The Ordinariate's Second Wave

At Westminster Cathedral this morning, 17 men were ordained for the diaconate of the Catholic Church in the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. All told they already had between them 500 years of priestly (and diaconal) service. This was not just in the Church of England. One had spent his entire ministry as a missionary in the Church of the Anglican Province of the West Indies; one had served as a priest of the Scottish Episcopal Church; three were formerly of the clergy of Anglican Churches that had never been in communion with the Anglican See of Canterbury: two from the Traditional Anglican Church in the UK, and another from the Anglican Province of America.

Westminster Cathedral has been generous not only in providing a space for the Ordinariate's inaugural series of ordinations, it has also made its fine resources of liturgical and musical ministers. And the Episcopal Delegate of the Bishops' Conference for the Implementation of the Ordinariate is Bishop Alan Hopes, an auxiliary of Westminster diocese; so there is always this special bond between Westminster and the Ordinariate. After all, the diocesan seminary at Allen Hall is also providing the courses and formation from which the Ordinariate's clergy are benefiting.

Fr Mark vests Deacon Masaki in the dalmatic,
photo (c) the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham

The Catholic League was represented by the General Secretary David Chapman, the Treasurer Cyril Wood, trustee Mrs Mary Bacon, Fr James Bradley, who served as the occasion's official photographer, and the Priest Director, Fr Mark Woodruff, a Westminster priest. Fr Mark had been invited to support and vest an Anglican priest and a small group received in his home parish in Lancashire, St Bernadette's in Blackpool, the Revd Masaki Narusawa, once of the Anglican Church in Japan but ordained in the Church of England Diocese of London.

John Hunwicke, photo (c) the Personal
Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham

But the League's turned out was especially heartfelt for its highly regarded and much loved, and long term member, the Revd John Hunwicke, whose learned analysis of matters liturgical, ecclesiological and ecumenical are available to a wide audience, through his blog, Liturgical Notes. We certainly hope this lively and informative blog will be resumed after Father Hunwicke's understandable online fasting while he prepared for ordination is over, and he is more Father Hunwicke than ever.

Congratulations to the Catholic Church's new deacons, especially Masaki Narusawa and John Hunwicke. Axioi!

In the usual Westminster custom, the great Liturgy of Ordination was marked with ceremonial precision and simplicity, and sung by the Lay Clerks of the Cathedral Choir. The Latin propers were sung at the Introit, Alleluia and Communion, allowing for three hymns to be appropriately added in supplementation from the rich patrimony of English hymnody. The ordinary of the Mass (Kyrie, Gloria and Agnus) was the peerless Mass for Five Voices by William Byrd from the 1590s, sung by men's voices. We have already commented on the significance of Byrd's liturgical compositions in promoting the liturgical renewal of the 16th century Catholic Church and his energies devoted to maintaining the identity and continuous musical and sacramental patrimony of the old medieval Church of England's Catholic constituency, while he also served as a court musician for Queen Elizabeth I. We have also mentioned the role played by Anglican musicologists in retrieving Byrd's music and restoring it by putting it into service in English Anglican Cathedral worship and from there to the wider Christian Churches. So something that forms rightly both part of the Anglican patrimony and the Roman Catholic:

Byrd was probably born in 1540 at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries. He witnessed the collapse of the shortlived and futile Henrician pseudo-Catholic Church in 1547 and its replacement by a more thorough Protestant Reformed Church of England under his son, with worship in English according to the First and Second Books of Common Prayer until Queen Mary restored the English Church's allegiance to the Catholic Church. Possibly by then he was a Chapel Royal choirboy. Certainly he was a pupil of Thomas Tallis, who as a Gentlement of the Chapel from 1543 to his death in 1585 was a leading court composer, serving Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I. Like Byrd he remained a Catholic throughout, but avoided religious controversy, adapting his musical style and output to the tastes and requirements of his royal employers. The young Byrd collaborated with Tallis, John Sheppard and William Mundy in writing new music for the Sarum rite used by the Chapel Royal towards the end of the reign of Queen Mary in 1558. Thereafter, with the Church of England re-established and its Prayer Book restored, Byrd's public musicianship had to serve the requirements of Queen Elizabeth. After he too became a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal in 1572, he collaborated with the aged Tallis on the publication of a collection of motets in Latin. Dedicated to the Queen, the collection comprised items used in the Chapel Royal, in which the Prayer Book was used in Latin translation. But Haec Dies comes from Byrd's own 1591 second volume of Cantiones Sacrae, containing his later output of motets more specifically reflecting his Catholic perspective. Like his subsequent Masses ...  they may well have seen service in the clandestine masses and performances of religious music in the houses of Catholic patrons.

