with the Catholic Church. So the new arrangements will bring its true nature and purpose to the fore. The Orthodox Church is not ethnic, or exotic: it is a local Church in Britain too, an integral part of the universal Church as we know it in these islands. Estimates are that in Britain there are half a million Eastern Christians of various backgrounds. This often disregarded body is a vast gift from God to sustain and reinvigorate the mission and service of all the Churches in this land. It is also his sign.

When the pastor for all the Churches and the servant of their unity, Pope Benedict, visited us in September 2010, he told us that the only way we can give a convincing account of the hope that lies within us is by unity – not good relations, but unity. This can be found in none other than the faith that the Church has received from the apostles. What God is painstakingly making clear in the different Orthodox Churches in Britain shows us that you do not have to abandon your identity, your traditions, your history or your ethos to be one in life and mission. There are still Greek, Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Antiochian, Arabic and other kinds of Orthodox dioceses and parishes, including a kind of English Orthodox Ordinariate – the largely ex-Anglican Antiochian Deanery of the United Kingdom. Each retains its rich and distinctive identity, the sense of family-belonging among its members, its precious cultural and liturgical traditions. But, without any threat to their integrity, they are not only in full communion between each other. They are working on how to be one body in British society, for all the world to see. As Pope Benedict said on how to achieve Christian Unity back in 1972, they are "entering more deeply into the mystery of the Church where you are, to discover that its reality is none other than one". Through them, God is showing us the road we must take to unity. There are tensions and problems and it may take many decades to achieve it. But internal Orthodox ecumenism is being determined by engaging with each other in hope, to deal with difficulties and disagreements, not by separation and estrangement. This is exactly what Pope Benedict was talking about: ecumenical progress is about plumbing the spiritual depths: getting under ecclesiastical self-interest, and settling in the Tradition that we have received.

Secondly, the black-majority and black-led Pentecostal Churches can no longer be seen simply as overseas denominations or individual congregations planted in Britain over the last half century. They form an increasingly coherent movement within the body of the Church in Britain. They are increasingly diverse. They are often serving people at the greatest risk in some of Britain’s most deprived areas, reminiscent of the zeal for service that brought practical relief and the good news of Jesus Christ by the hands of the Anglo-Catholic movement in the nineteenth century and beyond, as well as the Catholic Church in the same period. Some of these churches have their roots in the Reformed and Evangelical traditions. For other churches, the Pentecostal movement resulted in a breaking away from the Catholic Church and so there remains a strong sense of theological affinity as the search for integrating Church and Renewal in the Holy Spirit progresses. Several others have recognised their affinity with the Orthodox Church and its pronounced emphasis on the theology and operation of the Holy Spirit. Several evangelical charismatic individuals and churches have thus found their destiny in Orthodoxy. One, the Apostolic Pastoral Association, which has a strong African identity, takes inspiration from the Coptic Orthodox Church, itself from north Africa, because of its own concentration upon the apostolic faith of the Bible.

In both these families within the Church and how they are developing, the Spirit is blowing where he pleases, and dissolving the old certainties of who we are in the Body of Christ and how we belong to Him. Precisely as the former Cardinal Ratzinger once prophetically said, it is through going deeper than our denominations and encountering the single mystery of the Church.

This is the lens through which to view the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham that began to take form in January 2011. Too many people have seen this in an insular, English way as a mere swap between a choice of rival denominations. Is this what Anglo-Catholics actually believe about the Church of England being "part of" the one, holy, Catholic Church? Is that what those who are now Roman Catholics actually believe about the Catholic Church in which the entire Universal Church of Christ subsists and with which all Christians are already almost completely united by virtue of their Baptism? Of course not. For if we look at this new phenomenon in Anglophone Christianity from the point of view of the Pope and the unity of the Church that he is seeking, here is a concrete message that in the Church, whose complete unity is yet to be revealed, we will not all just have to change to Roman Catholic-"ism". The one Universal Church will integrate all kinds of gifts and providential histories that belong as gifts of the Spirit to the one Tradition and that serve the unity of our faith. In this one Church’s visible unity, there will be a Latin-rite Catholic reality enriched by all the cultures of the world; there will also be a Russian Orthodox reality, a Wesleyan Methodist reality, various realities with a proud attachment to the faith and values of the Reformation, a Baptist reality, a rich mix of Pentecostal and Charismatic realities. There will also be an Anglican reality with all the nuances and "noisy conversation" of its tradition as well as its glorious musical, liturgical and pastoral patrimony. The Pope is saying that the Catholic Church is not narrow, or that it can only conceive of absorbing the other and watering down the different. This is what some Catholics clearly want. But "united, not absorbed" was the declaration of Dom Lambert Beauduin at the Malines Conversations. Thus the Catholic Church is being urged by its supreme pastor to extend itself, imagine vast new spaces long uninhabited, and live up to realising it is called to be the manifestation of the entire universal Church itself. Of this, the Ordinariate for Catholics bearing their inheritance from the treasured Anglican patrimony is a foretaste. It is also a sign that the unity of the churches has to come out from behind great historic ecclesiastical institutions. These have their God-given purpose still, but they are the means and structure for the Church’s proclamation and service, not her limit.

The next Messenger will be a sequel to Anglicans and Catholics in Communion, capturing the important documentation and analysis about both the implementation of Anglicanorum Coetibus one year on. It will also take stock of our new phase in ecumenism, in which the historic witness of the Catholic League remains an insistent voice, proclaiming that there can be no true and lasting unity that does not first, or at least in the end, embrace the faith that the communion of all Christians needs communion with the Apostolic Local Church of Rome, whose Bishop is the universal pastor Christ has given to his Church and servant of that unity which is vital for that "convincing account of the hope that lies within us" to which Pope Benedict compels us.

As the annual Week of Prayer for Chrsitian Unity approaches - it was devised and first spread round the world by Catholics, and it was the Catholic League's founders who first promoted it in England - please pray ever more urgently for the Unity of Christians. Our nation and society demand nothing less of the Churches in our land than to manifest the one life and truth of Christ whom we proclaim.

New Grants

2012-01-08T12:00:00.000Z

At the recent meeting of the Catholic League's Executive, the following grants were approved in realisation of the League's objectives:

£10,000 to the Anglican Centre in Rome towards the costs of its fine new booklet for free distirbution on the history of Anglican-Catholic relations and the imperturbably hopeful work towards corporate reunion between the Apostolic See of Rome and the "Church of England entire" with the Anglican Communion, within the one Catholic Church. Our grant will, moreover, enable the creation of a "virtual centre" of resources, documents and agreements that chart the progress of Anglican-Catholic unity and support the current work of ARCIC
£3,000 to the Ordinariate to support the The Portal, the online magazine to inform Roman Catholics and Anglicans alike about the Ordinariate’s positive purpose and to explore their shared patrimony, as it evolves into an official organ of the Ordinariate
£1,000 to the Norbertine Priory at Chelmsford towards the promotion of vocations

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity:Liturgy Resource

2012-01-05T01:16:00.003Z

The League issues a Leaflet, aimed to assist clergy and lay people offering intercessions, biddings and the prayer of the faithful at the Mass and the Divine Office, especially Vespers, on each day in the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

There is also a Litany and Collect that can be used in prayer groups and at ecumenical services.

The scheme for the daily prayers is based on the format used by Fr Paul Couturier from the 1930s onwards, but adapted to take account of the different traditions in the Church in Britain in the twenty-first century. They are modelled on the Solemn Prayers at the Good Friday Liturgy, at which are also remembered not just those of one's own Church, but all those who believe in Christ, those who do not believe in Christ but who do have faith in God, as well as those who do not believe in God - towards the unity of all humanity in the charity and truth of Christ, "according to his will, according to his means".

The Leaflet can be downloaded here, or a hard copy can be ordered from the Priest Director of the Apostleship of Prayer, Fr Chris Stephenson, by email here, or can be picked up from St Paul's Bookshop by Westminster Cathedral in person.

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, 18-25 January Every Year

2012-01-05T01:08:00.002Z

It is not always remembered that the one-hundred-and-two-year-old Week of Prayer for Christian Unity is thoroughly Catholic in origin and conception. Even its antecedents in the 19th century were inspired by a shared vision of the integrity of Christ's one Church and the desire for fulness of communion in the Spirit, proclamation of the Word of God, the order of the Church which serves and embodies that, and in sacramental and eucharistic life.

It began its existence as the Church Unity Octave in 1908, founded by Anglicans after a decade of despondency about the adverse judgment of the Roman See about Anglican Orders, just as Anglican leaders were beginning to look more to closer links with Christians in Reformed and Evangelical churches. Fr Paul Wattson, an American Epsicopalian Franciscan friar, and the Revd Spencer Jones, vicar of Moreton-in-Marsh and the author of the book, England and the Holy See, which caused a great national debate, combined to set up the Octave with a reminder to their fellow Anglicans that Church unity could never be piecemeal or simply be a partial union between the like-minded, but had to start from the first principle of the integrity of the whole of Christ's Church as already one. Thus the reunion of all Christians with the Apostolic See of Rome and the successor of Peter, its Bishop, the Pope, was not merely a distant aspiration because of present difficulties and disagreements, the last step in ecumenism, but actually its first step. Unless the step was made in this direction from the outset, no one could ever arrive at it as the last.

The famous 1910 Edinburgh Mission Conference, to which the Catholic Church was invited to send representatives but declined to attend because the Conference seemed to promote the belief that there could be many parallel churches rather than one in which all could find unity, seemed to encourage the idea of an all-embracing fellowship of churches arising from the Reformation tradition, but maintaining their different theologies and systems. Jones felt that this movement was driving the Church of England from its Catholic self-understanding and the principle of reunion and reconciliation in one Church. He was central to the circle of figures that brought about the foundation of the Catholic League in 1913 to work for the union of all Christians in the Catholic faith and in union with the Apostolic See of Rome.

In 1908, Fr Wattson and his fellow friars were received as a community into the Catholic Church as the Society of the Atonement, which is still active in north America as a force promoting Catholic ecumenism. Wattson and Jones remained in contact as friends, both working and hoping for the same ideal of unity in Catholic faith and order. Meanwhile, the Church Unity Octave was sanctioned by Pope Pius X in 1909 and in 1916 extended to the whole Catholic Church by Pope Benedict XV as an aid for prayer and reconciliation among the nations at the height of the disastrous World War I. This was on top of a long-standing convention of praying between Ascension and Pentecost for the Reunion of Christians, especially between Anglicans and Catholics, established in 1894 by Archbishop Edward Benson of Canterbury and by Pope Leo XIII in 1897.

The Church Unity Octave itself, as a Roman Catholic devotion, was not widely adopted beyond certain Roman Catholic and pro-papal Anglican circles. Yet a growing understanding of shared Christian identity, dogmatic belief and unitedness in the Scriptures that followed the Great War, together with the renewal from the Litrugical Movement and growing western awareness of Eastern Christianity on account of the many thousands of Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic refugees from communist and famine-struck Soviet Russia, revealed that Orthodox, Protestant and Anglican Christians continued, after all, to share a hope for unity in the one Body of Christ. Dom Lambert Beauduin, founder of the monastery that is now at Chevetogne in Belgium, was a pioneer in an ecumenically-aware monasticism that continues to this day to pray for unity through study, dialogue and the celebration of the Church's litrugy from both east and west. This in turn had a profound influence on Fr Paul Couturier, a teacher-priest from Lyon who thereafter devoted his every spare waking moment to enabling encounter between Christians of all traditions, and even people of other faiths, in what he called the "invisible monastery" of heaven, high beyond the walls of earthly separation, united there, if not on earth, in prayer for the unity and sanctification of all humanity in the charity and truth of Christ. Thus he added on to the Church Unity Octave the means for other Christians to unite themselves with the prayers of Catholics for the same hope of unity, "according to Christ's will, according to his means". The "spiritual ecumenism" which he commended became a cornerstone of the Vatican II Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio.

The renewal of the Church Unity Octave so as to make it possible for Orthodox, Protestants and Anglicans to offer prayers in the same week for Christian Unity, without any hint of urging anyone to be disloyal to their Church or Communion's teaching or to compromise on their theological principle, was motivated from beginning to end with prayer for one's own and one another's ever greater holiness and faithfulness in Christ. The spiritual principle was that the more closely one came to union with Christ, the closer one draws to fellow Christians on their own, similar journey; and thus can the churches draw closer to one another through entering more deeply into the truth, repenting of past mutual wrongdoing and rivalry, returning to theological and spiritual sources so as to retrace steps side by side on a common journey towards reconciliation in the same faith. Couturier called this common spiritual endeavour augmenting what was now named the Chair of Unity Octave (to stress the abiding centrality of the communion of all the churches with the See of Peter - it is noteworthy that that the new American Ordinariate for Catholics with an Anglican patrimony is established as the Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter, making clear its fundamentally ecumenical mission), "the Week of Universal Prayer for the Unity of Christians".

The spiritual involvement in the Octave, the Week of Prayer, became very widespread. It took on a new lease of life as the World Council of Churches was established as a new world order took shape after the Second World War and Christians were looked to for promoting principles of justice, peace and unity in humanity. The Faith and Order Commission is nowadays a principal agency by which the World Council of Churches and the Catholic Church internationally collaborate towards unity. From the 1950s it was producing spiritual resources for prayer for unity as commended by Fr Paul Couturier. In 1966 the two Catholic approaches - the Wattson's Chair of Unity Octave and Couturier's supplemental Week of Prayer - were formally united and from the following year the WCC and the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity (now a Pontifical Council) have produced annual materials for the Week of Prayer jointly through Faith & Order.

In 2003, the League arranged a celebration to mark the 70th Anniversary of the Refounding of the Week of Prayer and the 50th Anniversary of Fr Paul Couturier's death. In 2008 a great celebration of the Centenary of the Week of Prayer from its foundation as the Church Unity Octave was held in Westminster Abbey, led by Archbishop Rowan Williams and Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor. More details on the history and significance of the Week of Prayer can be found on the League's dedicated websites:

The League also issues a Leaflet of prayers for each day of the Week of Prayer, especially designed to assist those who offer the intercessions at Lauds and Vespers, and the Universal Prayer of the Faithful at Mass. It is available for download here, from the League's Members' Secretary and Priest Director of the Apostleship of Prayer (email here) or from St Paul's Bookshop by Westminster Cathedral.

The Newman Fund raises over £50,000 for the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham

2012-01-03T09:02:00.000Z

Now that the Ordinariate has its own systems firmly in place for processing donations and collections, the League is no longer accepting new donations towards the Ordinariate through the Blessed John Henry Newman Fund. Existing regular donations remain unaffected for a transitional period. The gifts of those who still wish to donate to the Fund will be applied to the League's four objects, which may, of course, include support to the Ordinariate.

Since its inception in October 2010, the Catholic League has raised over £50,500 for the Ordinariate, including over £7,500 in Gift Aid that would not otherwise have been recoverable. This is in addition to the League's own grants of nearly £70,000 to support the work of the Ordinary and the Ordinariate's central services in the first few years of start-up.

For the Record: Fr Keith Newton on "What is the Ordinariate?"

2011-10-02T09:51:00.000+01:00

This text has been edited from Fr Keith Newton’s address and answers to questions from the floor at a day of exploration hosted by the South London Ordinariate Group in Kennington on 29 January, 2011.

Now that it has been transcribed with the approval of the Ordinary, we offer it as a valuable snapshot of a particularly exciting period in the Ordinariate's gestation - from the processes being put in place as people were looking forward to them, to the kind of questions and concerns in people's minds as they contemplated a journey to make the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham a reality.

Indeed, this may be useful and informative for those planning the establishment of an Ordinariate in other parts of the Church.

What is the Ordinariate?
Fr Keith Newton

Talk at Kennington Park, 29 January 2011

Preparing the Way
As I begin to say something about the Ordinariate, you must realise that I have been living and sleeping this for the last fifteen months, ever since the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus was published in November 2009. A lot of things have been going on and my part in it has been relatively small, despite what some of the press might say. Bishop Andrew Burnham and I had not been involved in any way in producing that document. When it arrived, what was in it was as much of a surprise to us as it was to many other people. We had indeed been to Rome; and we had been told that problems for Anglo-Catholics who wanted to be in communion with the See of Peter were a matter that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was going to be taking very seriously. Thus it ended up producing Anglicanorum Coetibus. Over the year since, what we have done - including, in my case, several trips to Rome - has always been with the knowledge of the Archbishop of Canterbury. I have been quite upset by the press at times, when it has been suggested that we have been going behind the Archbishop’s back. You may remember, for instance, when we went to Rome in April 2010, that, as we were on our way back, the Sunday Telegraph published a front page article stating that neither the Archbishop of Canterbury nor the Archbishop of Westminster were aware of it. They were not only well aware, they gave us their blessing. So, as I was saying, I have been planning and thinking about this for a long time.

In September 2010 there was an interesting article - I cannot remember who wrote it, but it may have been Ruth Gledhill in The Times - about going to the Ordinariate, in which the reporter said she had spoken to a senior Anglican figure, who could not hide his delight in telling her that the Ordinariate project had been put on the back burner and that Rome was back-pedalling like mad. I remember thinking that this was not true; but I also thought that in a sense it was, because, if any of you do any cooking, you know that you put things on the back burner not to forget them but in order for them to simmer, so that they are ready when you are ready and you can just turn up the heat to finish the cooking and everything is fine. So the Ordinariate was on the back burner, simmering nicely, ready for the heat to be turned up - and this is now what has happened.

People say that Rome works in centuries. What has been amazing to the Catholic clergy that I have been having conversations with about the Ordinariate is just how rapid this process has been, both in terms of the ordination of Father Andrew, Father John and myself and also the programme to erect the Ordinariate and begin the entrance of those groups who wish to join it. It is proving to be a very rapid process and it is making my head spin. I was still the Anglican Bishop of Richborough until 31 December last year. Then I was received into the Catholic Church on 1 January 2011 and on 15 January we were ordained priest, having been ordained deacon two days before. In the speech I made at Archbishop’s House after our ordination to the priesthood, I said that this was almost as quick as Cardinal Manning. But the Archbishop of Westminster pointed out, “No, you were much quicker than Cardinal Manning. He took two months and you took two weeks!” This is amazing in itself; but the reason is because the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was very clear that it was important for us to be ordained to be ready to meet those groups that were going to join us, to prepare the way - and a lot of work needs to be done - and make sure that this thing runs smoothly.

The Path to Reception and Catechesis
Since I became a Catholic, I have not been able to do very much really except work on the Ordinariate. My mail box is overflowing. But you will know that some things are becoming clearer now. The timetable is that those who wish to join the Ordinariate will leave their Anglican congregations by the Sunday before Ash Wednesday and from Ash Wednesday until Easter there will be a period of catechesis, of learning what it means to be a Catholic. That will take people through to Holy Week. The clergy who have been involved with groups will remain with them and, depending on the Catholic diocese people are in, the catechesis will either be delivered totally by the Anglican priest, or in some dioceses totally by Roman Catholic priests – but probably in most cases it will be by a combination of both. Then people will be received ideally on Maundy Thursday - but it could take place before Maundy Thursday, perhaps on Holy Tuesday, or at the Easter Vigil. But the best time will be on Maundy Thursday. Those to be received into full communion with the Catholic Church will probably be received by their own parish priest and then they will be able to take part in the Triduum - Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter. This way will be better, because you will know that in the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults the completion of initiation, confirmation and Holy Communion is deeply linked with the experience of going through the Triduum and its climax at the end of Holy Saturday in the Easter Vigil. Now, the RCIA is for new Christians; and so it is very important to distinguish between those who are being baptised (or who are coming into full Church life more or less for the first time) and those who are long-standing members of the Church in another denomination, but who are now coming into full communion with the Catholic Church. So we will not be using the RCIA process, or rite. Instead there will be a small rite of reception and confirmation in the Catholic Church that is appropriate to the groups of already practising and their members. After Easter, catechesis will continue, probably for several weeks leading up until Pentecost. Thus there will be a sustained period of catechesis before and after Easter.

Already many of the groups have been using Evangelium, which is a course on Catholic teaching and practice lasting something like 26 weeks. They are really enjoying it, so we are even now seeing how good catechesis in the Christian faith and discipleship may be as an ongoing feature of life in the Ordinariate. Cardinal Levada is very keen for the Ordinariate laity to be well catechised - many other Catholics will not have done much catechesis in their recent experience, but that is no reason for us not to; and perhaps it will be a strength that the people in the Ordinariate can offer to the rest of the Church. The Sevenoaks group is maintaining its identity as a Walsingham cell, meeting monthly for a mass, a talk and a meal. This will mean a continued structure arising from their Anglican patrimony, but it also offers an appealing way to provide ongoing catechesis. This will also provide a good structure on which to build future growth and development.

Ordination of the Ordinariate Clergy
As for the priests, they will also join in and contribute to the catechesis with their groups; but at the same time they will start a process of formation for ordination. That will take place in London for all the clergy on one day a week from Ash Wednesday until Pentecost. At some point in the Easter season those whose petitions for ordination have been accepted by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (and when a number of other steps have been followed) will be ordained to the diaconate shortly after Easter and then to the priesthood around Pentecost. Their formation will continue further for up to two years.

It is not that those priests who are coming into the Catholic Church for the Ordinariate are going to get a much quicker or shorter formation than any other ex-Anglican priest who becomes a Catholic and is eventually ordained. I know a number of people from my old Richborough area, who are now at a seminary and who will presumably be ordained in about two years’ time. So the process is equivalent and it is just that ordination comes at a different place in it. We also need to be clear (because I have heard one or two comments in which this is misunderstood) that those clergy who are petitioning for ordination in the Catholic Church in the Ordinariate will have to go through a very similar process of discernment to that of anybody else who seeks ordination in a diocese and who thus wants to become a seminarian in the Catholic Church. For instance, I have just been to St Luke’s Centre in Manchester for a few days to see the assessment and discernment that our clergy have to undergo. Additionally, necessary references will have to be taken up and the local diocesan Catholic bishops will also have to be happy with candidate clergy, since they will have to serve both the Ordinariate and the local diocese. All these things, including CRB checks, are now in hand.

Space to Discern the Nature of Being a Catholic Christian
So, that is the point at which our preparations find themselves and it is not long - about six weeks - to Ash Wednesday, when the process will begin. At that point the lay people will have to decide whether belonging to the Catholic Church in full communion is what they want to do. They will not need to make their final commitment until just before they are actually received, so there is plenty of opportunity for exploration and discernment in good faith and without pressure. But when the moment comes for making a commitment, it will be after a great deal of thought and prayer. The form it will take is that they will have to profess the Christian faith, usually by saying the Nicene Creed, and also agree that they believe everything that the Catholic Church teaches, signing a declaration to that effect. Then they will be received and chrismated, thus receiving the sacrament of Confirmation in the Catholic Church.

It is worth saying at this point that there is no such thing as a second class Catholic. This is very important to emphasise, because I have heard it said even by the Archbishop of York in a debate that, if he was going to become a Catholic, he would rather be a proper one and not a second class one. Let me tell you that that is nonsense – there are no second class Catholics. You are only a Catholic by belonging to one particular group or another – a diocese, or a religious order or some other kind of structure suited to a purpose, or group of people. First or second class does not enter into it. The Ordinariate is simply one of those ways in which you belong to in the Catholic Church. So I cannot see what point Archbishop Sentamu was trying to make. Perhaps he does not understand that the Catholic Church is much more diverse than most people realise. This is what makes it Catholic. I happened to be in Rome in October last year at the end of the Synod of Bishops of the Middle East. The final mass at which the Pope presided was very interesting, because normally, when you see a Papal Mass, it is all very beautifully choreographed and all the vestments match, and so on. But for the mass at which the Eastern Bishops concelebrated everyone was wearing something different - they were representing so many parts of the Catholic Church, from the Maronites of Lebanon, the Catholic Copts, the Melkites – there are all sorts of people, belonging to many different Churches in the one Catholic Church. And the Ordinariate in England & Wales is just one new part of her diversity.

Ordinariates further afield
We are mostly looking at the situation here in England. But do not forget that the Apostolic Constitution is not just for this country, it is for the world. Anywhere in the world where there are groups of Anglicans who want to come into full communion with the Catholic Church, they can form a possible Ordinariate group. The only groups being formed at the moment are in England and Wales, in Canada and in the United States. In Australia they are slightly behind us, but they are catching up and there could be one formed this year. For the time being, any Scottish groups will be linked to the Ordinariate in England and Wales, until such time as there is a large enough group to have its own Ordinariate within the territory of the Scottish Conference of Catholic Bishops. If there were groups in Ireland, they would need to go to their own local bishops in the Church in Ireland and say they wanted to form an Ordinariate; and the bishops would have to respond to that. But, as far as I know, nobody has done that yet. At the moment we have no group in Wales, but it would be possible. I have even had someone mention to me the possibility that there may be a group in South Africa too. Again, this is all possible. Wherever people are, all it takes is for them to approach the local bishop, say they wish to form a group and then he will have a conversation with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and they will see what can be done. So an Ordinariate is not just a special arrangement for people in England and Wales, or for that matter in North America or Australia. It is universal and thus provides a new canonical structure for people to belong fully to the Catholic Church. In this, no one is “second class”.

Identifying Anglican Patrimony – Worship and Theology
Now let me turn to some of the questions people have asked. What about “Anglican patrimony” and how exactly can it be identified? It has often been said that a distinguishing mark of Anglican identity, as distinct from the usual Catholic practice, is receiving communion in both kinds. I have to say, however, that I have not been to a Catholic church recently where the laity was not invited to receive the sacrament in both kinds. Obviously, in Westminster Cathedral, where there are enormous numbers, that is not normally feasible, but at most Catholic parish churches that I have been to the option is there. Not everybody takes it up, but it is more and more usual to do so; and I imagine that in most churches it is encouraged and not really an issue. Certainly in Ordinariate parishes I would expect that it would be the norm.

Beyond questions of custom and usage, much more difficult is the underlying question about what patrimony means and what makes it. I do not think we will really get to flesh this out until we start to live it out. It may be something about the way we do liturgy; it may be something about the words of the liturgy. Currently there are people who are working on an Anglican form of worship for the Ordinariate to use. It will not be exactly like other Anglican forms of worship, because it must conform to Catholic doctrine and, more than that, express it clearly. This means it will need to have been ratified by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The Americans already have an enormously thick Book of Divine Worship. If you go to one of the Pastoral Provision parishes you will be given one of these to use, but it is so thick that it hardly fits in the pew. It is also nearly twenty years old and is not going to be reprinted, partly because of the new opportunity created by Anglicanorum Coetibus and partly because in the light of two decades of experience it could benefit from revision. There is a group of people here in England working on a liturgy for us that has an Anglican flavour about it and that will inform, and be informed by, thoughts in other parts of the world where there will be an Ordinariate using Anglican patrimony in their Catholic worship. There is also something about hymnody.

Then there is the spiritual history that we are bringing with us. I think it is very interesting that, if one becomes a Catholic, normally you say “I’m going to become a Catholic” and you take on a new history, the history of the Catholic Church in England and Wales. The history of the Catholic Church from 1500 to 2000 is something people should know more about and it is going to form part of people’s history if they join the Ordinariate. But becoming a Catholic in the Ordinariate does not mean people will be putting aside their own history – they will be taking it with them. They will also be taking spiritual writers and theologians. For instance, I was taught by the great Eric Mascall, who was much revered by many Catholic theologians too. There are other great teachers in the Anglican Communion. I had a meeting with Cardinal Schönborn a couple of years ago and it came out that he is an incredible fan of C S Lewis. So there is such a wide range of experience, culture, theology, spirituality, people, worship and history that all goes into making up the Anglican patrimony.

Identifying Anglican Patrimony – Laity and Governance
Another side to Anglican patrimony is our tradition and systems of governance. That prompts the question of what involvement in the Ordinariate the laity will have. What needs to be understood is that there were two documents produced in November 2009. There was the Apostolic Constitution which is, as I understand it, basically about canon law; and to go with that were the Norms. The Apostolic Constitution cannot be changed, but the Norms can be altered by the Governing Council of the Ordinariate. There may be part of those norms concerning which we might say, “Is it possible to do it this way?” So there is room for adaptation and development, given particular conditions. Nevertheless, even now, in the Norms as well as the Apostolic Constitution itself there are certain things that have never happened in the Catholic Church before. I do not think people realise how enormous these changes are. For instance, the Holy Father has decided who is going to be the first Ordinary. It was his choice to make at the beginning, but in future the Ordinary will be chosen by the Holy Father on the recommendation of three names sent to him from the Governing Council of the Ordinariate. Now, that does not happen elsewhere in the Catholic Church. Generally when a diocese is vacant, it is the nuncio who makes consultations and produces the terna of names that he sends to the Congregation for Bishops in Rome. In our case, however, there is a more democratic aspect to it that has never been there before. The Governing Council, which is made up of clergy, some appointed by the Ordinary, some elected by the priests of the Ordinariate, will produce the terna.

Also, there is to be a Pastoral Council. As I understand it, the Pastoral Council of a Catholic diocese is voluntary and at the discretion of the Bishop. It is advised, but not mandatory. But in the Ordinariate it is mandatory and it will involve laity in the governance of the church; and that, too, is something quite new in a Catholic setting. My reading is that this is a national, not an area or group, Pastoral Council, designed to work with the Ordinary and he with them. There will be a mandatory Finance Council that lay people can also be involved in – it is not limited to clergy. Furthermore, I expect that the Pastoral Council and Finance Council at the level of the whole Ordinariate will be reflected in local parish groups too. So every parish will have a Pastoral Council and Finance Council in which the laity are to be involved. Thus one of the things about the Anglican patrimony that we will be bringing to the Catholic Church will be this involvement of lay people. Not that we want Synods like the General Synod – God preserve us! – but there is a legitimate and proper role in evangelism, in mission, in finance and organisation which the laity should take part in. This is not concerned with arguments over doctrine, liturgy and the order of the Church, but the rightful role of the laity in living out their Catholic faith through the work and witness of their Church.

If you read the commentary that accompanies the Apostolic Constitution by Fr Ghirlanda, who is a canon lawyer and Rector of the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, he makes the point that there are certain things that are very clearly identifiable as aspects of this or any local Catholic Church, but there are additional attributes that are part of the Anglicanism we bring, that other Catholic Churches have not known and yet will be intrinsic to the Ordinariates. He clearly names the involvement of the laity in the governance of the Church. It is something I want to encourage. As much as it forms part of our patrimony, it will also be very new to us, because we will not be doing it in exactly the old way as in the Church of England, but in accordance with Catholic canon law. It will also be new to our fellow Catholics, and they will be very interested to see how it works and possibly what can be learned from it. So lay involvement as part of the patrimony we bring is something we should want to develop properly.

The Need for a Distinctive Body, “united not absorbed”
Another question concerns why a separate Ordinariate is needed – why cannot Anglicans becoming Catholics just join in together and contribute to their existing local parishes and dioceses? Will members of the Ordinariate lose out on the experience of belonging to the mainstream reality of the Catholic Church in this country? Is there a risk that they will define themselves too tightly and just look inwards to themselves, rather than outwards to others in the Church, Christians in other Churches and, perhaps more importantly, to people in the wider world?

Someone recently impressed upon me that the prophetic side to the Ordinariate that Pope Benedict is hoping for might get lost. Well, to me it would be a tragedy if we in the Ordinariate, lay people and clergy alike, became so absorbed with finance, administration and ritual rubrics that we failed to look outwards with our Catholic faith that has, after all, brought us this far. Yet, unless we form a grouping in our own right, there are certain purposes that the Church needs that we will not be able to serve. We have to play our part alongside our fellow Catholics in service and in mission by adopting a distinctive role. And that includes taking our place in the Catholic Church’s ecumenism. We have to be a bridge. Building a bridge is about linking up two sides; and we cannot begin to perform that function unless we are connected as part of the wider Catholic Church and it is connected as part of us. That is going to take a bit of time to settle down; but I do believe passionately that that is what we should be and that is what the Holy Father wants of us. I do not want us to be defined as ultra-rightwing traditionalists or “more catholic than the Pope” – that is not true of is in any case. For the true story is not about our separateness, but our journey more deeply into the Catholic faith and the fullness of the life of the Church.

For me, this has been going on since I was a young Anglican priest, who passionately wanted to be in communion with the rest of the Catholic Church. I had always hoped and imagined that full communion and unity between Anglicans and the See of Peter was going to turn out in a different way, but God works in ways that we do not really know; and so the Ordinariate is the answer God has given to our prayers. He has his reasons. And it will be up to the people joining the Ordinariate to make sure that they too have the same spirit of belonging to the whole Church - and serving as one of its links to the Anglican tradition and its vital sense of its place within wider English society too. As I said in my statement at the press conference, “I’m all for building bridges, not burning them down”. But it will all take time, not least because there is some rawness felt among Anglican church people about the Ordinariate and those who may be leaving to join it. But I think with time it really will be possible for the Ordinariate to be a point of contact and friendship between Catholics and Anglicans and even an instrument in the ongoing work of reconciliation.

Sacred Places
One place where it might be possible is Walsingham itself. I cannot believe for one minute that Our Blessed Lady wants two separate shrines. Yet at the moment there are two; and I hope that there will be an opportunity for the members of the Ordinariate, when we go to Walsingham, to form that bridge, a bigger bridge than there has been before. Certainly, since I have had conversations with the Guardians of the Anglican Shrine about how that might be possible, I can hope that when ordinary Catholics go to Walsingham they will be as much at home at the Anglican shrine as at the Catholic one. And we have already seen how members of the Ordinariate can still be part of the Anglican Shrine through maintaining their Walsingham cells. This could be our bridge to link the Catholic Church and the Anglican Shrine.

This leads into another question about people’s contacts with the Anglican people and the Church building they have known and loved, once they become Roman Catholics in the Ordinariate. People will need to leave their church and their Anglican worshipping community with their priest on Ash Wednesday. There has to be a genuine “moving on”, in becoming a Catholic in full communion. It is not simply going to be “business as usual”, because not all of people’s friends and fellow Christians desire or feel called to Catholics. We were hoping that there might be a possibility of sharing buildings, even providing for the Roman Catholic priest who is to say mass for the groups in the period between Ash Wednesday and the moment their own priest is ordained to the priesthood, to do this in the group’s accustomed place of worship. But this is looking less and less likely, because the Church of England has put out a legal position to address such an eventuality already. The suggestion is that, if there is to be any sharing of buildings by Catholic former members of a congregation, it would have to be agreed with the new incumbent and the PCC of those who remained in the Church of England. So it looks as if sharing is not going to work; certainly not in the short term.

The Costly Value of Moving On as well as Bringing Patrimony
Clearly there is something about leaving and moving on in becoming a Catholic. This is hard, but in fact it is part of our journey: no one said it would be easy. In the 1980s, I was a missionary in Malawi and I remember to this day being at Gatwick airport. I had two young children - four and one - and my wife. She never wanted to go to Malawi. When she was interviewed, they said to her, “Why do you want to go to Africa?”, and she said, “I don’t!” They said, “Then why are you going?” She replied, “Because my husband sees it as his vocation.” They then asked her, “Do you do everything that your husband tells you?” “No, I don’t,” came the reply. But she felt that it was very important to support me in what I thought was my vocation, to go and serve in a different part of the world. But she will tell you that, as we walked through that big airport, she felt it was like going into a prison. We had no idea of what life would be like. We had never been to Africa in our lives. We did not know where we were going to live. We did not know if people wanted us there. We did not know whether we would be welcomed. We did not know whether we would manage, whether we would be paid – I was going to earn only a third of what I was earning in England. There were all those unknowns; but we did it. And in truth, there was no point in all the time that we were there that we felt on our own. In life, you just sometimes have to take a step into the unknown and trust that God is going to hold you up. It is an act of faith.

Now, between Ash Wednesday and Easter Day people preparing to be received will be asked not to receive Holy Communion. For some people that is a sticking point; but certainly Fr Andrew Burnham, Fr John Broadhurst and myself did exactly that during Advent. I stopped receiving Communion in the Church of England just before Advent and during Advent I went to mass in my local Roman Catholic parish. It was far from easy, as I sat in the pew. But it was an important part of the process for me, a really important journey of change; because, by the time we had got to the end, we were longing, just longing, to receive Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. That is an experience that we all need to go through. Remember, anyway, that the obligation on Catholics is not to receive Communion, but to be at Mass every Sunday. I think we have got into a position, even within the Catholic Church, in which everybody thinks that the point of coming to Mass is to receive Communion. It is not – it is to take part in the re-presentation of Our Lord’s saving works. Holy Communion is the fruit of that and we encourage everyone to receive. But it is not always necessary. So, those preparing to be received I urge to take that period between Ash Wednesday and Easter as a period of growth. Having gone through it myself, I think they will find it a very necessary step to have taken on their journey. Where the groups of new Catholics in the Ordinariate groups will worship (if, as seems likely, they cannot worship in their old church) will be decided by the local Catholic Deanery, in consultation with the Ordinariate priest. Probably through the first part of the catechesis period it would be best to join in the worship at one of the local Catholic parish’s major liturgies alongside your own pastor, who will be doing the same, at least until he is made a deacon and can take a liturgical part. But it would also be good to meet as a group in your own right, to pray together once a week, or say the office together. Thus, as well as being part of the Catholic Church near you, you should still keep together as a group.

Remaining obligations to Anglican parishes
What about people who have positions of lay responsibility in their Anglican parishes, who are keen to join the Ordinariate, but for whom moving is complex, given certain legal obligations? Well, as a matter of fact, there has been some advice from the lawyers about this. Those who are church wardens need to hold the public annual parish meeting earlier. This can be done at any time and it does not have to coincide with the annual general meeting of the congregation. This will enable the election of fresh church wardens for the parish. As for a Treasurer or Secretary of the Parochial Church Council, there is no need to wait for an AGM; and those joining the Ordinariate should pass these responsibilities in Anglican congregations on now. Of course, there would be nothing wrong with a period of handover from a distance for a few months, if that would help the situation. We do not want to be seen as those who went away, forgot about those who were left, did not care and left others to pick up pieces. This all wants to be done as smoothly and helpfully as possible. Someone asked me at the press conference, “Don’t you care about those who are not coming?” I said, “Of course I care about them. I wish they would follow me. Not all of them are following me at the moment and more will follow as time goes on. I do care about them.” The way we deal with this will be important as we do not want to be seen to be the cause of bad feeling. But people resign and hand over tasks all the time, so there is no reason why this should not be handled in the same way. There are slight anomalies concerning elections of PCCs, as technically Catholics and members of other Churches, too, can be members. But I do not think that would be particularly helpful.

I understand how difficult it is for people to make the decision to move from what they know and love, especially if they have been closely involved through friends, schools and family connections. It has been the same for me. But if acting on a call to go forward on the journey to be a Catholic is what we really want, then we need not fear the unknown. Christ is there for us whatever trials we have to face; he is with us in our agonised decisions, with us on our journey as we trust him to lead us, and he is there to welcome and guide us wherever we go. He is always there for us and it is he for whom we are Christians.

The important thing is for everyone, Anglican and Catholic, to focus now on where the Lord is calling them to serve him and thus where they ought to be in the Church. There will always be plenty of jobs going in the Ordinariate groups, so I don’t think we will allow anyone to get away with doing nothing!

Individuals not belonging to Groups
What about individuals who are isolated from where potential groups are based or who live out in the sticks? Of course, the Ordinariate is for groups of Anglicans, so, obviously, if people can become part of a group, or at least be associated with one, that would be best. The Ordinariate website has them all listed. It is a list that is growing all the time, as people are becoming more public about them. But there remains a major problem for isolated laity and I have raised this specially with Bishop Alan Hopes, the Episcopal Delegate for the Ordinariate from the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England & Wales. It is quite clear that when Fr Ghirlanda wrote about the Ordinariate he said it was both for groups and individuals. So no one should miss out on belonging to the Ordinariate who wants to, just because they cannot belong to a group.

So, individuals who live where there is no group can still be part of the Ordinariate, but they worship at a local diocesan church. Already three or four people have been in touch with me to say that – amazingly - there is to be no group in Brighton. My advice has been to go and see the local Catholic priest as a first step and we can take it from there. In the case of Brighton, I have sent people to Fr Ray Blake, who I know is passionate about the Ordinariate and will welcome them with open arms. People should ask if they can be catechised and received into the Catholic Church at Easter and register not as a member of that local parish but as a member of the Ordinariate. This is entirely possible. Individuals would thus worship in the local diocesan Catholic Church and perhaps sometimes go and visit an Ordinariate group elsewhere for contact and support. It may even be possible to register with a group at a distance, even though a person would not normally worship with it. We hope that, should a group form in Brighton (and that may be possible if we get 5 or 6 people at least), it could form a nucleus around which more Church life could grow into a viable regular congregation. The number constituting a group is not defined, but it is meant to be a “little church”. Until a group can form itself with some strength and momentum, an individual would still be a member of the Ordinariate, although normally worshipping at an existing local Catholic Church. That is the best that can be done at the moment, but we can see how things develop in the time ahead.