So the composition of the Three Part Mass represents an attempt to recover the motifs, influences and  tradition of a Catholic musical and liturgical patrimony Byrd treasured from the time of his youth, as well as to renew it with influences from the continent and developing tastes in secular music, - all at the same time as his outstanding and innovative contribution to the emergence of the Anglican musical and liturgical patrimony.

But despite his high reputation as a master of European Renaissance music in his lifetime, and despite such illustrious pupils as Peter Philips, Thomas Tomkins and Thomas Morley, the English tradition of Latin sacred music died with him. The place of his secular music in the repertoire declined with changes in popular taste and it was only his Anglican music that preserved his fame beyond the Restoration, until it too fell out of use. But the story does not end there. Despite various attempts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to revive interest in his enormous output over such a long life, it took an Anglican clergyman and musicologist, Edmund Fellowes, to edit and publish twenty volumes of Byrd's music as well as the remarkable series, Tudor Church Music, through which he also recovered the long forgotten works of other English Renaissance composers, notably Orlando Gibbons.

So the selection of this Mass could not have been more apt for the ordination of deacons for the Ordinariate:

Ostensibly a piece of Catholic patrimony from the age of the Tudors, it speaks of the genesis of the Anglican musical patrimony by the same hand. Furthermore, it was recovered for re-reception within Catholic worship through the scholarship of a Church of England priest, as a labour of love that he thought would enrich the Anglican choral tradition in such places in which he served as Bristol Cathedral, St George's Chapel, Windsor, and St Michael's College, Tenbury (1856-1985 - a school founded by Sir Fredreick Gore Ouseley as a model for church music raised to the highest standards, in reaction to its parlous condition in the mid-nineteenth century). It is interesting to reflect that the sacred music of the English Renaissance that is associated with the Anglican patrimony par excellence ... owes its place deep in the heart, imagination and folk memory of the Church of England's cathedral tradition to the efforts of a clergyman who flourished in the first half of the twentieth century, a matter of mere decades ago. It is also worth bearing in mind that long before Anglicanorum Coetibus, the restoration of Anglican patrimony brought with it some treasures to be restored to their rightful and much loved place in the Catholic liturgy too.

The readings were from Acts 6.1-7 and Matthew 20.25-28, although using the Jerusalem Bible translation customary among English Roman Catholics, and not the Revised Standard Version more familiar in North America and now the norm for the Ordinariates.

At the rite of Ordination, the prayer devised in 1995 for recognising Anglican ministry, its acceptance and incorporation in the sacrament of order of the Catholic Church was prayed and a fine sermon delivered by Monseigneur Andrew Burnham on the pastoral leadership set apart by the apostles for the maintenance and service of the churches they had founded on their journeyings.

The new translation of the Litany of the Saints, with responses at last designed to fit the well known melodies, came into its own. Unlike in some Ordinariate ordinations, perhaps reflecting the dioceses in which they took place, silence was allowed in, as Bishop Hopes went through candidate after candidate, all seventeen of them, to receive the promise of obedience to the Ordinary, the traditio evangeliorum - the placing of the Book of the Gospels into each deacon's hands - and the Kiss of Peace from the ordaining bishop to each one. During vesting, the clerks sang Ubi Caritas to Gregorian chant, an apt connection to the diakonia of Christ to his apostles on the night before he died and, so to speak, they concelebrated with him the First of all Eucharists.