So, nobody should say that, because they have no group nearby, despite dearly wanting to be part of the Ordinariate and not a diocese, they will need to wait for 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9 years until a local group finally emerges. Those who feel God is calling them in the direction of the Ordinariate should come. They can be received into full communion with the Catholic Church through the local parish and in due course, I am sure, groups will begin to form. I do not doubt that that will include Brighton. If people experience real problems with what I have suggested, they should come back to us and we will not lose track of people seeking to join the Ordinariate. Beyond what I have mentioned, I do not know how just yet; but it is work in progress. In the meantime, nobody should be left behind waiting for a group to form in their area.

Guidance for Receiving Individuals into the Catholic Church in the Ordinariate
One of the problems in the minds of some people may be that not all local diocesan Catholic priests are as supportive of the Ordinariate as others; or they do not understand its procedures, or the purpose it is supposed to serve. I am in discussion with Bishop Alan about the necessary instructions to priests on how to respond to individual enquirers and this may take the form of a letter from the local bishop. It would be important, for instance, to steer priests away from channelling people to the RCIA. By now RCIA courses will have been up and running since September and normally new enquirers will be encouraged to wait until the next sessions being in autumn 2011. As we were noting earlier, however, the RCIA is not appropriate for already baptised and practising Christians – especially Catholic Anglicans – and the agreed aim is in any case to prepare people for reception in Holy Week. I am sorry that some people have already had the mistaken advice to wait and join the RCIA process, but I can confirm that the Catholic Church in this country understands that people coming into the Catholic Church from the Anglican Church are in a different category and need to be treated in a different way.

For instance, in the catechesis of a practising Anglican, you would not need to spend a lot of time on the Nicene Creed. A well instructed Anglican would believe and comprehend it in any case, otherwise they would hardly be at the point of seeking to belong to the Roman Catholic Church. That said, however, there are real differences between the Anglican and Catholic Church: different ways of doing things and different ways of expressing and understanding the faith. For some this may be problematic and need to be worked through. So a more suitable catechetical programme is being formed and there is no reason why this could not be available to diocesan priests asked to prepared and receive individuals who wish to join the Ordinariate (and we have already mentioned how useful the Evangelium course has been for those who are already well versed in their Christian faith and Church life). As long as priests have the right advice from us and access to the right resources, I suspect that in practice they use their own judgement as to what is necessary.

It is worth saying that any enquirer as an individual or in a group is under no pressure because they simply wish to explore possibilities. If someone goes through the course and then says that they are not quite ready, that is fine. If may be that they feel ready later on and I should have that that they could be received then, perhaps following a further conversation with the priest who was preparing them before as an individual, or the priest who leads the group to which they wish to belong. Once the Ordinariate is set up, reception will be the responsibility of the Ordinariate priest, not the diocesan priest. But I am sure that taking time for discernment will be respected and taken into consideration as a real part of a person’s experience that leads to reception.

At the moment, enquirers have been asked to fill in a little form on which we record people’s details. This includes a place for them to sign, confirming that they believe all that is taught by the Catholic Church to be true. Some people have told me that they are not ready to sign it yet, so I have said “Don’t sign it.” It is not necessary for people to do so until they are ready to be received, and the period of exploration and discernment is still under way. So there is plenty of time yet. Besides, it is a personal profession of faith that has to be right for each person. People are not joining the Catholic Church just as a group – they are fundamentally making an individual profession of faith. People may be planning to do this together, but there is an individuality on which it all depends. Fr Andrew Burnham had said it is a bit like going on a pilgrimage to Walsingham: you all pay for it separately, but you get on the bus and go together.

The Sisters from Walsingham
At this point it seems fitting for me to pay tribute to the sisters from Walsingham. It was not just the three former bishops and their families who left our positions in the Church of England. We were accompanied with the advice and preparation of good Catholic priest-friends and our fast from the Eucharist was barely the month of Advent. But the sisters went without Holy Communion for three months, as they waited on the Lord. Sister Wendy tells me that, usually in the past, when she had gone to a Catholic mass she had been quite upset not to receive Communion, because she thought, “I’m being refused Jesus here and I really can’t stand it.” But she says that three months was easy, because the sisters knew what the end result was - receiving Communion in full communion with the Catholic Church with the Successor of Peter. What if they had held back and come later? Would they have spared themselves a great deal of heartache? But this was a great sacrifice they offered in order to be faithful to our Lord. I think it was God’s will, and this is why they are an inspiration. It was so pleasing to us to have them with us at our reception too. And then to find out that the Ordinariate is to be called the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham reveals how God has been in it all the way.

Second and Third Waves?
When will the second or third wave be organised, if people are not ready to go at the moment? Well, there is no closure on the Apostolic Constitution. It is now a permanent part of the Catholic Church in England and Wales. It will be part of the Catholic Church in other parts of the world, too. There is no closed door. Once we have opened up the way this time round, we then have to start to deal with others who come after. Hopefully, we will learn something from the process we have undergone, particularly with regard to the clergy in planning with the theological educators on how it is going to be done and what is needed in the future. It seems to me that you cannot start up a new process of formation for clergy every month. You would have to arrange it in semesters, or something like that. Already there are more priests coming to me and asking, “How do I join the Ordinariate?” Probably they are a bit late to join at the moment, because the process for discerning clergy for ordination is well on its way. So I doubt if anyone coming to me now, particularly if they have a group with them, will be able to be ordained in the first wave. But I am sure it can be organised well for a future point. There will be no problem over the catechesis or reception of lay people, but the practical difficulty will concern the formation, time and resources needed for the ordination of clergy. That is part of a conversation we need to have with the bishops and the theological educators in the seminaries, so that we are sure we can devise a process that runs smoothly.

Retired Clergy
What about retired Anglican clergy – will they be able to belong to the Catholic Church through the Ordinariate and continue to serve in a priestly ministry? Anglicanorum Coetibus is for groups of Anglicans, although, if you read Fr Ghirlanda’s commentary, he says it is for individuals as well as groups. But the questions that have to be answered about individual priests not linked to a group is (a) are they useful to the Ordinariate or could they be?; and (b) are they useful to the local diocese or could they be? It is quite possible for someone to be ordained within the Ordinariate, who would normally exercise his ministry within the diocesan context because he is not linked to a group and has no group he can be linked to. But it would require me to have a conversation with the local Catholic bishop about that person from the beginning, as it would be a question of whether he is going to be useful and work alongside the other priests in the diocese.

There is also the question of how the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith will look at applications from people who are not in groups. I doubt whether they would say they could be ordained purely on the grounds that they want to say mass privately since that is what they have done all their life. In any case, there needs to be a pastoral process of discernment for each of the priests who enter the Ordinariate and that will always involve a conversation with the local Catholic bishop about his views and needs. That is because we do not expect the Ordinariate clergy to be confined to ministering within the Ordinariate. They cannot be. If they only have one congregation to look after 30 or 40 people, then they have the time on a Sunday or a Saturday night to help with the local diocese; and so they should. Diocesan priests are overworked and they have a lot of pressure on them. There are big congregations and the more the Ordinariate clergy help the local clergy, the more the Ordinariate will be accepted as part of the natural Catholic life of the Church in England and Wales. Even now, if there are any Catholic priests who are complaining about the Ordinariate, I have not met them yet. All of them have been so enthusiastic, want to be helpful, want to be encouraging and hope that we will equally want to be part of the local Catholic life. The best way forward is for there to be reciprocal support between the clergy of the Ordinariate and the clergy of the diocese – and in the case of all our Ordinariate priests, those with groups and those who are isolated, the local diocesan bishop will need to be happy. But I think this will be quite possible.

Funding the Ordinariate
What about the finances of the Ordinariate – how will it be funded? We are currently trying to set up a charitable trust, which will take a little bit of time. There are two ways of giving to the Ordinariate at the moment. The first is to give directly to CaTEW, the Catholic Trust for England and Wales, which is a Catholic fund held by the Bishops’ Conference, of which I am now a voting member. They have ring-fenced a fund for the Ordinariate within their accounts, so that anybody who sends money to them for the Ordinariate can be assured that it will be devoted to this purpose alone. We already have £250,000 given by the Catholic dioceses of England & Wales; we have been offered some money by Forward in Faith and the Catholic League, too, is offering assistance.

Very interestingly - and I am very touched by what happened - in November I went to Pluscarden Abbey near Inverness, which has great Anglican links through Aelred Carlisle, who had been a monk on Caldey Island. When he left the Anglican Church, the Caldey monks divided into two. Most of them became Catholics and formed Prinknash Abbey, while some remained and formed Nashdom Abbey, which became Elmore Abbey and is now in the Close at Salisbury. The Prinknash monks founded Pluscarden Abbey in Scotland; and, when you go into their chapel there, you will see a picture of Aelred Carlisle and several others in the community with Anglican backgrounds. Once I had resigned as Bishop of Richborough, I went there to get some rest away from it all for a moment. For example, there had been a lot of press interest surrounding our resignations. But, when I sat down for our first meal, I was greeted by what the monk began to read from the lectern during supper. He said, “News from The Tablet – three Anglican bishops have resigned ......” Afterwards, the Abbot said, “We know you here for a rest, but would you like to talk to the Community about the Ordinariate?” So I talked to them for an hour or so. When I got back, the Abbot wrote to say they wanted to send a donation to the Ordinariate and that has gone into the CaTEW fund. The problem with CaTEW is that the fund they are holding for us will be for the Ordinariate’s general purposes and it is not possible at the moment to hold individual accounts for distinct parish groups. But I am grateful to the Catholic League, which has set up the Newman Fund to provide this facility for us. Thus it is possible to earmark people’s donations for particular parishes and groups, as well as attract Gift Aid tax relief. Once we get our own trust going, we will be able to operate like every other Catholic diocese. But we are only a few days old and it takes a bit of time to set things up.

The Principal Church of the Ordinariate
What about identifying the Ordinariate’s principal church and headquarters? At the moment we do not have a principal church; nor have we identified where the headquarters will be. This may be because it will have to be where I live; but I do not know yet where that will be either. I am supposed to be leaving my present house on 31 March and we are currently looking for a suitable house for me to live in somewhere around London. Until we know where that is, we can assume that the headquarters will be where I live, providing it is big enough to accommodate the administration. For the moment, the Bishops’ Conference has given me an office next to the chapel at its building in Eccleston Square.

We have not yet identified a principal church. The Tablet suggested that it was going to be St James’ Spanish Place, which was unwelcome news to its parish priest! I do not think we can put out the congregation of 1400 for a group from the Ordinariate. But I am sure something will be found. It is all in God’s hands.

Some Thoughts on Present Disorder in English Society

2011-08-10T13:04:00.000+01:00

It is quite clear that the riots and looting by children and young people in scores of towns and cities are not borne of grievance at systemic exclusion from education, or access to economic prosperity, nor because of the suppose racism or oppressiveness of the police, or the failure of power to listen to disaffected youth. People of many ethnic origins are involved - just as they are in the police and fire services. It seems, too, that a good proportion of those involved are students, or in work. Furthermore, whatever our problems in England, this country has an education and schools service that is the envy of children in, for instance, India and South Africa, where only a fraction of the resources we enjoy are available' and yet children there work hard to achieve, get themselves and their families out of poverty and go on to improve their villages, cities and wider society. It is shaming to think that, in a country with so much - one of the richest in the world - where young people have more going for them than almost anywhere else in the world, a tiny minority have unleashed their utter self-absorption in a feast of violence and unruled wills that has not even remembered the taboo of preserving life, ahead of the self-indulgence of acquisition - of something for nothing.

Most young people are not disaffected. They have strong senses of identity, aspiration, hope, love and duty. Most young people have a clear sense of dignity, worth and self-respect. They want to be understood as indiviudals with thoughts and ambitions that matter. Most want to make their families proud of them through their achievements, hope for a good job and a happy home and family life of their own. A lot of young people have heart-breaking obstacles in their path; some have made terrible mistakes; a few others face terrible dangers from involvement crime, gangs and drugs. We may not always get the solutions to many of these problems right; but this country, from the government to the energetic world of self-sacrificing charities, bends over backwards to try and put things right and make them better. Everywhere there are signs of hope, as young people at risk find out who they are and what they want to be in life - through arts, sports, inspiration, reading and imagination, finding what they would love to do for a job, learning about their health and threats to it, choosing their own future rather than having it dictated to them by cowards, and learning the skills that make them effective as contributing members to society, with voices that deserve to be heard and are worth hearing.

The rioters in the streets are in a class apart from the glorious young people who are our country's future and who continually make our country a dynamic place to live. It is most unfair to them for the public and media discourse to blame them for the transgressions of a few. Whatever the faults and setbacks, most young people take pains to overcome them and we every reason to be proud of them and confident of the future.

There is much comment about root causes to the problems of the last few days, relating to social disaffection and financial exclusion owing to the state of the economy and the public spending cuts. There are grains of truth in this, but the true problem is the entrhonement of the paramount self in the formation of some young people. The Judeao-Christian tradition, to build social cohesion through the community of faith, has answered this in a very few short phrases that, formerly, we learned more or less by heart. Not that this wild and strange children will listen for years to come, but it is worth repeating them:

Thou shalt do no murder
Thou shalt not steal
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house ... nor anything that is his
Cursed is he that removeth his neighbour's landmark
Cursed is he that smiteth his neighbour secretly
Lay not up for yourselves treasure upon earth
Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, even so do unto them
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind and with all thy strength
Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

John Allen Interviews Fr Mark Woodruff for the National Catholic Reporter

2011-08-05T19:52:00.000+01:00

This interview with our priest-director forms part of the blog, All Things Cahtholic, of the distinguished journalist senior correspondent of the American National Catholic Reporter, and is found here, starting about half-way down the page.

John Allen writes:
While I was in London recently, I had the chance to speak with several people about the new “Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham,” a structure provided for by Pope Benedict XVI two years ago to welcome groups of Anglican clergy and laity into the Catholic fold, which is now a going concern in the U.K.

The ordinariate currently numbers roughly 900 laity and 60 clergy, including some newly minted Catholic priests who had already retired from Anglican ministry at 70.

One of the more interesting conversations came with Fr Mark Woodruff, a former Anglican who entered the Catholic church long before the ordinariate, but who has served as an advisor for some of its groups. A veteran ecumenist and a deeply thoughtful soul, Woodruff sketched some of the promise, and the challenges, facing the new venture. Woodruff not only took the time to answer my questions in person, but he also fleshed out his thinking in e-mail correspondence. The following are excerpts from our exchange.

What does the ordinariate mean?
I think it’s genuinely an attempt to signal that in the universal church, which we believe subsists in the Catholic Church, there is endless space, with the possibility of embracing Christian tradition in its entirety and its integrity. … This is an immense affirmation of Anglicanism and its riches. It’s possible for them to be in communion, united not absorbed tout court. Furthermore, we as a Catholic Church can to some extent internalise Anglican tradition and make it our own. This is an immensely valuable tool ecumenically that we have not had before. It’s not about poaching, it is about internalising in the Catholic Church what already belongs to it, the ultimate dimension being the visible unity of the whole of Christ’s body.

What’s the background to the ordinariate?
The practical shape and detailing of it has been under discussion for twenty years or more. There were negotiations for something along these lines in the late 1980s. A grouping called the Congregation for the English Mission was involved in discussions with Cardinal [Basil] Hume when there was a crisis for Catholic-minded Anglicans and papalist Anglicans in those days.

At that time, the Catholic bishops here didn’t want a multiplication of jurisdictions. They wanted an integrated diocesan structure. The effect was that, when there was an influx of Anglicans in large numbers in the early 1990s — since that time we’ve had about 500 priests in England and Wales who have come from the Anglican tradition — it broke up relationships, traditions and shared outlooks, as people made their own way. They did so in great number, but you lost that esprit de corps.

What did that say about what we really thought of ecumenical reconciliation? Our message was that, to be in communion with the Catholic Church, you had to relinquish your old life together and simply ‘convert’ to Roman Catholicism. As we lost sight of the principle of corporate reunion, we also lost sight of our own principle that the church is a community of communities. That communion has not been broken up this time around. You’ve got some kind of ecclesial, Eucharistic, corporate identity, and that’s something to build on.

There are 900 laity and 60 clergy in the ordinariate. Ten years from now, what will those numbers be?
Partly, it depends on finding resources and buildings from which the Ordinariate parishes can conduct their mission. Perhaps there will be some sharing with other denominations, or existing Catholic parishes. A big concern is how to pay the clergy too, not least those with families. There are hospital, school, and prison chaplaincies that can help with this, and some have arranged to take secular employment, as permitted by the norms.

The liturgical rite is being developed and hopefully will be in use early next year. In my view, it’s a risk not to have it ready now, as inevitably people may drift from their groups into the parishes where they are now getting accustomed to church life. But when it is in use, there is no reason why it shouldn’t be a draw to other Christians who want to be built up in this way. Other Catholics will be free to attend and take part and, it may even be that, with this rite as normative, the Ordinariate will be among the most enduring manifestations of the Anglican tradition in this culture and country.
I believe that God has not gone to all these lengths for something that is merely transitional.

Is it an open question how large the ordinariate may become?
I happen to think that if the ordinariate project gets its liturgical life together, and it maintains a distinctive Anglican theological and spiritual tradition, it will be a great addition to the Catholic church in this country. It will embody something to which people will respond. It will have classic Anglican liturgy, it will express Catholic faith in a classic Anglican way, and it won’t have the sort of dichotomy within itself between orthodoxy and relativism that I think is troubling the Church of England.

Are the members of the ordinariate right-wing ideologues?
No, I don’t think they are. I think most people have been ordinary Anglican churchgoers coming from the broad range of Anglican-Catholic traditions. Externally, some will be used to a fairly elaborate liturgy, others will be coming from a more choral-civic ‘Prayer Book’ tradition, others will have been very consciously ‘Vatican II’ and not theologically all that different from Roman Catholics. Sociologically and demographically, they will have different perspectives, but from what I have seen there is both the sheer normality of the people and clergy, and also a range of views and their expression – from very conservative, to very academic, very ‘Anglican’, very pastoral, very spirituality-focused, to very social gospel-focused, to everything else that we can find in our regular Catholic churches.

What’s been the Anglican reaction?
I think there has been a great deal of neuralgia. In the English situation, the Church of England does not quite occupy the position in national life that it once did, but it still has this important position of leadership and engagement with the state and with civil society that is vital, I think, also to the mission of the Catholic church. We are absolutely bound to work together and, besides, we respond to different parts of society, and they respond to us. There has to be a partnership.

We mustn’t settle for the Ordinariate as the last word in somehow embracing an Anglican tradition within the Catholic community. The work that still needs to be done is the union of all Christians, and that has to be happening because it’s the will of Christ. The Church of England entire and the Catholic church entire have at some point to be in complete union.

I’ve stressed time and time again to these friends of mine who have come into the Catholic church: I do not want you to come in and pull the ladder up. This is not about you finding a safe haven. You are now somebody who is embedded within us, who adds something to us in terms of our understanding of Anglicanism, which helps us reach out and embrace and be friends and collaborate even more deeply. We want you, therefore, to be part of that ecumenical outreach and engagement.

It is clear to me, too, that the church in this country cannot simply go on as it is, with all of our ‘denominations’ experiencing a declining grip on the imagination of people. No one church can address the deepest longings in those imaginations on its own. We need each other, we relate to people differently, and even though we are disunited we urgently need to collaborate and realise more and more an ecumenism of life.

There’s also an ecumenical vocation to the ordinariate?
If it forgets that, it must fail. It has to be about unity, because it really does have to be about the struggle for the soul of Europe and re-evangelization. It has to be at the centre of that. Otherwise, it’s just going to be an ‘ecclesiastical granny flat’. No one wants that.

For the Record: Anglican Papalism, by Fr Brooke Lunn

2011-07-17T13:27:00.001+01:00

January 2006

Anglican Papalism is a movement, from schism to unity, with a clear idea of our starting point, and a definite sense of direction. The movement’s antecedents go back to the schism, and its future goes forward to its destiny - full communion with the Roman Apostolic See. It is the expression, in a particular historical and geographical context, of the desire for unity in accordance with the expressed will of Our Lord Jesus Christ [John 17].

The usage - Anglican Papalism - goes back scarcely a century, though what it indicates, namely, efforts to heal the break with Rome, go back to the break itself. Because of widespread misunderstanding of it, it is necessary to be clear about its precise meaning.

My dictionary gives:

Anglican…(Anglicana ecclesia in Magna Carta)…Of or pertaining to the reformed Church of England or any Church in communion with it.
papalism n., papalist n. & a. (a) n. a supporter of the Pope or the papacy; (b) adj. Of or pertaining to papalism or papalists.
Romanizer n. a person, esp. an Anglican, who favours or adopts practices of the Roman Catholic Church M19.

From the above we may see Anglican Papalism as a movement of members of the Church of England or any Church in communion with it in support of the Pope or the papacy.

Thus Anglican Papalism is not to be confused with Romanizers. The former belongs in the realm of ideas, the latter in the realm of phenomena. The phenomena of Romanizers are relatively easy to perceive. The idea of Anglican Papalism requires much more application in order to begin to comprehend it.

Anglican Papalism - essential points

1. Christian unity
Unity is a fundamental concept running through the Holy Scriptures.
a) The story of Adam and Eve illustrates the essential unity of the whole human race.
b) We are created in the image and likeness of the Holy Trinity, the perfect society, the model of unity in diversity.
c) The story of Cain and Abel illustrates the social responsibility aspect of the essential unity of the whole human race.
d) The struggle to establish Jerusalem as the centre of unity of God’s people over against the high places, and the focussing of this unity on the Temple, is a central theme of the Old Testament; and is still very much present today.
e) Along with this goes the emergence of ethical monotheism in God’s revelation.
f) Jesus’s concern for the unity of God’s people is expressed in various ways, particularly in John 17: ‘that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.’
g) Ephesians 1:9-10 reads: ‘For he (God) has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.’
h) From this follows the need for Christian unity. The French catholic priest Paul Couturier, who has become known as the Apostle of Unity, saw in the prayer of Jesus in John 17 the basis of his own understanding of prayer for unity, so he produced for his Week of Prayer the formula that the visible unity of the Kingdom of God may be such as Christ wills and achieved by whatever means he wills.
j) God’s will, as Ephesians says, is to unite all things in heaven and on earth, so unity also means the unity of the whole human race, through, amongst other needs, inter-religious dialogue.
k) It also means the unity of the whole creation…ecology, the ‘green movement’, and so on.

Unity is the primary motivation of Anglican Papalism. The understanding of what unity means continues to develop, but the basic motivation remains.

2. Rome
Anglican papalists are convinced that the fulness of the Church is to be found both in the local Church, the bishop and his people, and in the universal Church, the communion of all the Churches with the Church of Rome, the Apostolic See. It is not a case of either/or, but of both/and. Thus full communion with Rome is not just some optional extra, which might be helpful, but is essential for the fulness of the Church. Rome holds a unique place in the unity of the Church, over and beyond the fact that unity necessarily involves all Churches and ecclesial communities and, indeed, everyone of good will who professes the Christian faith.

Section 23 of the ARCIC Agreed Statement Authority in the Church I reads:

If God’s will for the unity in love and truth of the whole Christian community is to be fulfilled, this general pattern of the complementary primatial and conciliar aspects of episcope serving the koinonia of the churches needs to be realized at the universal level. The only see which makes any claim to universal primacy and which has exercised and still exercises such episcope is the see of Rome, the city where Peter and Paul died.
It seems appropriate that in any future union a universal primacy such as has been described should be held by that see.

3. Prayer
Prayer is very much to the fore in Anglican Papalist work for unity. The Church Unity Octave, first observed in 1908, originated with two Anglican papalists. The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity developed from this. Couturier, the ‘Apostle of Unity’ was first brought to England through the efforts of Anglican papalists. Today the Catholic League is active in promoting prayer for unity. A special edition of The Messenger of The Catholic League, no. 280 October 2003 – February 2004 was dedicated to the vision of Paul Couturier as part of the observance of the fiftieth anniversary of his death. Also from the Catholic League comes the Christian Unity Prayerbook.

4. Doctrine
It is fundamental to Anglican Papalism that an essential prerequisite for full unity is agreement in the essentials of Christian doctrine. Until Vatican II this was identified in the Creed of the Council of Trent. Today the touchstone is the Catechism of the Catholic Church of 1994. The work of ARCIC is recognised as of great importance in the search for unity.

5. Liturgy
Lex orandi - lex credendi - lex vivendi…worship, faith, life…Christianity is all of a piece, and all the parts belong together in its wholeness. The catholic Church, as distinct from many ecclesial communities which express themselves primarily through ‘Confessions’ [Augsburg, Westminster, etc.] expresses herself primarily through liturgy. Thus Anglican Papalists give due significance to their convictions through liturgy. This is not the same as saying that Anglican Papalism is primarily about liturgy. It is not. There are many Romanizers who are most definitely not papalists; and there are Anglican Papalists who would scarcely merit the description of Romanizer. The difference between papalist and Romanizer is fundamental, yet there remains much confusion. Yet indeed many Anglican Papalists are Romanizers. Issues raised by this are dealt with in a Catholic League publication, Liturgy and Unity.

6. Loyalty
Anglican Papalists have been on the receiving end of much unjust criticism - that their position is irrational, hypocritical, disloyal, etc. Where such criticism has been just, and this seems to be very rare, the object of such criticism has been exceptional and untypical of Anglican Papalism. Geoffrey Curtis CR, not a papalist himself, in Paul Couturier and Unity in Christ [p. 163] gave a fair appreciation which questioned the charge of disloyalty. This is considered further below.

One of the most frequent grounds for the allegation of disloyalty is the adoption of practices of the Roman Catholic Church. This ground is refuted in Liturgy and Unity, already mentioned above. Another ground is that Anglican Papalists stress the importance of bishops but then don’t do what their bishops tell them to do. There is more than an element of truth in the waggish observation - unlike most Anglicans, I have a high doctrine of episcopacy, but low expectations; whereas most Anglicans seem to have a low doctrine, but high expectations; and I am the one who is least often disappointed! Put another way, I do not subscribe to a doctrine of the infallibility of individual bishops!

Pope Paul VI, who succeeded John XXIII, and had the task of seeing the Second Vatican Council through to its completion, is almost definitely the Pope with the best knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of Anglicans since the ferment of the sixteenth century. He said, at the canonisation of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales in 1970, that on the day when the Church of Rome would embrace firmly her ever-beloved Anglican sister in the one authentic communion of the family of Christ ‘no offence will be afflicted [sic] on the honour and sovereignty of a great country such as England. There will be no seeking to lessen the prestige and usage proper to the Anglican Church’ [Rome and Canterbury Through Four Centuries, Bernard and Margaret Pawley, pages 341-342]. Anglican Papalists, loyal to all that is of good value in our Anglican heritage, say a heartfelt ‘Amen’ to that.

I now live in retirement in the London Charterhouse. The very first of those Forty Martyrs canonised in 1970 was Saint John Houghton, Carthusian Prior of the London Charterhouse. He was martyred, viciously, on 4th May 1535, because he refused to accept Henry VIII as head of the Church in England. To accuse Saint John Houghton of disloyalty to the Church in England because he supported the papacy would be a manifest travesty. 'Anglican' and 'Papalist' are terms that came into usage later, but Anglican Papalists today look to Saint John Houghton, along with many of his contemporaries, as true witnesses, even unto death, to the conviction which we share with him.

7. England
Anglican Papalists recognise both the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church in England as rightfully claiming descent from the undivided Church in England before the sixteenth century schism. We do not accept derogatory epithets such as 'the Italian Mission' or 'the immigrant Irish Church' to describe the Roman Catholic Church in England.

One of the powerful motivations of Anglican Papalism is the Christian mission to the people of England, of whatever racial, religious or cultural background. We perceive the present disunity among Christians in England as a scandal, a stumbling block to the mission of the Church in our land. It is not just some historic scandal [Henry VIII and all that], but a continuing scandal, an actual scandal, here and now, in which the Churches and ecclesial communities in England today participate. Reunion and unity, for us, mean one visible Church in England, with a common identity, not a stifling uniformity but unity in an acceptable diversity. What that means for us has been explored in, for example, Liturgy and Unity, already mentioned above, and Reuniting Anglicans and Rome - a special issue of The Messenger of the Catholic League from October 1994.

8. Individual reception
Recognising Newman’s dictum about the primacy of conscience, Anglican Papalists see this as applying not least to those Anglicans who enter individually into full communion with Rome. The Catholic League, in recognising this, logically opened membership to all who agree with the four objects of The League and with the doctrinal basis of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

9. Ecclesial communities and corporate reunion
Those Anglican churches, including the Church of England, which have formally moved away from the catholic teaching and practice of apostolic succession in holy orders [as taught in the Ordinal with its Preface accompanying the BCP 1662] are now Ecclesial Communities rather than Churches in the proper sense. This leads to a substantial change in the basis for seeking corporate reunion with the Roman Apostolic See. In no way does it diminish the need for reunion. In so far as Rome recognises ecclesial communities, then this reunion will properly be corporate.

10. Unity of creation
Unity includes Christian unity, unity with other religions and life stances, and the unity and harmony of the whole creation. This is added in as a reminder that our own particular motivations need to be seen in the overall context of God’s will for the unity of the whole creation, to unite all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth.

Two Classic Texts
I elaborated the above ten essential points from my own personal experience and understanding of Anglican Papalism over more than half a century. It is an understanding at the beginning of the third millennium. Basic to it are two classic texts of Anglican Papalism - England and the Holy See, by Spencer Jones in 1902; and The Church of England and the Holy See (the 1933 Centenary Tractates of the Council for Promoting Catholic Unity).

I take a glance at these two texts below, as they are critical evidence for the true nature of Anglican Papalism. A recent book and the reviews of it reveal the extensive ignorance of the true nature of Anglican Papalism, and the prejudice, misrepresentation, misunderstanding and false judgements deriving from this ignorance. The reason why so many commentators on Anglican Papalism who are not themselves Anglican Papalists are so hostile is complex. This is a challenge to Anglican Papalists. This present article merely attempts to throw some light on what Anglican Papalists themselves understand it to be.

Anglican Papalists’ true home in mainstream Christianity
Anglican Papalism is a movement from schism to unity, from the margins to the centre, from a backwater into the mainstream of Christianity. As such it is the very opposite of extreme. So how is it that it is so frequently misrepresented as extreme ? Extreme depends on what one identifies as the norm. If you perceive the Church of England to be The Norm of Christianity, with Dissent wandering off from this norm in one direction, and catholics refusing to come into line with the norm in the other direction, then clearly Anglican Papalists are out of line with this norm. The term nonconformist makes the point, having been used to describe both Dissent and catholics.

The evidence does not support the view that the Church of England is the norm of Christianity. It does support the view that the catholic Church is the norm. This is not so much because she is overwhelmingly the largest body of Christians, but more because of her faithful witness to God’s revelation down the ages. That there is a gap between the faithful teaching of the Church and all too much of the actual practice, not just of individual members but also of the members corporately, is recognised in the teaching by the model of the Church as the pilgrim people of God rather than as the perfect society.

This proper norm was recognised by the English Church down the ages until the state imposed an alternative norm in the sixteenth century. Yet the arms of the Archbishop of Canterbury to this day incorporate the Pallium, the symbol of authority conferred by the Pope, thus indicating the proper norm. The Gospels of Saint Augustine of Canterbury, probably brought to England by Saint Augustine himself when sent by Pope Gregory, being used at the enthronement of Archbishops of Canterbury, including our present Archbishop, likewise indicate the proper norm. The ARCIC process has helped to acknowledge the proper norm [e.g. Authority I.23]. The second half of the twentieth century has seen much progress in acknowledging the proper norm of Christianity, though there is still much more to be done here.

A key principle in Spencer Jones’s England and the Holy See is that of proportion. Thus, to treat the Church of England as the norm of Christianity is to get things seriously out of proportion. To treat the catholic Church as the norm is to restore a sense of proportion. Anglican Papalism, with its conscious desire and commitment to pursue the expressed will of Our Lord Jesus Christ for unity, and our recognition that this necessarily involves full communion with the Roman Apostolic See, places our true home right at the heart of mainstream Christianity.

Loyal Anglicans
The loyalty of Anglican Papalists to our Anglican heritage is second to none. Spencer Jones’s England and the Holy See is a classic Anglican text, written for Anglicans by an Anglican. The overriding purpose of the Centenary Tractates of 1933 is to demonstrate that the true home of the Church of England is full union with the Holy See - which they demonstrate most effectively. The title of the series is - The Church of England and the Holy See.

The loyalty of Anglican Papalists to our Anglican roots is seen in many ways, of which the following are some:

1. Anglican Papalists have a good knowledge, understanding and appreciation of our Anglican heritage; usually better than that of fellow Anglicans. The two texts referred to above demonstrate this very clearly.

2. Anglican Papalist clergy and laity have a fine record of devoted work, often in the pastorally tougher parts of The Lord’s Vineyard. I note in The Catholic Herald of November 11, 2005, "H.J.Fynes-Clinton, one of the prime movers [of Anglican Papalism], rarely had a good congregation at St. Magnus the Martyr."

I was a server at St Magnus from 1951 to 1959, when I went off as a student to Trinity College, Dublin, months before Father Fynes died. Latterly, I served the 8am weekday Mass, occasionally attended by local office workers, as well as the lunchtime services. I myself worked in Barclays Chief Foreign Branch just up the road. For the 8am Mass Fr Fynes would catch the underground from St James Park, near where he lived, to Monument, close by St Magnus. He was in his eighties. His GP had told him that this was too much for him, and when Fr Fynes carried on nonetheless, his GP said: ‘Well, you’re on your own.’

A good congregation? City of London parishes were viewed by many as sinecures. Fr Fynes viewed the parish of St Magnus as the very opposite, a most demanding ‘cure’ of souls. Far from being sinecures, City of London parishes are seen by diligent pastors as among the toughest pastoral assignments. Fr Fynes led the way in weekday services in the City. Our community of worshippers in the 1950s at St Magnus had a powerful influence on me, for good, as I believe; and the inspiration for this was Fr Fynes. I wish to say much more on this, but now discipline myself; except to say that the comment which provoked my response I consider to be unworthy, and ignorance is a poor excuse.

3. Our recognition that we are in schism is an honest self-appraisal, not disloyalty. Were St John Houghton and his fellow Carthusian martyrs being disloyal to the Church in England when they took their stand against the tyrant Henry VIII ? Was St Thomas More likewise being disloyal? Was St John Fisher also being disloyal? They were not Anglicans in schism. We are. But the issue is the same.

4. A true, thorough, critical evaluation of all that is good and worthwhile in our Anglican heritage is a necessary exercise of the principle of proportion.

5. The willingness to persevere in the face of misunderstanding, unfair treatment and misrepresentation is a test which demonstrated the loyalty of our forebears who were actively persecuted; and continues to be a test for us today.

6. Anglican Papalists, notably Spencer Jones and Fr Fynes-Clinton, expressed themselves very clearly
about the responsibility of bishops to exercise a ministry of unity in witnessing faithfully to God’s revelation. They were absolutely clear that the mind of the Church took precedence over the vagaries of individual bishops. For this they have been criticised as inconsistent, disloyal and undisciplined. Yelton, in Anglican Papalism puts it thus: ‘This was a fairly typical attitude to bishops by those who on the other hand sought to uphold church order, displaying one of the ambiguities which has plagued the Catholic Revival throughout its existence.’ Which prompts the question: 'Was Athanasius wrong to confront the Arian bishops?' Was Athanasius ambiguous? What nonsense!

When it comes to charges of disloyalty, those who have in our times changed the fundamental nature of our Anglican heritage should become aware that they are in a very vulnerable glass house.

How others see us
About thirty years ago the local council of churches decided to hold the Week of Prayer service in our church. It was their first visit. The secretary of the council came around to arrange things, and I shewed her the church. ‘The council won’t like this’, she said, as her nose twitched at a suspicion of incense in the air. ‘Shrines, candles…’ - the usual list of aids to worship in catholic churches which so upset the anti-catholic prejudice nurtured in the English since the sixteenth century. ‘But’, said I, ‘the local catholic Church is an active member of the council of churches, and you have held services there?’ ‘Yes’, she replied, ‘but then we expect such things of them. We expect you to know better.’

Even to this day we should be well aware of just how deep-seated is anti-catholic prejudice and ignorance. In so far as this has declined, this has coincided with a decline in the place of religion as a whole in our society. So, Anglo-Catholics, and Anglican Papalists even more so, are criticised because we ought to know better.

An appreciation is given by Geoffrey Curtis CR in his Paul Couturier and Unity in Christ, 1964 [p.163]:

We are beginning to see that Anglican Papalists have been unfairly judged. Abbe Couturier saw this very clearly. They are accused by English Roman Catholics of failure in logic and by many of their fellow Anglicans of disloyalty. There may be Anglican Papalists who are a law unto themselves and who ignore the force of the ordination pledges and are thus disloyal to our Church and to its bishops. There may well be an Anglo-Roman underworld as there have been Protestant and Modernist underworlds and, for all I know, an Inferno of ‘Moderation’. But the true Anglican Papalists are not of this calibre. They are a small group with a long lineage in our Church, and many are of the salt of the earth. Their particular standpoint many of them have recognized as involving a call to a life of reparation. Contrary to average opinion this small group is notable for its intellectual power as well as for its holiness. Perhaps the books of Anglican theology of this century that have been most widely read abroad have been books by Papalists - Spencer Jones’ England and the Holy See and Gregory Dix’s The Shape of the Liturgy; Dr S.H.Scott’s great work, Eastern Churches and the Papacy, is used by scholars in most parts of the world.

To other Anglicans their position seems neither disloyal to our Church nor, given their convictions, contrary to the logic of charity, but rather sadly disproportioned. We believe that our own Anglican heritage possesses certain Christian values in trust and that these would be jeopardized if we were to submit to Rome as she now is.

That is a gracious appreciation, but I am greatly puzzled that Fr Curtis sees Anglican Papalists as willing ‘to submit to Rome as she now is’ [his book was published in 1964], and so jeopardize our own good Anglican heritage. Submission is the Roman Catholic approach to Anglicans wishing to enter into full communion with the Roman Apostolic See. It is difficult indeed to see how this is compatible with the Anglican Papalist principle of corporate reunion. In number eight of the Centenary Tractates of 1933, Fr Fynes-Clinton has a section headed ‘Corporate Return’. In this he emphasizes: ‘Our schism from Rome was Corporate: the remedy must be Corporate’. Fr Corbould, in the same tractate [pages 25-26…quoted later and see previous post] lists eight Anglican aspects which might be agreeable to Rome in the cause of reunion.

Fr Curtis was clearly sympathetic to the cause of unity with Rome. This is seen in his biography of Paul Couturier. Also, Fr Curtis was a prime mover in the recognition at the London Charterhouse of the Carthusian Martyrs. What is it about Anglican Papalists that Fr Curtis found to be ‘rather sadly disproportioned’ ? He is not alone among those of goodwill who seem to misunderstand us. Does some of the problem lie with us, and our possible failure to communicate clearly what our principles are ? I remain genuinely puzzled. This is not because I believe that our movement is above criticism. Yet I suspect that some of our critics are more familiar with the fringe elements rather than with the essence - not a sound basis for fair judgement.

There is also the phenomenon, still very much with us today, of anti-papalism amongst strongly traditional Anglo-Catholics. Amongst these would be found those content to be called Continuing Anglicans.

A more bizarre hostility is found in a Jesuit reviewing Yelton’s book. His review takes up so much space with abuse of Anglican Papalism that he leaves himself with no room at all to substantiate his false accusations. Briefly damning with faint praise - ‘occasional intellectual brilliance’ - to heaping abuse - misconceived, travesty, dishonest, parasitic, pastorally disastrous…what is it about Anglican Papalism that draws out such unfairness? But one point above all in that review suggests that time should not be wasted on it. ‘For Catholics, papalism is a position which few will understand.’ Recall the dictionary definition of papalism - ‘a supporter of the Pope or the papacy’. A Jesuit, whose fourth vow is one of special obedience to the Holy Father in the matter of accepting missions, not understanding papalism ? Let’s move on quickly.

A completely opposite and very positive view of us is seen by many Roman Catholics. Witness, for example, the warm relations we have enjoyed for many years with our contacts in the monasteries and diocese of Bruges where we visit annually in the hope of and furtherance of Anglican-Roman Catholic unity. A key ingredient of such good relations is friendship.

Fair minded Roman Catholics acknowledge that Anglican Papalism has drawn some of the anti-catholic prejudice away from Roman Catholics. A fair number of Roman Catholics learnt their catholic faith and life in the Church of England. Amongst these only a few ‘kick the ladder away’ or ‘bite the hand that fed them’. The Catholic League, once exclusively Anglican Papalist, now has Roman Catholic members, including Officers and Council members. We are in good heart.

Anglican Papalism since 1960
I take the date 1960 from Yelton’s Anglican Papalism - A History 1900-1960 [p.16]: ‘The real undermining of the Papalist tradition came in the period after 1960, which is not dealt with in detail in this study.’ This judgement is supported by reviewers of Yelton’s book: ‘He has written a study in failure’; ‘A lost cause’; ‘the coup de grace’; and so on. So, given the precise meaning of ‘Anglican Papalism as a movement of members of the Church of England or any Church in communion with it in support of the Pope or the papacy’, consider the evidence.

On 3rd December 1960 Dr Geoffrey Fisher visited the Pope. This was the first ever visit of an Archbishop of Canterbury to the Pope since the sixteenth century schism. Subsequent Archbishops of Canterbury, including our present one, have visited the Pope. Since 1960 the Second Vatican Council led to great improvement in Anglican-Roman Catholic relations. The Vatican 2 Decree on Ecumenism said [13]: ‘Among those in which Catholic traditions and institutions in part continue to exist, the Anglican communion occupies a special place.’ Since 1960 ARCIC was set up, and continues to do valuable work towards unity. Pope Paul VI, from a position of considerable knowledge and understanding, expressed a most gracious and generous appreciation of our Anglican heritage.

The Catholic League took Vatican II totally on board, and subsequently took the Catechism of the Catholic Church [1994] as our touchstone of orthodoxy. The League’s publications, including The Messenger, continue to promote the papalist cause. Notable here are two special issues - Reuniting Anglicans and Rome in October 1994; and The Unity of Christians: The Vision of Paul Couturier in February 2004.

The Congregation of the English Mission was an initiative of The League regarding corporate reunion, whose explorations for three years to 1990 are briefly described in Reuniting Anglicans and Rome. Much of the work and prayer for unity goes on at the grassroots level and doesn’t make the headlines. A good example is the inauguration of the Emmanuel Chapel in the Begijnhof guesthouse in Brugge, for which the League provided the monstrance and the icon of the Mother of God. The years since 1960 have seen some of the most positive gains in the search for unity. Sadly, the last few years have seen a significant turning away from unity with Rome on the part of the Church of England.

For several centuries the religious life of England was largely to be identified with the Church of England, hence Anglican Papalism. The continuing marginalisation of the Church of England in English society raises questions concerning the Anglican dimension of papalism. We may be moving towards a situation where the need would be better expressed as English Papalism. The 1933 text was The Church of England and the Holy See. The 1902 text, England and the Holy See, may now more accurately reflect the situation.

Whether it be Anglican or English Papalism, the movement remains as necessary as ever, new challenges notwithstanding. Seeking the will of Our Lord Jesus Christ is not a lost cause. Failure is not an option. The coup de grace ? A tradition undermined ? Inevitable flaws ? A lost cause ? Failure? Shades of Mark Twain: Reports of our death are an exaggeration.

For the Record: Fr Brooke Lunn on "The Centenary Tractates" of 1933 - The Church of England and the Holy See

2011-07-17T12:01:00.002+01:00

A glance at the Centenary Tractates of the Council for Promoting Catholic Unity in 1933
Brooke Lunn, January 2006

Eight tractates were published, as follows:
1. What do the Celtic Churches say? by the Reverend Silas M. Harris, M.A. (36 pages)
2. What does the Anglo Saxon Church say? by the Reverend J.G. Morton Howard, M.A. (20 pages)
3. What do the General Councils say? by the Reverend S. Herbert Scott, D.Phil., B.Litt., F.R.Hist.S. (36 pages)
4. What did the Church of England say? by the Reverend J.G. Morton Howard, M.A. (32 pages)
5. What does the XVI century say? by the Reverend Spencer Jones, M.A. (40 pages)
6. What do English Divines say? by the Reverend L.F.Simmonds, M.A. (32 pages)
7. What do the Tractarians say? by the Reverend Spencer Jones, M.A. (44 pages)
8. What are we to say? by the Reverend H.J. Fynes-Clinton, M.A. and the Reverend W. Robert Corbould. (31 pages)

The purpose of the tractates was to demonstrate the integral relationship between the Church of England and the Holy See from the earliest times; how, since the sixteenth century schism, this integral relationship had not totally been lost from sight or remembrance; and, in 1933, celebrating the centenary of the Oxford Movement, the extent to which this integral relationship had been restored to sight, with progress towards its full re-establishment.

The tractates are of considerable scholarly merit, and bring before the reader a wealth of evidence which four centuries of anti-catholic propaganda had sought to suppress. For my part, they largely substantiate, as Spencer Jones says in the thirteenth of his propositions [see previous post] ‘that Rome is in fact the mother of English Christianity’. Here I wish to refer, briefly, to tractate eight by way of a corrective to certain misunderstandings currently circulating.

What are we to say?
In tractate number eight Fr Fynes-Clinton, referring to the Manifesto of October 1932, wrote:

Constructively it asserted that the inevitable end of the Catholic Revival is the corporate return of the English Church to communion with the Holy See, and that this is the aim for which it is the duty of all Catholics to strive.

Under the heading of ‘The Catholic Life of the Church’ Fr Fynes writes:

The English Church possesses those essential elements of the Catholic inheritance that make her a living part of the Holy Apostolic Church founded by Christ:- the Faith in her assertion that she adheres to the undivided Church and the Oeucumenical Creeds, and in her appeal to the early Councils and the consent of the Fathers: Sacramental Orders with her expressed intention that they be a continuation of those of the Primitive Church: her maintenance of Episcopal government and her ancient Canon Law.

Beyond question she has much of value to contribute to the whole in her sacramental life, in her revived Religious Orders, in her historic continuity with the past and an intimate nexus with the national life and history that no other religious body possesses. In this lies a hope for immeasurable progress in the future in winning the allegiance of the English people back to their Catholic inheritance. The Church of England has unrivalled opportunities of reaching every village and household, of influencing the great interests and powers of the kingdom, and these opportunities involve the gravest responsibility.

Further on, under the heading ‘Corporate Return’, Fr Fynes writes:

To-day we see cause for great hope in the agreement that our state of disunion is intolerable. Schism from the Church or schism within the Church is sin. Our schism from Rome was Corporate: the remedy must be Corporate. Individual secession serves but to postpone reunion and leaves the problem where it was before. A corporate return made possible by an acknowledgment of the faults on both sides in the spirit of penitence, of prayer, of charity and determination. This is our aim: its glory our inspiration. The supreme need of the Church of England to-day is Corporate return to the Holy See, and this is but a return to her natural and original life.

Fr Corbould, in the second part of tractate eight, regarding the acceptance of the Holy Father as the centre of unity for Christendom, writes:

But such an acceptance need not involve the great upheaval feared in our accustomed religious life. Granted dogmatic agreement, on Roman principles much variety could be allowed in practice, and much could be allowed of those things which are peculiarly English and which we have come to value. In a union effected on such a basis for instance, all the following concessions could be made without touching the basis of dogmatic agreement. We do not say they all would be: we do not even say that it is desirable that they should be, but at any rate they serve to show how large a field of negotiation remains after dogmatic agreement has been attained. Rome could concede:-

1. That the Archbishop of Canterbury be acknowledged as Patriarch of such Anglican churches throughout the world as should desire to enter into the union.

2. That until the Anglican Church shall ask for a change of relationship she shall be governed by her own canon laws, provided that these in no case override oecumenic laws or custom, under the authority of the Patriarch of Canterbury, with an appeal to the Holy See.

3. That liberty be granted to the Anglican Church to appoint her own bishops.

4. That an English rite be authorized approximating as nearly as possible to that familiar to our people, but revised so far as necessary to satisfy Catholic liturgiologists.

5. That the use of the Authorized Version of the Bible be allowed until such time as a revised edition of it can be agreed upon.

6. That the Pope himself shall regularize from his point of view the orders of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and that the Archbishop should then secure the “regularization” of the rest of the clergy - no denial of the validity of their present orders being required of them. (It should be noted that such a means of satisfying questions as to orders was suggested by the Anglican bishops at the Lambeth Conference of 1920 and would follow the precedent of St. Chad and the Celtic Church.)

7. That the existing bishops and priests of the Anglican Churches adhering to the union should be secured in their present offices and status - including those who should be already married.

8. That communion in both kinds should be allowed as a permissive use.

That such ideas should be put forward in 1933 in a classic Anglican Papalist text should act as a corrective to false notions about Anglican Papalism still in circulation.

For the Record: Fr Brooke Lunn on "England and the Holy See" by Spencer Jones

2011-07-17T11:37:00.007+01:00

A glance at Spencer Jones’s seminal work for Anglican Papalism
Brooke Lunn, January 2006

This book was published in 1902 when Spencer Jones was Rector of Batsford with Moreton-in-Marsh. It runs to 440 pages, plus an introduction of 16 pages by Viscount Halifax, and a preface of five pages by the author. It is subtitled An Essay towards Reunion, and is written primarily for the benefit of the English people and members of the Church of England, to commend to them the idea of reunion with the Holy See. It is not an attempt to commend the Church of England to the Holy See with a view to reunion. In 1902 anti-papal, anti-Roman, anti-catholic sentiment was still widespread in our society. This sentiment remains into our time, though much diminished in a society where Christianity itself is increasingly marginalised.

The Preface gives some indication of the author and his motivation:

If in the following pages I speak for the most part in the first person it is because I am speaking only for myself. I have to shelter myself, therefore, under the well known saying that in questions of this kind egotism is true modesty…

My thoughts have been running upon the subject of Reunion for thirteen years; and I have made some attempt to analyse what I think may be described as the chronic difficulty of the Anglican Church; until at the last I feel constrained to speak…

My general aim is to contribute materials for discussion and to do something towards restoring the great doctrine of unity to that position in the context of Christian thought which properly belongs to it; and the leading idea throughout is the principle of proportion as applied to any progressive movement that may arise in the direction of Reunion with the Holy See…

For the rest, if the unity of the Church is destined to become one of the commanding and controlling thoughts of the New Century, words recently uttered by the late deeply revered Bishop of Durham may here be set down in order to give a certain stamp and seal to this project. “If I were to choose a motto,” he said in his annual charge to his clergy (1900), “If I were to choose a motto for the coming age I should say that its work and its aim lies in applying to every relation of life the truth which is now dawning upon us, ‘Ye are all one man in Christ Jesus.’ ”

Proportion

In seeking to commend the Holy See, the writer puts forward a principle which he terms proportion. He sees a great disproportion [p.23] between our attitude towards Dissent and our attitude towards the Holy See. We are fair towards the former and unfair towards the latter. His principle of proportion, therefore, requires equal fairness in our attitude to others. This fairness requires that we seek to know and understand others before forming judgements; that is, that we should consciously avoid prejudice.

Much of the Essay is taken up with exploring particular areas of prejudice, seeking to throw light on these areas, and so eradicate false and unfair judgements. The largest chapter, more than a third of the book, entitled ‘Hindrances and Helps’, looks at some of these areas, seeking to clarify and so assist fair judgement. The area most treated is the place of the Bible in the catholic Church. Other areas include The Blessed Virgin, Infallibility, Indulgences, Images, Jesuits, and so on. It is a measure of change that I understand why Jesuits were included, for when I was young our protestant world presented them as bogeymen. Today Ignatian spirituality is appreciated well beyond the bounds of the catholic Church.

Unity, Saint Peter, and Divisions

Spencer Jones sees three types of unity:

The question is, are we to wind up our dogma at the risk of alienating men, or are we to relax it in order to attract them?

The Undenominational type of Unity follows the latter course, and the Catholic type of Unity the former.

The basis of Undenominational Unity is a common sentiment; and of Catholic Unity a common faith. And the latter would seem to be in accordance with the teaching of the New Testament and the experience of history.

Spencer Jones further distinguishes these two types by seeing their different ends as, respectively, union and unity. Union is some sort of coming together, recognising each other - today sometimes referred to as Federal unity. Unity, on the other hand, necessitates full agreement on the essentials of doctrine and morals. Union implies an invisible unity; unity necessitates visible unity.

The writer calls the third type Anglican. This is the so-called Branch Theory - Anglican, Greek and Latin. Spencer Jones simply and briefly describes this and passes no judgement on it other than to leave it behind.

Now of these three principle types I think it will be acknowledged that the Roman type comes nearest to that ideal of Unity presented by Our Lord which I have made some attempt to pourtray [sic] in this chapter.

Chapter III treats of Saint Peter in 89 pages, presenting a case for the Petrine ministry. In this the writer is to some extent anticipating the work of ARCIC. Chapter IV is entitled ‘Divisions’.

It may be convenient to consider Contradiction and not Division as the proper antithesis of Unity; and to restore the proportions of Christendom not to destroy its divisions as the proper aim of Reunion…

So to regard Divisions is to recognise them as a necessary condition of our case; it being only when they are pressed beyond their limits that we rightly describe them as contradictions or conveniently characterise them as unhappy. Unity is not uniformity, although the two ideas are often confounded; and discrimination in the use of the term Division will perhaps best secure the proper distinction between them.

Let the idea of Division, then, be considered as at once necessary and subordinate to the idea of Unity, and our unhappy Divisions or Contradictions as destructive or antagonistic to its life.

In short, unity in diversity - legitimate diversity.

Twenty-eight propositions
Returning to the first chapter, entitled ‘On the Principles of Reunion’, Spencer Jones sets out twenty-eight propositions:

With a view to promote discussion…some of which, indeed, will appear obvious, while as regards others I shall ask the reader to assume the limitation of a prefix, such as, Let it be granted - or, Let us assume for discussion’s sake - or Does it not appear likely that ? - but all of which are intended to clear our minds and to guide us in the consideration of the subject that is before us:

That Christendom is divided against itself.
That a house divided against itself cannot stand.
That our Lord meant us to be one.
That it is our duty, therefore, to compose our quarrels.
That he has endued us with the power to do so.
That this power discovers itself in the work of the Holy Spirit on the part of God, and in prayer and labour on the part of man.
That it was to the Church regarded as one that our Lord vouchsafed the promise of His presence.
That the enterprise of Re-union is, therefore, genuine since its purpose is divine.
That a “divine ideal must be capable of fulfilment.”
That as a matter of history no other form or principle of Government has been able to come near to the Holy See in its power to keep together in the bond of a living fellowship so many thousands of Christians.
That the Communion of Rome is conspicuous in the records of Scripture (“I thank God that your faith is spoken of throughout all the world”); and appears at once unique and conspicuous in the subsequent records of the Church.
That the See of Rome is the Apostolic See and is destined to become the visible centre of Christendom.
That Rome is in fact the mother of English Christianity.
That Reunion, for the English Church, signifies Reunion with the Church of Rome.
That England cannot formally remain as she is except in so far as she is infallible.
That Rome cannot formally cease to be what she is since she claims to be infallible.
That two cannot continue to agree except they walk together.
That fellowship and communion are therefore necessary if faith is to continue one.
That two cannot walk together except they be agreed.
That it is therefore necessary to study the belief of other Communions before we oppose them or unite with them.
That a more extended recovery of contact is calculated to destroy prejudice and thereby to prepare the way for Communion.
That since “large changes and adaptations of belief are possible within the limits of the same unchanging formulae,” explanation will be found in fact to remove misunderstandings and to reduce the distance between us.
That time, which is an “element in all growth,” has already effected much.
That circumstances which alter cases do thereby, and so far determine duties.
That movements, therefore, which may be inexpedient at one point of time may come to be wise and proper at another.
That fair and free discussion as distinguished from recommendation of practical steps will serve to prepare us for conjunctures.
That Reunion has come at length to be frankly recognised both as an idea and a necessity among all Communities of Christians; and that the same freedom of discussion must be allowed in relation to Rome as is universally permitted in all other directions.
And that at all times and under all circumstances “love is the fulfilling of the law.”

Conclusion
Spencer Jones is an Anglican country parson and scholar, writing primarily for Anglicans, in the classic Anglican tradition - scripture, tradition and reason - sweet reason. While his style is very much that of 1902, his content, again and again, speaks directly to our situation a century later. His key principle of proportion has made some headway, specifically in the work of ARCIC. However, the official Anglican attitudes to the catholic faith on the one hand, and on the other to those who follow alternative religious paths, remain disproportionately favourable to the latter.

It is particularly noteworthy that his principle of proportion is most ironically ignored when it comes to Anglican Papalism itself, of which he is such a key exponent. It remains an urgent question for Anglican Papalists as to why we continue to be so misunderstood, misjudged and misrepresented. Whatever the reasons for this, a reasonable acquaintance with the writings of Spencer Jones would serve as a significant corrective.

For the Record: Fr Peter Geldard on the Ordinariate in 2010

2011-07-16T20:31:00.004+01:00

What is the Ordinariate? – Origins and Opportunities

Fr Peter Geldard, Catholic Chaplain of the University of Kent

This address began as a talk to the Catholic League’s annual pilgrimage for Catholic Christian Unity at the Beguinage in Bruges, Belgium, in September 2010 (see left). A shorter version was delivered at St Agnes’ Church, Kennington, on Saturday, 11 December 2010, and this at St John’s Church, Sevenoaks, on Wednesday, 15 December 2010.

I don’t know if many of you do remember me from the past, when I was the National Secretary of the Church Union. But if what I say could be of use to you, it is not only in the sense that I have been involved in the Ordinariate in the last six to nine months, but also that in some ways (when I tell you my life story briefly) you will see that I have been involved in it for perhaps the last thirty or forty years.

First of all, I am going to say just two things that, as it were, I am not going to say - but will refer to. The first is that I do not believe it is right or possible for me here to persuade you, or try to encourage you, to make a decision in your own lives that may not be appropriate, or may not be timely. Important spiritual decisions are always acts of faith and it is one of the mysteries of God that He gives that gift of faith to people at different times and in different ways. There are in each one of us on our pilgrimages the Nicodemus, as well as the St Paul. So it is very important that none of us get into a judgmental situation, let alone a rhetorical argument (whether within ourselves or with regard to other people), where the position you find yourself in demands that you must make a certain decision right here and now, or that you should have made it five years ago, or that you should be making it in a fortnight’s time. I say again, it is one of the mysteries of God that for different people at different stages they come to different conclusions.

We have seen that in our Church life’s history, particularly in England over the last 200 years, for some people there comes “a bridge too far”, or “a straw that breaks the camel’s back”; and sometimes it may seem almost insignificant in terms of the weight it carries. For John Henry Newman, you may remember, the great founder of the Oxford Movement, it was the Jerusalem bishopric. We may find it rather obscure today to think that that debate in 1841 about who should or should not be bishop in Jerusalem – an English Anglican, or a Prussian Lutheran and whether they were interchangeable - was the crucial issue; but for Newman it was the final moment. For Cardinal Manning, of course, it was the Gorham Judgement, the judgement of the Privy Council that overturned the Bishop of Exeter’s and the Court of Arches’ rulings that it was contrary to Church of England teaching to insist that baptismal regeneration (of infants particularly) was conditional upon a personal profession of faith – and this permitted a vicar to be appointed on the authority of the secular power without regard to episcopal authority. Different crises have confronted other people right up to the present day. After the Second World War there were some who found the Church of South India scheme too much, in that it provided for the gradual assimilation of Anglican, Methodist, Congregationalist and Presbyterian ministries in one united Protestant Church with a threefold ministry, by means of mutual recognition regardless of whether ministers were ordained by a bishop. For me, it happened when I had been for 20 years on General Synod, on 11 November 1992 at 5 o’clock – I remember it well –and the decision was made by the Church of England unilaterally to ordain women to the priesthood by a majority in the House of Laity of one vote. For me that was the bridge too far. But the crucial thing is, and I hope I have kept my word in this, that I have never judged anybody who came to a different conclusion, or who thinks differently at any given moment.

Part of my work, particularly in dealing with students from all over the world (I deal with about 18,000 students at the University of Kent), is to respond every year to the many students who come to me asking if they could be reconciled with the Catholic Church, some from Anglican backgrounds, some from other very committed backgrounds and some from none at all. I learnt very quickly that you never say, “Well, it depends on where were you last week, or what your position was the week before.” You simply just say, “The door is open; you’re welcome; come in”. In this way, I want to say something even more positive as well, and that is that all that has gone before is usually God-given. So one of the crucial things I always want to emphasise - and I hope this has been prominent in your thoughts and discussions - is that there is to be no denial of the past. The past and what God has done in it is something that he is building on, making it into something better and bigger. There is no question of you denying the Anglican sacraments you have received or the baptism you possess – all these things are God-given. And it is that grace that we build on: it is a going forward, not a looking back.

So that is the first point I want to be borne in mind, so we do not need to come back to it again. The second point to register, but that I do not want us to labour, is that I am not going to seek to convince you that it is the fulfilment of the Catholic life that we should be in communion with the successor of Peter. That I take as a sine qua non, something which, in the end, all of us believe is central. When I joined the Church of England - I came from a non-Church background as a young lad of 17 and a half, having grown up at Bexhill near Hastings, and I went to a church called All Saints, Sidley - almost within a matter of days of coming into that community I believed that the fulfilment of Catholicity was to be found in communion with the successor of Peter. I recognised it, staring at me in the face, in Scripture. In the little I knew then and have studied since of the Early Fathers, it stands out and it keeps being repeated. I also saw it being emphasised time and time again by scholars within the Church of England. I remember reading that great book by Michael Ramsey, the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury, The Gospel of the Catholic Church, written in 1936 and now too often forgotten, in which he makes that fundamental point that the unity of the Church and the wholeness of the Church are inseparable from the apostolic order and mission of the Church, by means of which it proclaims the Gospel and we live and bear witness as Christ’s disciples in the world. Thus he speaks not just of bishops and their role in the Church but of the one episcopate, the successor to the apostles, the organ of unity and continuity (p.220, 2nd edition, Longmans, 1956), which it is impossible to consider apart from its primate (p.228). He quotes the paper about the Papacy by Canon B. J. Kidd, Warden of Keble College, Oxford, at the Malines Conversations: “without communion with him there is no prospect of a reunited Christendom” (p.228). And he challenges a certain Anglican tendency to present the episcopate as just something that contributes to the bene esse of the Church, rather than what constitutes its esse (p.219). To Ramsey, this “one episcopate” of the universal Church, in which the Bishop of Rome is integral to its ever growing organic wholeness as the Body of Christ (p.220), is thus not just there for its benefit or wellbeing, it is of its very essence.

So, even though I knew that the Church of England led by the Archbishop of Canterbury was not united with the Catholic Church led by the Pope, I had that profound awareness of this one, holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of which the Church to which I belonged was clearly part, and by which God was able to work in us and and give us his grace, despite our divisions. I knew that in my life in the Church of England, first as layman and then as a priest, I was not in communion with the Pope, whose role and ministry is vital to the Catholic faith in which I believed and proclaimed; but yet I believed that God had his reasons and a purpose for me in the Catholic movement in the Church of England. Providentially and mysteriously he had put me in All Saints, Sidley, and he put me in the Church of England as he put you in the Church of England, because I believe categorically - and most of my life has been fighting for this - that our job was thus to do whatever we could to reconcile the whole body. As Catholic Anglicans, we were not saying that Catholicism was preferable to Anglicanism, we were not denying our Anglican sacramental life, and we were not denying our history. In fact we were attesting to the opposite. The great affirmation of the Oxford Movement, the Tractarian Movement, and the Anglo-Catholic Movement was, of course, to challenge the Church of England to recover her true catholicity, in her worship, her spirituality and in her history. And so the witness of Catholic Anglicans was not asking her to deny anything, but to affirm something that we believed was there but due to historical accident had sadly disappeared from view.

This is how I became heavily involved in working for unity within in the wider Christian Church and predominantly, of course, with the Roman Catholic Church. That was my aim and my ambition. I saw that the Catholic Church was the larger part of Christendom and that we Anglicans were western, but we broke away from it at the Reformation. So it was the duty of those Anglicans who realised this to try if we can to reconcile Christendom and heal our breach. Thus historically our job was to work within the Church of England to try to achieve that by every means - by getting the Lambeth Conference to pass resolutions in 1920 affirming this; and by encouraging the Church of England to become involved in closer relations and dialogue with Rome, notably through the theological dialogue of ARCIC, the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission. All that was to the good; all that was so hopeful for the cause of Christian Unity. One of the great joys I had when for ten years I was National Secretary of the Church Union was travelling all over the world, speaking, promoting and encouraging the ARCIC process, particularly in places where the bilateral discussions were being held - Australia, Japan, Korea, South Africa, the United States, a whole variety of places. I urged the case for ARCIC to come to fruition.

To cut a long story short, all this came of course to a climax in my life when, you remember, Pope John Paul II came to Canterbury in 1982. The stole he wore that day was one that I had presented to him personally a year earlier on behalf of the Catholic Societies of the Church of England. The greatest joy was when he came into Canterbury Cathedral with Archbishop Runcie and they stood in front of the throne of St Augustine. You may remember those historic words: “The successor of St Gregory greets the successor of St Augustine”. It appeared that there truly was a genuine chance that corporate reunion – as we referred to it – was a possibility within my lifetime. It is for that reason that I continued to labour within the Church of England. But then we fast-forward a little bit, only ten years, and that ideal, that hope, shattered. That was, of course, on that Wednesday afternoon in 1992, when I saw what came to be referred to as “an insuperable barrier” placed squarely in the path of the possibility of reunion. At that moment, whereas for the bulk of my life up until that point I believed that I was part of the wider Catholic Church, and the Church of England was part of the wider Catholic Church but contained within it (of course) people who emphasised Protestantism, in simple terms the circle turned. I realised that corporately the Church of England had become a Protestant Church, in which some people were desperately trying to be Catholic.

And so that, for me, was a dilemma. It was a dilemma which resulted, as some of you may know, in myself and six others being involved in very detailed negotiations with Cardinal Hume and other Catholic bishops of the time towards some kind of scheme of corporate reunion for Anglicans who desired it. These are now names that will be familiar to you – there was Bishop Cormac Murphy O’Connor of Arundel and Brighton , as he was then and successor to Cardinal Hume as he became; there was Cardinal Hume’s assistant, someone called Bishop Vincent Nicholls, who has now succeeded them both as Archbishop of Westminster; there was Bishop Allan Clark of East Anglia, who had been chairman of ARCIC; and there were one or two other ecumenical officers, such as Fr Michael Seed SA and Fr Anthony Nye SJ. On the other side there was the Bishop of London, Dr Graham Leonard, myself and a few other priests, including Fr Brooke Lunn and Fr Michael Woodgate. I always say teasingly as I wrote in an article at the time, “I suppose in military terms we were rather heavily out-gunned!” But the reality was that we were there to negotiate the possibility of reconciliation. It happened, because of one of those quirks of history, that I had written an article in the Catholic Herald, a Roman Catholic newspaper, published on exactly the same day that the Bishop of London had written an article in the London Times. I described how I had become an orphan, how I believed that what the Church of England had done had destroyed something which to me was very precious; and that I was now seeking a new mother. Graham Leonard, using slightly different language, said he recognised the time had come for us to make our journey to the Catholic Church, that we were to come as supplicants and it was our job, perhaps, now never to talk in terms of demands respect for our position ever again. In the course of those discussions, of which books and articles have been written, with more and more coming out on the web occasionally, it was known that I was particularly involved in presenting details of something that was called the Pastoral Provision, which had already been set up in the United States. This was a unique arrangement, whereby individual Anglican parishes (or Episcopalian as they are known in the United States) might be reconciled with the Catholic Church, retain their own particular liturgy and, with their own particular ethos, remain as what were called pastoral parishes in something of their own right. They would come under the local Catholic bishop of the diocese in which they were situated and thus integrate with it, but at the same time they were to be allowed to retain all that they could of the past. Now admittedly in America such parishes have had the great advantage in many cases of already owning their building and being used to paying their own pastor. So if you made a decision to change allegiance, you could do so almost lock stock and barrel and the only cost involved in material terms was painting a different sign outside the door. For the most part, parishes carried on almost seamlessly - one week Anglican and Catholic the next.

I had been to the States many times and I had found out all the details they had about how this had worked. I presented everything to Cardinal Hume and the other Catholic participants at our meetings in England. I remember many weeks of discussing it. But one of the problems at that period of history - and many of you will know this because it came out afterwards - was that Rome insisted on unanimous approval from the Roman Catholic hierarchy in this country before a like scheme could be implemented here. Anything less than unanimous approval meant that things could not happen. No such unanimity was possible, so the result was that that concept of corporate identity among groups being reconciled could not in the end come to pass in England. Perhaps on the Day of Judgement we shall see the whole plan laid out and realise how the hand of God was at work in this. Whether, in fact, seeds were sown then that have borne fruit in the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus and the prospect of an Ordinariate that are now before us, I leave for history to decide. I remember the sixteen boxes of great big folders I had and, rather than see the waste of all my efforts, I said to Cardinal Hume that I hoped he could do something with all this work. He rather sweetly said he would post it all to Rome. Being still a young man, I was concerned about the cost of the postage and he said, “Peter, have you ever heard of the diplomatic bag?” So all this went off to Rome and whether or not this had any influence I don’t know. But what I do know is that, during my time as General Secretary of the Church Union, three times I met John Paul II and three times I met his assistant, someone called Cardinal Ratzinger. On something of shorthand terms, I once had a conversation of about twenty minutes with him and the concept of corporate reunion was something we talked about. So possibly seeds were indeed sown.

Ironically in the birthplace of Anglicanism, with no hope of a Pastoral Provision in England for Christians of Anglican tradition owing to the opposition of English Catholic bishops of the time, there was no possibility of a structure to maintain or care for groups or parishes with their own identity. The only way open to Anglicans to become Catholics, individually or in groups, was what we called Individual Submission or Individual Conversion. I had finished in London at the Church Union and I was then serving as priest of a church in Davington in Faversham which is part of the Canterbury diocese, a sweet lovely medieval church which was actually attached to a house. This caused a lot of confusion because my name is Geldard, but the owner of the house was someone called Bob Geldof, so there were many times when our names got confused in the newspapers. It also got confused in the telephone bill and once I opened mine and saw that I had spent something like £8,000 on calls, before I realised that it was his bill and not mine. Surprisingly, the cheques never came the other way! Anyway, there I was at Davington in Faversham, and from 1992 I thought it right to spend two years with my people praying, reflecting and deciding what was right. For the situation which I faced then - and it may be one that many of you face now - was that “you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t”. If you act immediately, you are accused of being impetuous; if you delay and you think and you reflect, you are accused of being opportunist. In the end I felt it was right that we explore all the possibilities. We got speakers in to talk about what was then called “The Roman Option”; we got speakers from Orthodoxy; there were people begging me to create what we could almost call a Continuing Church, virtually a Congregationalist church; and of course there were others who said that, if we were part of the Church of England, then we must accept the decisions made. And we wrestled with all that.

After two years, I felt it was right that I declared my hand. But not knowing it fully, although I sensed it, I knew there were others in the parish that had been thinking the same as me. When I announced my decision, 34 others in the parish made the same decision - all the church officers and the whole parish council. Thus 35 of us were received into the local Roman Catholic church in Faversham. Then, in ways that I still do not fully understand, I waited to see what the outcome those discussions with Cardinal Hume would be. At the time I resigned, the possibility of a married man like me being ordained had never been talked about, let alone put into practice; and so I resigned and there was that long period of silence and worry and concern. After that, as far as the way that the Catholic Church often works, so the saying is, “the rest is mystery”. Suddenly the phone went and basically they said, “We’re going to ordain you and we’re going to make you the Catholic Chaplain of the University of Kent just down the road, so you can stay in the same house.” I have enjoyed that work that God has made possible and given to me for the last sixteen years.

And during those years it has been interesting to recall the many conversations with others who have wondered, as I had done, about what is right for them. All that wondering changed, I believe, last November in 2009, when out of the blue came this booklet, which I am sure you are familiar with, called Anglicanorum Coetibus. If you have not yet read it, do not worry. If you have already read it and it is not all that clear, do not worry either. In a sense it is like the telephone directory – there’s no point in just reading a document like that and thinking you will get all the answers. It is not a narrative, nor is it the story or the explanation. It is “legalese” and it is job is to describe the administration of the Ordinariate once it is created. Mysteriously, perhaps, it does not tell the story behind how the Ordinariate should be created or what its “patrimony” may look like, because this is a constitutional document to provide for all time for the creation of a number of different possible Ordinariates, whereas the creation of each actual Ordinariate which it provides for will be over in a whisker when it happens. And so we are in that interim period where the creation of the Ordinariate lies ahead; and once the Ordinariate in England is up and running, it will be run according to this booklet. It is like when I always say to my students, as I try to help them when they struggle with their exams and their essays: “In the last resort, don’t read the book, look at the picture!” And so, if anyone asks what Anglicanorum Coetibus is all about, I say, “Look at the picture.” And this is crucial. It is not a picture of an individual “swimming the Tiber”, it is a picture of a bridge. What has changed - and of course it is the initiative of Pope Benedict that has caused this change to happen worldwide and particularly here in England – is that there is now a bridge that makes it possible for groups of people with their pastors to move and be reconciled, staying together, maintaining their patrimony and their heritage and all that they love, but fully incorporated with the wider Catholic Church.

This is so radical and so phenomenal that most people have still not got their heads round it. They can say what it isn’t, but they find it very difficult to say what it is. It is not a so-called “uniate” church, one of the historic Eastern Churches in union with the see of Rome, and yet it seems like a “uniate” church because of its own liturgical provisions and “patrimony”. It is not a bi-ritual church in the sense that it does not have a separate liturgy, yet at the same time it can have its own distinctive liturgical characteristics as well use the liturgy of the Western Church – which for many, of course, is the one they are using at the moment. It is not a specialist body for clergy like Opus Dei, although it does have an Ordinary who is going to be in charge of it in his own right, and the Ordinary will not be in Rome like a major religious superior, but in England close to his pastoral charges and as an integral part of the Church here. And so the whole thing in one sense is very confusing, yet in another very exciting. Above all, what it is - and I use these words carefully – is what I believe all of us, me in my lifetime and the generations who followed the Oxford Movement during the last 150 years have been desirous for. What we worked and longed for these long years has come about.

The greatest hope I had as an Anglican was for ARCIC to succeed. So one of the questions you have to ask is, “If we were all in earnest at ARCIC, and Rome claims it was in earnest in ARCIC, what would have been the result if ARCIC had come to an achievement within six months? What would have been the practical outcome?” The practical outcome would, of course, have been a corporate reunion of the whole. But the possibility of that in my lifetime I saw fading; and those who have known the Church of England since 1992, know that it has faded even further. But what has happened through the Apostolic Constitution is that Pope Benedict has revived the hope and offered the chance of corporate reunion along the lines that ARCIC might have achieved for all those right around the world who are desirous to have it. To use an analogy that others have used, he has sent a boat to pick us up, he has sent us a boat with extraordinary qualities, which will be our own. It is flying an ex-Anglican flag; it is being captained by an ex-Anglican Ordinary; and all the crew will be ex-Anglican. The hymns it sings, the ethos it has will be ex-Anglican. It has all the designs we could want and yet some people are saying there is one fault; and that is, if you go down into the engine-room, although the engine itself is ex-Anglican, you will see a little brass plate that says this boat was designed on the advice of ex-Anglicans, it was built by a man in Rome. Well, if that is the only fault that some people can find with it, it is like criticising someone for making the present you asked for. For it is in fact an offer which I believe we need to respond to as generously as it has been given.

It is also a challenge which all of us have got to reflect upon. You cannot blame it for not answering questions and addressing considerations over which it has no control. To look at one burning question at the moment, for instance, It cannot be blamed because it cannot categorically say, “You can have this building, bricks and mortar, lock stock and barrel”, because it does not own this or that building, or have any say over what belongs to the Church of England. I believe there are solutions to such questions with good will, perhaps an ecumenical Church Sharing Agreement, of which there are many examples in England already among different local denominations, to enable an Anglican parish and an Ordinariate Catholic parish to sustain their use of a cherished place together. But I beg you not to be locked into thinking too much of how you can take properties with you. Property is a liability. The pilgrim church must always travel light. Even so, there are possibilities in certain cases for people to be able to continue to use the buildings they know, because economic circumstances may tend to make that practical, even attractive, where it is difficult for an Anglican or an Ordinariate group to maintain the use of a church on their own. You do not need relations between Catholics and Anglicans determined and complicated when it comes to property. But with good will something may be possible.

The question I cannot answer is, “What is it going to be like in six months time?” What I can say is that the speed at which things are now happening is quite phenomenal. I stand judged if I get it wrong, but I believe that three of those bishops who have resigned will be ordained as priests by the end of January. I believe three or more will be ordained about a month later. I believe that groups will be starting to be reconciled at the beginning of Lent; they will be allowed to retain their pastor and they will stay working and worshipping together. There will be no question of taking the pastor away, as it was in my case, saying “Right, you go off to seminary for a year or two”. No; as I say rather teasingly, they will be resprayed very quickly in about ten weeks, they will be ordained, and they will continue their pastoral life, alongside any additional studies following on after that - exactly what happened in the Pastoral Provision in the United States and that we recommended for England as far back as 1992.

That is a phenomenal breakthrough. It is a great change of mindset for the Roman Catholic Church to commit itself to, and I cannot emphasise that to you strongly enough. But it has come about because of somebody with the exceptional qualities and insight that belong to Pope Benedict. He understands Anglicanism. He is a scholar of Newman, a lover of Newman and he is committed to Newman’s objectives Newman for the Church, for its people, and for Christianity in England.

I leave you with two quotations. The first is from Victor Hugo (Histoire d’un Crime, 1852/1877, end of chapter 10):

There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

And then those words of Brutus from Julius Caesar, Act 4, Scene 3:

There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
omitted, all the voyage of their life
is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat
and we must take the current when it serves,
or lose our ventures.

God bless you.

Study Paper III - The Sacraments and the Ordinariate

2011-07-05T23:58:00.001+01:00

Today we post the last of the three Study Papers by Prebendary Brooke Lunn to assist deeper consideration of the issues raised by the Apostolic Constitution and its Norms, addressed in his Appreciation of Anglicanorum Coetibus, in which he identifies the provisions for an Ordinariate as satisfying the objectives of the historic Anglican Papalist movement for a form of corporate reunion.

Study Paper I - Towards an English Ordinariate is an aid to those considering whether to form or join a "group of Anglicans" that could constitute part of an Ordinariate. It also examines the key and distinctive characteristics of the developing Ordinariate in terms of patrimony, Catholic Christian unity and the integrity of the proclamation of the gospel in the setting of English - or, for that matter, any other - society.

Study Paper II - Anglican Patrimony explores in great depth the social, ecclesiological, theological, cultural and religious identifying mark of a distinctively Anglican-ethos Catholic particular church, as well as its liturgical heritage.

Study Paper III - The Sacraments and the Ordinariate makes a noteworthy case for a greater identity and recognition between the classic Anglican theological position and the teaching of the Catholic Church than usually thought. It locates conscience as a means to mutual respect. This is fertile ground for ecumenical growth towards visible unity; and, taking the Church of England and the Catholic Church at their word, makes a bold proposal for how the Ordinariate, the wider Catholic Church and the Anglican Church can come closer together around what Pope Paul VI saw as Anglicans' and Catholics' communion of origins: in this case, a shared Anglican patrimony and sacramental understamding.

Fr Lunn notes that, after a century of theological rupture, the Restoration Prayer Book of 1662 supplants the Reformed theology, that denied the ex opere operato nature of sacraments, with a reasserted agreement in the Anglican formularies with the teaching of the Catholic Church - "right form, right matter, right intention, right minister, right candidate, indelible character". He goes on to note, however, the prevalence of an alternative Anglican divinity, which has been damaging to Anglican-Catholic reunion, namely the belief that sacraments (including Order, notable episcopacy) are of the bene esse of the Church, rather than of its esse - you might say of benefit to it, rather than integral to its very being. One could add that a similar redefinition has occured with regard to the use of the word "Catholic" in ecumenical dialogue, wherever its use by different people rests unnoticed on different meanings and assumptions. For instance, one meaning is "comprehending the range of diverse beliefs and forms"; the other means "integrating all in the one binding truth". Fr Lunn therefore calls for the reassertion of the common understanding about sacraments held by Anglicans and Catholics in their respective magisterial teaching authority, in order to clarify the massive misunderstanding about terms and teaching that has blighted ecumenical progress towards unity between the Catholic Church and "the Church of England entire".

He argues that, if the two do indeed hold different sacramental theologies, then questions of mutual recognition and validity surely do not matter. It is only because the sacramental theology in both is fundamentally the same that it matters to Anglicans that their sacraments according to their formularies are valid by Catholic criteria; it also matters to Catholics that the Catholic Church has formed a judgment that they do not, after all, meet those same criteria. How to overcome this impasse? Fr Lunn believes that a step forward can be made, not through the unrealistic dream that one position or the other can be made to prevail, but through each recognising that the other's position is conscientious. Thus Anglican interlocutors are unlocked from the point of grievance and disputation over validity according to the Roman Catholic judgment, and Catholic interlocutors need not be constrained to regard Anglican sacramentality solely in adverse terms: without resiling from its settled judgment, it is at least possible to recognise freely that the Anglican judgment is different, and that the Anglican conviction is to be respected as conscientious.

Fr Lunn sees this recognition of each other's conscientious position as an important step towards the "regularization of Sacraments" on the road to corporate reunion within an Ordinariate. The ecumenical resonance would be strong and positive. Respect for conscience and integrity does no harm to the different convictions, teaching and practice of the other, at the same time as it recognises that basic principles and faith are actually held in common.

He then cites for study purposes a formula, suggested in 1994, that does justice to both conscientious positions. It sought to place the ordination of a former Anglican priest into the sacerdotal presyterate of the Catholic Church in context. In practice and in principle, no Anglican cleric in the last half century has been asked to go against their conscience and deny their original Christian faith and ordination. Cardinal Hume addressed this problem for Anglican consciences at the time by saying that the doubt was not nowadays about validity, but invalidity. But still, he said, the Church and its faithful require absolute certainty. And so the Church requested Anglican clergy, who it recognises as "ordained in some sense" (even fully valid for Anglican purposes - and was that not some recognition of the Anglican conscientious position?), to seek and accept ordination without conditionality and beyond doubt in the Catholic Church. Indeed Cardinal Hume was responsible for obtaining the agreement of the Congregation for Divine Worship for a form of prayer to be inserted into the rite of ordination of former Anglican clergy, to articulate the reality of what was going on (the ordination of the ordained) liturgically. The prayer (which has been used widely at the Ordinariate ordinations) recognises that "not a few of the sacred actions of the Christian religion as carried out in communities separated from her can truly engender a life of grace and can rightly be described as providing access to the community of salvation", recognises and thanks God for the number of years of the candidate's previous ministry in the Anglican Communion "whose fruitfulness for salvation has been derived from the very fullness of grace and truth entrusted to the Catholic Church", and prays that it be brought to fruition in the full ommunion and presbyterate of the Catholic Church. These wordings, which reflect the terms and teaching of the Decree on Ecumenism from the Second Vatican Council, demonstrate a great deal of respect for conscientious conviction and also a recognition of Anglican sacramentality by the very act of the Catholic Church's receiving it.

Readers of this Study Paper may also refer to Study Paper I, section V, in which Fr Lunn proposes practical terms for the Church of England and the Catholic Church to take each other at their respective words and follow their ecumenical pledge not to do apart what can be done together. With regard to the Ordinariate and its Anglican patrimony shared with the Church of England, should it not in due course mean that (other than in the celebration of the sacraments) Ordinariate clergy could receive, like Free Church pastors and ministers, an authorisation to officiate. If Anglicans and Catholics are committed ecumenically to the mutual exchange of gifts, it is a principle of Catholic Church life that members of its Ordinariates do not turn their back on those with whom they share the Anglican tradition, but come to the fore in mutual friendship, pastoral collaboration, cultural links and bonds as close fellow Christians. It will have to be in the end that Anglicans receive a warm and honoured welcome when they come to a Catholic Church belonging to the Ordinariate, and there sense a deep sense of affinity and spiritual ecumenism. By the same token, just as Anglican regulations in England provide a place for fellow Christians from other Churches in its systems (PCC members, ecumenical canons, church-sharing agreements and local ecumenical partnerships), it ought to be that members of the Ordinariate also play their part in this generous ecumenical space. The Ordinariate's Anglican identity and heritage thus serve not as points of rivalry and rupture, but as the very means by which Catholic and Anglican closeness on the road to visible unity in the same apostolic faith can be strengthened.

Read or download Study Paper III: the Sacraments and the Ordinariate here.

Study Paper II - Anglican Patrimony, by Fr Brooke Lunn

2011-07-04T23:58:00.002+01:00

Today we publish Fr Brooke Lunn's second Study Paper to assist exploration of his Appreciation of Anglicanorum Coetibus.

This is already an historic document, since it is a reworking for the present circumstances of An Inlook into Anglican Identity, a study guide Fr Lunn developed early in the period from 1987 to 1990 as the leaders of the Catholic League set up a Committee for Corporate Reunion, to explore the feasibility and basis of corporate reunion. "Anglican identity" was thus the term being used at the time of the first formal plan for a scheme in the late 1980s and just into the 1990s, before the phrase "Anglican patrimony" entered into the currency. To those who say that the Apostolic Constitution was rushed in its conception and had no precedents, once again we demonstrate evidence of important foundational work two decades ago, itself resting on more than a century of repeated efforts, contacts and approaches, which are now bearing fruit as they are realised in the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham and further afield.

The original Inlook was printed in its entirety in our August 2010 Special Edition of The Messenger, a substantial collection of 200 pages of documentation and analysis entitled, Anglicans and Catholics in Communion: Patrimony, Unity and Mission. This remains available for free distribution and if you would like a copy, please email us here and we will send you a copy while stocks last. All we ask is a small donation to the Newman Fund to support the Ordinariate.

After a searching discussion among members of the League, using the Inlook, a "Congregation of the English Mission" was established as an embryonic body that could in due course petition the Catholic authorities for a "group of Anglicans" requesting a corporate reunion, marked with a distinctive Anglican identity and outlook, and committed to the union of all Christians for the sake of, and vital to, the effective and convincing mission of the one Church to the nation. Sounds familiar?

In this pioneering work, Father Lunn was a leading figure. The proposed model for corporate reunion looked to Canon 372 and also to concrete examplars such as the relatively new exceptional structure of the Personal Prelature (designed and implemented for Opus Dei) and the Pastoral Provision in the USA. A series of meetings took place with Cardinal Basil Hume OSB, Archbishop of Westminster, and his advisers Fr Anthony Nys SJ and Fr Michael Seed SA. There were also informal explorations with the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (whose prefect at the time was Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI - evidently Anglicanorum Coetibus was long forming in his mind) and the Apostolic Pro-Nuncio to the United Kingdom at the time, Archbishop Pablo Puente Buces. These plans could not be advanced at the time - the Personal Prelature because it provided only for a clerical body, and a Pastoral Provision because the Bishops of England & Wales were "of one mind that, in our particular circumstances, such alternatives would serve to increase the multiplicity of Church identities in an unhelpful and confusing manner". Their full November 1993 statement eventually rejecting the Congregation for the English Mission's proposal, and addressing the forthcoming likely transfer of hundreds of clergy to the Catholic Church and untold numbers of laity on an individual basis alone, can be read here. Who knows what could have been?

There were several parish groups received on an individual-cum-corporate basis, mainly in the Diocese of Westminster - notably at Enfield Lock (St Peter & St Paul) and St Pancras (Holy Cross, Cromer Street). But these relied on church-sharing by a small Catholic congregation with a continuing but diminished Anglican parish congregation; and relations, despite considerable efforts at good will locally, proved difficult, not least as their former pastors were not available to lead the nascent Catholic communities, their having been moved on to other parish postings in anticipation of ordination and incardination in the diocese. While obviously there was disappointment on the part of many that a Pastoral Provision for Anglicans seeking full communion, with some kind of distinctive ecclesial reality of its own, could not at that time be integrated into the Catholic Church in England and Wales, many clergy and faithful were undeterred. It is estimated by Fr John Broadhurst that in England over the 10 years from 1994 (the period of financial and housing support allocated by the Anglican authorities for those in conscience taking up what was essentiallly a voluntary redundancy or early retirement scheme) and in the period since, 500 Anglican clergy became Catholics, with large unrecorded numbers of lay faithful. The effect of this influx of Anglican background, patrimony and contribution to the life of the Catholic Church in England and Wales remains uncalculated but deserves thorough research. Certainly, it was something of an answer to prayer - even if an unexpected one - for vocations to the priesthood, during a period when across the Western world the numbers being ordained was seriously contracting.

As in Fr Lunn's first Study Paper, Towards an English Ordinariate, the focus is taken beyond the immediate identity markers of Liturgy and Tradition, to a thorough treatment of origins and the Anglican theological paradigm of Scripture, Tradition and Reason, to an appraisal of the purpose and truthfulness of a Via Media (and the integrity of how that is practised), to considering the role of the laity in Anglican church life, and on to such factors as the relationship of Church and State, how size of congregation affects identity and mission, and the importance of folk religion and culture for what our now termed the "evangelisation of culture" and the "struggle for the soul of Europe".

Fr Lunn has thoroughly revised his original Study Paper to take account of the opportunities offered by Anglicanorum Coetibus and development of the new Ordinariate. It is also a masterly introduction to the thinking of Newman as it relates to the fields he covered.

Read or download Fr Brooke Lunn's Study Paper II - Anglican Patrimony here.

We will post the final Study Paper - Sacraments and the Ordinariate - on 5th July.

Study Paper I - Towards an English Ordinariate, by Fr Brooke Lunn

2011-07-03T19:30:00.004+01:00

Following the posting from Prebendary Brooke Lunn, our past Priest Director's remarkable Appreciation of Anglicanorum Coetibus, in which he judges that the Apostolic Constitution's provisions satisfy the aspirations of the historic and influential Anglican Papalist tradition and its objectives for "corporate reunion", we now post the first of his three accompanying Study Papers.

Study Paper I: Towards an English Ordinariate was drafted in the period following the issue of Anglicanorum Coetibus in late 2009 and into 2010. It was circulated privately to assist Anglicans discerning the significance and provisions of the Apostolic Constitution and proposed a "proto-Ordinariate", an informal association of individuals and groups exploring possibilities, who could serve as the basis of a more defined movement out of which the Ordinariate itself could be formed.

Above all, Fr Lunn focuses on the Constitution's four significant factors:

The creativity of the Apostolic See in accepting the once maligned, but ecumenically influential, Anglican Papalist narrative of "corporate reunion", locating the Catholic space for its terms in Ad Gentes 20 and Canon 372;
It is a breakthrough solution to Christian disunity, providing the means for respecting the Church life of other Christians and integrating it with the Catholic Church in a way that has been impossible at any other time since the sixteenth century (not least because of the shortcomings of the procedures of merely individual reconciliation);
It provides for a genuinely mutual reception of gifts and ecclesial life, fully in accord with the Decree on Ecumenism's principle of spiritual ecumenism, also known nowadays as receptive ecumenical learning - thus the Ordinariate can and must offer the tradition and the key elements of the patrimony of the "Church of England entire", not just isolated portions;
How the members of the Ordinariate can contribute to the closer sharing of ecclesial life and mission among the Pilgrim People of God, across the divisions within the Church, in order to meet the needs and justified expectation of the people of England for a "common, shared, united witness and proclamation of the Gospel by all the Christians in this land", "united not absorbed". The same could be true of an Ordinariate in other lands.

While some of Study Paper I serves the enquiries and explorations of those beginning to consider the possibility of joining an Ordinariate, it also has a great deal to say about the positive formation and development of an Ordinariate once established, as it takes shape and maps its way ahead on sound and carefully thought through principles. This is above all what Fr Lunn is seeking to facilitate. To his mind, the Ordinariate and its patrimony are fundamentally concerned with the integration of the whole of Christ's Church according to the prayer and will of Christ - "that they may be one, so that the world may believe." Indeed he strongly articulates the encouragement of the Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI on his Apostolic Visit to Great Britain in September 2010, as he addressed the Ecumenical Evening Prayer at Westminster, to find unity in none other than the apostolic faith, in order to give before the world a convincing account of the hope in the Risen Jesus Christ that lies within us.

Read and download Fr Brooke Lunn's Study Paper I: Towards an English Ordinariate here.

Tomorrow we will post Study Paper II: Anglican Patrimony

An Appreciation of Anglicanorum Coetibus: by an Anglican Papalist

2011-07-02T23:47:00.010+01:00

Fr Brooke Kingsmill-Lunn has been the most penetrating of commentators from the Anglican Papalist perspective in England for decades. First as the editor of The Messenger of the Catholic League and until 2007 as its Priest Director, he has offered a consistent critique of the state of the Church of England, the Catholic Church in England & Wales and the relations between them from the position of an Anglican who supports the papacy and who desires and works for the reunion of the "Church of England entire" with the Roman Apostolic See. Now retired after a distinguished parish ministry in inner north London, his pastoral priesthood in the Church of England has been devoted to the corporate reunion of the whole Church, for the sake of a society which needs not only Christians to be united but also that there be one Church under one Shepherd with a unified mission and proclamation. In this he continues the apostolate of one of the greatest Anglican Papalists of the mid-twentieth century, Fr Henry Joy Fynes Clinton, rector of the Parish Church of St Magnus the Martyr, Lower Thames Street, London, from 1921 to 1959, who encouraged Fr Brooke's own vocation to the priesthood and his unwavering commitment as an Anglican to the papacy and to the principle that intrinsic to the two provinces of the Church of England, and of the other provinces in communion with it, was their corporate reunion with the Rock from whence they were hewn.

After so many hopeful signs during Fr Fynes' time - from the Malines Conversations to the visits of the Abbé Paul Couturier - and so many fruits since - from the Archbishop of Canterbury's visits to Rome first by Dr Fisher and then by Dr Michael Ramsey, Vatican II and the Decree on Ecumenism, the substantial agreements of ARCIC I, and the Pastoral Visit of Pope John Paul II to Britain and his joint blessing with Archbishop Runcie in Canterbury Cathedral in 1982 - the possibility of some kind of corporate reconciliation the age of ecumenism looked realistic. But new directions within the life and ministry of the constituent churches of the Anglican Communion, including the Church of England, culminating in the Lambeth Conference of 2008 and the vote of the General Synod of the same year to proceed with the ordination of women to the Anglican episcopate, have meant that, however advanced the theological agreement and however deep the ecumenical respect and friendship, the old trajectory of Anglican-Catholic dialogue towards reunification on the grounds of an essential similarity deriving from the common apostolic faith and tradition was definitively barred.

In these circumstances, efforts towards uncovering a new pathway towards visible unity in the apostolic faith have been initiated on a new footing, and ARCIC III is testament to this. But what of those Anglicans who support the papacy, who believe the Anglican Church still needs the papacy and who still maintain that the Catholic Church still needs the Anglican tradition for the sake of its fuller and more effective mission to society?

In his An Appreciation of Anglicanorum Coetibus, Father Lunn examines how its provisions largely satisfy the objectives of Anglican Papalists in the new reality (and may well have satisfied the objectives of Fr Fynes Clinton), how its large vision gives continuing scope for an ongoing engagement with the fuller Anglican tradition, not simply a detached part that could risk turning its back on the Church in which it was formed, and also how a coming together of the Catholic Church with all that is of value in Anglican heritage, not only honours and protects it but overcomes disunity that is so great a stumbling block to the proclamation and acceptance of the Gospel.

Download or read An Appreciation of Anglicanorum Coetibus: By an Anglican Papalist here.

Tomorrow we publish Fr Lunn's accompanying Study Paper I: Towards an English Ordinariate, followed on Monday by Study Paper II: Anglican Patrimony and next Study Paper III: Sacraments & The Ordinariate.

Annual General Meeting

2011-07-02T11:36:00.002+01:00

The League's Annual General Meeting took place on Thursday 30 June 2011 at St Silas' Church, Kentish Town, London. Fr Graeme Rowlands celebrated an Anglican Mass in honour of the First Martyrs of Rome and spoke of the abiding central importance of nothing less than the visible reunion of the Church for which the martyrs had given their lives, as the only true objective of those who seek unity on the foundation of the faith of the Apostles.

Trustees serving on the Executive are elected on a rolling basis each year. Alongside Fr Mark Woodruff (Priest Director), David Chapman (General Secretary), Fr Christopher Stephenson (Membership Secretary) and Fr Graeme Rowlands (co-opted annually ex officio as Priest Director of the Sodality of the Precious Blood, which is historically associated with the League as a fraternity of celibate clerics for deepening priestly life, ministry, spiirtuality and fellowship), Cyril Wood was re-elected as Treasurer and Mrs Mary Bacon and the Revd James Bradley were elected as trustees.

Fr Christopher Stephenson's appointment as Priest Director of the Apostleship of Prayer was ratified. He is currently pastor of the Scarborough parish mission of the Traditional Anglican Church in Britain.

Tributes were paid to Miss Mary Lamb, our long serving trustee who died in December 2010, and to Canon Colin Tolworthy who has retired after a nearly ten years of invaluably steady support and wisdom on the former Council and the present Executive.

Here is the Report on the League's work in 2010 by the Priest Director:

The Catholic League’s objects are to promote fellowship among Catholics; the reunion of all Christians with the Apostolic See of Rome; the spread of the Catholic Faith; and deepening the Spiritual life. It was founded in 1913 and is registered under the Charities Act 1993, Charity Registration No. 232443.

It is an association of members, governed by the Trustees who meet on a regular basis. The Trustees are drawn from among the members. The Constitution, as revised in 1999 and again in 2008, also provides for a President (Fr Michael Rear), who acts as Visitor to ensure that the Trustees apply the rules and assets are applied in accordance with the objects of the League. There are no paid employees of the Charity.

Contacts and collaboration were fostered throughout the year with other organisations working for Christian Unity, such as the Anglican Centre in Rome, the Ecumenical Marian Pilgrimage Trust, the Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Society for Ecumenical Studies, the Society of St John Chrysostom, the Sodality of the Precious Blood and, through Fr Mark Wooduff, the national ecumenical instruments, including Churches Together in England.

The two journals published by the League continue – The Messenger containing substantial articles and the Newsletter containing news, notifications and intercession lists. A Special Edition of the Messenger (April-August 2010), Anglicans and Catholics in Communion: Patrimony, Unity and Mission, carried detailed analysis and comment on the Apostolic Constitution, Anglicanorum Coetibus, its implications and prospects. A second impression was required in December, owing to its extensive distribution and sustained demand for its documentation. The League has also substantially supported the creation of The Portal, an informative online magazine for members of the Ordinariate and all those interested in knowing more about its development and impact.

In the autumn, the League also transformed its website on the lines of a blog, in order to keep track of fast moving developments and meet the need for swift comment and news. It also serves, as before, as a general ecumenical resource. It can be found at www.unitas.org.uk.

At the Annual General Meeting in June 2010, members gave their unanimous support to the trustees’ view that the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus and the prospect of the foundation of an Ordinariate in England as a form of corporate reunion for Anglicans with the Catholic Church represented in large part the culmination of the League's objectives. Trustees also signalled their intention to work in support of Christian Unity between the Anglican and the Catholic Churches in the new situation in light of this, not least through encouragement to members who, at least for the moment, remain members of the Church of England at the same time as promoting the League's overall objects.

It soon became clear that the Ordinariate would be established at some point early in 2011, but that it would need considerable support and resources. Accordingly, the trustees called an Extraordinary General Meeting of members to confirm the policy they had previously endorsed, and to seek express approval to use the League’s resources to assist the foundation and work of the Ordinariate. Bishop Alan Hopes, auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of Westminster and Episcopal Delegate of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales for the Implementation of the Apostolic Constitution, was invited to address an Extraordinary General Meeting of the members, which took place in October, to explain his understanding of the way ahead for an historic development for Catholics and Anglicans (and their unity), and to lay out any particular needs. This was the first time that a Catholic bishop had addressed a meeting of the members of the League in its history.

The proposal to confirm support for the policy and the use of the League's assets and resources was approved unanimously and consequently the executive of trustees awarded a substantial grant of £65,000 to establish the office of the new Ordinary and the central operational services of the Ordinariate in an initial two years (£5,000 towards set up in 2010, and £30,000 in each of 2010 and 2011 towards operational costs).

The Executive also agreed to respond to a request to set up a dedicated fund to receive donations for the proposed Ordinariate until its own financial systems are in place, so that there are resources to help it and its groups from the outset. This means that the Ordinariate can also benefit from the Catholic League’s charitable status and receive donations attracting Gift Aid. The fund is known as the Newman Fund and, for the duration of the need for the facility, all donations and Gift Aid will be restricted to the work of the Ordinariate.

Sadly, at the close of the year we said farewell to our much loved and longstanding trustee, Mary Lamb, who died in December. Mary’s company as a fellow pilgrim to Walsingham and Bruges, and her shrewd insight as a trustee will be sorely missed. May she rest in peace.

In August, the Executive co-opted Mary Bacon to strengthen the number and capacity of the trustees. Mary had previously served for many years on the Council and Standing Committee and it is excellent to welcome her back.

During the year, the following grants were approved:

£65,000 over two years (£35,000 in 2010, £30,000 in 2011) to the establishment and operation of the Ordinary’s office
£400 to Pusey House to defray the costs of conferences on the Ordinariate
£5,000 towards The Portal online magazine
£1,000 to the Ecumenical Marian Pilgrimage Trust’s 2011 biennial event

According to the longer term vision set out by the trustees and endorsed by members, the Catholic League will be actively supporting the establishment of the Ordinariate in 2011, as well as continue to represent the objectives of its members - whether Catholic, Anglican or belonging to any other church communion. In the light of Pope Benedict’s impressive and inspiring visit to Great Britain in September 2010, and the Beatification of Blessed John Henry Newman, we will continue to support efforts towards the visible unity of the Anglican and Catholic Churches. A second Special Edition of the Messenger is planned once the Ordinariate is more firmly established, to build on the previous edition’s work of documentation and analysis.

We are also planning to commission a thoroughly researched history of the League and its work from 1913 to 2013, the Centenary, and a series of lectures and events to mark achievements on the way to visible unity and to encourage the way ahead.

A Walsingham Pilgrimage Hymn

2011-06-24T19:12:00.002+01:00

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)

Bruges Pilgrimage 8-12 September 2011

2011-06-24T18:48:00.007+01:00

Annual Pilgrimage for the Unity of Christ's Church

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

2011-06-24T17:19:00.003+01:00

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):

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

2011-06-24T15:14:00.005+01:00

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.

Birmingham Ordinations to the Presbyterate: Strengthening of the Brethren and Some Patrimonial Reflections

2011-06-24T10:46:00.003+01:00

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.

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.

Is the Ordinariate for You? An Ecumenical Response

2011-06-23T20:11:00.001+01:00

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.

Aylesford Diaconal Ordinations: W. H. Monk, Patrimony, Plainchant and Hymns

2011-06-23T18:04:00.004+01:00

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.

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,

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,

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

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,

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 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.

At the Heart of Christian Worship: Liturgical Essays of Yves Congar: Review

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At The Heart of Christian Worship: Liturgical Essays of Yves Congar, Pueblo Books, Collegeville, 2010
Book Review by Fr Mark Woodruff

Cardinal Congar was one of the most significant priests of the twentieth century. In the period between the World Wars, the massive learning and insight of this Dominican contributed to the re-evaluation of the teaching of the ideas of St Thomas Aquinas, not as a system of theology in which everything was nailed down, but as an inspiring journey into faith in the Creator, salvation in Christ and the renewing work of the Holy Spirit in the world and the development of the Church. He was an ecumenical pioneer, assisting Fr Paul Couturier’s renovation of the Week of Universal Prayer for Christian Unity as it opened up the Catholic Church’s idea of Christian unity through spirituality, and pointing to the work and creativity of the Holy Spirit in the life and history of other parts of Christianity, despite separation. At the Second Vatican Council as a theological expert he was able to ensure that the Church’s rediscovery of its identity as the Body of Christ in which all its members, lay and clergy alike, are integral to its communion and unity - not a merely hierarchical or juridical institution – was constitutionally enshrined in Lumen Gentium after 150 years of renewed teaching (from Johann Adam Moehler, to Lambert Beauduin, Henri de Lubac and Pius XII), and not left to become unfinished business, as it had been at Vatican I. He also saw that Newman’s thinking on consulting the lay faithful concerning the Church’s doctrine and on the legitimate development of doctrine was decisively received and placed within the teaching of the Roman and conciliar magisterium. Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II were deeply influenced by him in their earlier days, but for a time under Pope Pius XII he was prevented from teaching and publishing and this weighed heavily upon him. But Pope John called him from exile to a pivotal role at the Council – he influenced the drafts or redrafts of nearly every major document - and Pope John Paul completed his vindication by appointing him a Cardinal in 1994.

The five short and very readable essays in At the Heart of Christian Worship, not available in English before, are a tour of Congar’s great themes and penetrating principles, as they are translated into practice in the experience of most people’s regular liturgical life. “Real” Liturgy, “Real” Preaching observes how preaching, like worship and especially the mass, is no mere clerical exercise, or an end in itself, because its purpose is to produce an effect in the people who are the Church to which the Gospel is announced and the Church within which and for which the sacrifice is offered. The Ecclesia of Chrstian Community as a Whole and The Structure of Christian Priesthood explore how the Church is not a merely hierarchical institution where only the priests celebrate the sacrifice and the lay faithful have no active role. Instead it is the priestly Body of which Christ is the Head in which all his members participate; the whole Church offers the sacrifice at the hands of the members consecrated to celebrate it, the priests who are never apart from the faithful but one with them in their action and their common benefit. Where does the “Sacred” fit into a Christian Worldview? and What is the meaning of Sunday? take up Congar’s constant theme of the wholeness of sanctification that comes from God’s grace – not only a whole People, but a whole world and all time. So priests are never special Christians, any more than Christians are special humans, or the Church a more perfect form of human society, or Sunday a more eminent day than the others – all days are sacred time, all the world is the Lord’s, all humanity is drawn to the Christ who is lifted up in the sacrifice offered in and by his Body, the Church.

These essays are essential reading for those at the present time who are approaching the unity of Christendom by entering more deeply into the mystery of the Church within their own community, as Pope Benedict once put it, whether as orthodox Anglicans, or Catholics, or Anglicans becoming Catholics through their Personal Ordinariate. Not only do they give valuable insight of the mind of the man who, arguably more than any other individual, shaped the way the Church came to describe itself and what lay “at the heart of its worship” in the late twentieth century, they also allow the reader to “think with the Church”, embracing the vastness of its conception of Catholic communion and comprehending that the true ecumenical movement is not simply the rapprochement of separate human traditions but the incorporation of the whole of humanity in the sacrifice of Christ offered “through him, with him, in him”, by his Body the Church, as the sole course of its salvation.

Mary Lamb, 1925-2010

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At the end of 2010 Mary Lamb, a long serving and devoted trustee of the Catholic League died. The League was represented at her funeral by her fellow trustee, Mary Bacon.

Mary's working life was as a school teacher. She joined Combe Bank school Sevenoaks in 1976 as Deputy Head and also as a History Teacher and she also took on the role of Examinations Secretary during her time at the school. Mary left the school in 1991. Upon retirement she presented the school with a prize that is awarded each year at the school's Prize Giving day. “The Mary Lamb Form Shield” is presented to the form with the best “team spirit”. This is typical of Mary. She is fondly remembered by the staff of the school.

Mary was a faithful member of the Catholic League both as an Anglican and latterly as a Roman Catholic. She served on the Council for many years and was co-opted onto the newly formed Executive. In both capacities she was a valued member and she contributed much to the decision making process over the years. She could always be relied upon to offer a balanced and yet creative response to many of the more difficult decisions we had to make. Mary’s meticulous attention to detail was evident in the care with which she organised residential conferences in Walsingham and elsewhere for the League. Her particular humour and incisive thought will be missed by us all. Mary was also a regular pilgrim on our annual ecumenical pilgrimage to Bruges and she will be missed by her many fellow pilgrims there. A very private person, she was counted a friend by many, but little is known about her personally. If any member of the League can contribute any more details to this brief obituary, it would be greatly appreciated.

David Carter reviews "Anglicans and Catholics in Communion"

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David Carter is a distinguished British Methodist ecumenical scholar, a leading figure in Churches Together in England's Theology and Unity Group and also the British Catholic-Methodist dialogue committee. In the past he was Secretary of the Society for Ecumenical Studies and is currently a member of the editorial board of the UK Benedictine Catholic ecumenical journal, One in Christ.

As editor of the Newsletter of the Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary he is a notable reviewer of books with an ecumenical significance. He recently wrote the following assessment of the Catholic League's Messenger 292 (April-August 2010), Anglican & Catholics in Communion: Patrimony, Unity and Mission.

The League is grateful for this perspective from a disinterested and widely respected commentator on ecumenical developments and thinking. Some voices still question the Ordinariate's potential contribution to Christian Unity (even suggesting it could be harmful to it); others dismiss the idea that in England there can be such a thing as Anglican patrimony. Yet over the last year and a half it has been interesting to see how the imperatives we have promoted - Christian Unity and Re-evangelisation in Europe - and the cultural, spiritual, liturgical identity and responsiveness to society we have commended, features that an Anglican patrimony embodies, belong in the communion of the whole Church, not just within Anglicanism, have become the narrative others are now articulating.

If you would like to receive Anglicans & Catholics in Communion, a complimentary copy is available from the General Secretary, David Chapman, c/o St Paul's Bookshop, Morpeth Terrace, London SW1P 1EP, telephone 020 7828 5582. A donation to the Newman Fund (see the panel to the left) would be appreciated in return.

Anglicans and Catholics in Communion-Patrimony, Unity, Mission, edited by Mark Woodruff (The Messenger of the Catholic League, No 292, April-August 2010).

Mark Woodruff and the Catholic League are to be congratulated on this publication which is a valuable vade mecum for anyone wishing to understand the origins and basis of the Ordinariate as well as the hopes that may reasonably be entertained for it. Its canonical basis is clearly and succinctly outlined by Fr Gianfranco Ghirlanda and its rationale explained in other essays with particular attention to the understanding of catholicity as explained in the Decree on Ecumenism of Vatican II. Cardinal Levada explains that "when I say enrichment, I am not referring to any addition of essential elements of sanctification to the Catholic Church - Christ has endowed her with all the essential elements. I am referring to the addition of modes of expression of these essential elements, modes which enhance everyone’s appreciation of the inexhaustible treasures bestowed on the Church by her divine Founder". One might here slightly quibble with the cardinal. Surely, if the Church’s catholicity is wounded by virtue of the separation of any of the baptised from her, then, to a degree, so is her ability to offer the fullness of worship to Him, this being only complete when the entire family that the Son has gained for the Father is present "in one mind and heart together" (Acts 4:32)?

Fr Mark himself offers two excellent chapters, one on the question of the way in which Anglican orders can be "recognised or received" and one on hymnody as part of the Anglican patrimony to be shared with the rest of the Roman Catholic Church by members of the Ordinariate. One might just add here that, in a sense this is part of a wider heritage than purely Anglican since so many who have contributed to it have come from the free church traditions, Isaac Watts being the most prominent. One might add that though Charles Wesley would certainly wish to be remembered as an Anglican, it is Methodism that has preserved so much of his heritage.

Philip North contributes a particularly interesting chapter in which he asks how far Anglicans making the journey into Roman Catholic communion may be able, or not, to maintain the sort of ministry to the whole population of a parish that they currently exercise and value. This is an important missiological question and should not be overlooked by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference as they prepare the ground for the Ordinariate in England. John Hunwicke contributes a delightfully written essay entitled Patrimony - What Patrimony? He argues that "we should be allowed to paddle around with our Anglican patrimony in the middle of the catholic mainstream" (my italics). He feels that much that traditionalist Anglo-Catholics value may be a timely gift to the Roman Catholic Church, stressing particularly that their concern for due awe and reverence in worship may fit precisely with the aims of Liturgiam Authenticam. I have some sympathy with this view, as I feel that in all the western Churches there is a need, particularly on the part of those ministers or lay preachers entrusted with the leadership of worship, to conduct it with dignity, to remember that it is not entertainment (a word I address particularly to the Free Churches) and to communicate a sense of awe and wonder particularly in preaching, praying and presidency at the eucharist. Fr John also stresses that the patrimony is essentially that of a tradition embodied in the people, the people in whom the anointing of the Spirit resides (1 John 2:20) and who have the sensus fidelium.

There are many other riches in this book which I heartily commend. Whatever the rest of us may feel about Anglicanorum Coetibus, I think we can all derive pleasure from two things. The first is that due provision has been made for a group of people who feel they must join the Roman Catholic Church but also take with them all that is compatible with that Church from their previous Anglican tradition. The other is to record the gracious words of Archbishop Rowan to the effect that he welcomes anything that allows the Anglican heritage to be more widely shared with the rest of Christendom.

David Carter.

Ordinations for the Ordinariate in Brentwood

2011-06-11T19:28:00.001+01:00

Saturday 11 June 2011 saw the ordination of seven priests for the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham in Brentwood Cathedral. At the request of Monsignor Keith Newton, the bishop of Brentwood celebrated the Solemn Mass with the Ordination of Priests, together with priests from the Diocese of Brentwood and the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham.

Before the Mass began the clergy gathered across from the cathedral church as the bell tolled. The Entrance Hymn, Praise to the holiest, has become something of an Ordinariate showpiece already – especially with the beautiful and moving tune Billing; a happy cocktail of Anglican and Catholic patrimony perfectly fused, just like the author of the hymn, Cardinal Newman.

The particularly effective arrangement by Andrew Wright, the Master of Music at Brentwood, was performed at the beatification of Cardinal Newman in 2010 and provided a very moving opening to the ordination Mass in Brentwood. The tradition of well-appointed hymnody so often found in Anglican churches, as we shall see later, is clearly alive and well in Brentwood and the robed choir (cassock and Anglican-style surplice) made an impressive impact as the procession entered through the west doors.

The bishop began the celebration with warm words of introduction, recalling the historic nature of the day and linking it to the Solemnity of Pentecost and the Memorial of St Barnabas – both of which he went on to mention in his homily.

The Penitential Rite was concluded by the Kyrie from Palestrina’s Missa brevis, which we promptly followed by Gloria ‘de Angelis’, in Latin and helpfully printed in the Mass booklet in square notes. The translation underneath the Latin lyrics made use of the new translation of the Missale Romanum which will come into use in England & Wales later this year.

After the Opening Prayer, the Liturgy of the Word began and was completed by the singing of the gospel to a modern tone. After this the candidates were called forward by name for Presentation, Election and Consent. The candidates were presented by the Ordinary of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, Mgr Keith Newton. This was followed by the prayer of thanksgiving for ministry in the Church of England, and the homily.

In both the homily and the closing remarks at this Mass, the bishop of Brentwood made it very clear that he understands and respects the unique nature of the relationship between the Ordinariate and the Diocese. He was particularly notable for his pastoral and caring acknowledgement of the fruits of the Anglican tradition and his genuine wish to see these – together with the people who bring them – implanted and given space for growth, within the Catholic Church in England & Wales: truly united but not absorbed.

After the homily, the Examination of the Candidates took place, followed by the Promise of Obedience. In Religious communities, it is normal for these to be made to the Ordinary even if they are not the ordaining bishop; it would be a powerful symbol of the nature of the hierarchical structure of the Church, if a similar practice were adopted with a non-episcopal Ordinary of a Personal Ordinariate, especially when the ordination takes place in a church which is not of the Ordinariate.

After the Litany of the Saints and the Concluding Prayer, the bishop laid hands on the candidates and prayed the Prayer of Consecration over them. Then, as they were vested in the stole and chasuble, the hymn Come down, O love divine was sung. This setting of words by Bianco da Siena, was translated by Richard Frederick Littledale (1833-90). Littledale, who was an Anglican priest, was born in Northern Ireland. He was very much within the Tractarian tradition of the Church of England, serving in parishes in Norwich and Soho, London, before taking early retirement due to ill health. Despite writing a book entitled Plain reasons against joining the Church of Rome in 1880, he was a prolific translator of liturgical texts of the Latin and Eastern rites. These included the Offices of the Holy Eastern Church (1863) and a number of devotional books. He also wrote on the liturgical ritual of the Church of England in Catholic ritual in the Church of England (1861) and The Altar Manual (1863-77). He is also known for his translation Christ enthroned in highest heaven. The tune, Down Ampney, was written in 1906 by Ralph Vaughn Williams and was included in the English Hymnal. It is typical of the post-Victorian hymn tunes of RVW, which often sought to draw on the English folk tradition more than the developed hymn-tune tradition of more Protestant and non-conformist sources.

After the Anointing of the Hands and the Presentation of the Bread and Wine, the Kiss of Peace followed with the singing of the Latin Veni Creator Spiritus. The contemporary Catholic practice of using a large dish-like paten is one which is almost entirely alien to Anglicans, especially those of the Anglo-Catholic tradition. To someone from that tradition it can seem incongruous to be presented with a gothic gold chalice and a dish full of hosts, rather than the traditional charged chalice and paten with host.

During the Preparation of the Gifts, the choir once more took charge of the music and very proficiently performed Elgar’s Spirit of the Lord. Sir Edward Elgar, himself a Catholic, was a further link with the Ordinariate’s patron, Blessed John Henry Newman. It was Elgar who composed a setting of Newman’s Dream of Gerontius. Today’s anthem, however, was very much of the Anglican cathedral tradition. It is this sort of work that can be found on the music lists of Anglican cathedrals for Sunday Evensong – traditionally the slot in the week when a longer anthem is deemed appropriate. It was a very effective Offertory Motet; setting words from the 1903 work The Apostles including Isaiah 61 and Luke 4. Elgar, despite his Catholic roots, sets text drawn from the Authorised Version, the so-called King James Bible:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because He hath anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor:
He hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted,
to preach deliv’rance to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,—
to preach the acceptable year of the Lord;
To give unto them that mourn a garland for ashes,
the oil of joy for mourning,
the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness;
That they might be called trees of righteousness,
the planting of the Lord, that He might be glorified.
For as the earth bringeth forth her bud,
and as the garden causeth the things that are sown in it to spring forth;
So the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations.
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because He hath anointed me to preach the Gospel.

The Preface of the Eucharistic Prayer was then prayed by the bishop before the Sanctus from Missa de Angelis was intoned and the Eucharistic Prayer begun. As at the diaconal ordinations in Wanstead, one of the Eucharistic Prayers for Masses for Various Needs and Occasions was used (B – God guides the Church on the Way of Salvation), concelebrated by the priests of the diocese and ordinariate. Some of the new priests took a part in the Eucharistic Prayer and it was encouraging to hear the words ‘Keith our Ordinary’ recited publicly and aloud for the first time at an ordination.

After the Agnus Dei – sung from the Missa brevis setting by Palestrina – a cantor sang the Latin plainchant communio and the choir then sang Colin Mawby’s setting of Ave Verum Corpus during the distribution of Holy Communion.

Sweet sacrament divine was sung during Holy Communion and then, after the Prayer after Communion, the Ordinary thanked those present for their help in preparing the celebration. The rapport between the Ordinary and Bishop McMahon is obviously good – these are two men who complement each other’s jurisdiction by a genuine and mutual respect for the roles they undertake in the name of the Church. Bishop McMahon responded with equally generous words, expressing again his personal joy and pleasure at the establishment of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, which described in relation to Mary as ‘her Ordinariate’.

At the end the Pontifical Blessing was given jointly by the bishop and Mgr Newton. This is a liturgical gesture usually reserved for ecumenical celebrations but here, for the first time, the sight of the Anglican and Roman Catholic traditions joined in a sacramental sign which no person can dispute, was strong. Liturgically it might be wise not to be repeated on a regular basis – for fear that, if nothing else, it appears too much like an ecumenical service – but at this warm and historic ordination, it had a very special and profound meaning.

By the end of the Mass, for the first time again, there were an equal number of priests of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham in the building, as priests of Diocese of Brentwood. It’s growing, and growing fast.