The motet at the Offertory was Psalm 116/117, Laudate Dominum with Gloria Patri set by Thomas Tallis, Byrd's teacher and mentor. Queen Elizabeth granted them the joint monopoly of printing and publishing music, remarkable for two such well known Catholics - even more remarkable that she provided her patronage for their editions of Latin sacred music, since some of it could be used in the Anglican services in her Chapel Royal, which were in the Latin in which she was fluent, despite some of the pieces being clearly for none other than the Catholic liturgy. Laudate Dominum was thus dedicated to Queen Eizabeth, collected alongside the Mass Puer Natus and the Lamentations.  Some say that Laudate Dominum is likewise for the clandestine celebration of the Old Rite (the psalm occurs both as the last of five in Sunday and Festal vespers, and as the psalm in the truncated vespers at the end of the Easter Vigil rite on Holy Saturday), but it could equally have served in the Latin language Anglican Chapel Royal among the set course of psalms for Mattins of the 24th Morning of each month - perhaps December? In any case, it is not a motet for Mass (the Gloria Patri gives it away as a setting from the Office), or for Benediction, which had not then reached its present form and content.

The naming of the bishop remains a problem of ecclesiology in the Ordinariates, since their Ordinaries are not bishops, but rely on bishops of Latin territorial dioceses to ordain on their behalf. Thus, correctly, the order of service showed that these were not ordinations "in" the Diocese of Westminster but "for" the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. Bishop Alan Hopes, as a bishop of the Westminster Diocese in its Cathedral, was both generous host and welcome guest, and Monseigneur Newton was able to refer to this generosity of gift and service from Westminster Cathedral and especially from the Bishop in his concluding remarks. At the Eucharist prayer (the Roman Canon), Benedict our Pope was commemorated, Bishop Alan recalled himself as it the custom and then Vincent our Bishop and Keith the Ordinary. As Mgr Newton is head of the ecclesiastical circumscription that is the Ordinariate, who as such is the chief minister in communion with the Bishop of Rome (in much the same way as Abbots are mentioned in the Eucharistic Prayer in their monasteries), Keith is "our" ordinary, not "the" ordinary, in the Liturgies of the Personal Ordinariate. That said, Westminster is the primatial Cathedral of England, and its bishop is by long custom the English Catholic Church's primate, usually thus serving as President of the Bishops' Conference of England and Wales. It was only fitting, therefore, that, even though this was a Mass in the Ordinariate, Archbishop Vincent be commemorated in his own Cathedral Church, in his own diocese and as primate of the England & Wales Catholic Church of which he is presiding bishop and protos, and which includes the Ordinariate.

The Communion motet was Victoria's O sacrum convivium. We have commented on Victoria and his relevance to Anglican patrimony before:

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".

After the Communion and before the concluding remarks of the Ordinary, Bishop Alan called up the wives of the new deacons for a special blessing. These were each of them people who had devoted lifetimes as wives and mothers to their husbands, and served as fellow-workers and supporters of their ministries with a remarkable apostolate all of their own.

The complementary hymns were splendid. Prior to the Offertory in the Procession, we sang the great Ascensiontide hymn, Crown him with many crowns, by Matthew Bridges, 1800-72. He was a prolific versewriter, translator of poetry and church apologist. At first, he followed the Anglican evangelical line that the Roman Catholic Church was a manifestation of superstition sustained by the papacy; but, under the influence of  Blessed John Henry Newman and doubtless in response to similar intellectual and spiritual crises, he became a Catholic in 1848. In 1852 he issued Songs of the Passion, a collection of verse devotions to accompany the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, dedicated to Cardinal Wiseman. Crown him with many crowns appears as the Song of the Seraphs, to reflect the Third Sorrowful Mystery. This writer expects that many readers will have assumed that you could not find a more classic example of Anglican hymnody, yet this is a Catholic creation, albeit imbued with his earlier Evangelical fervour (cf. "for thou hast died for me" and the penultimate verse that we omitted and that forms the last verse in the English Hymnal, its second a line a delight to choirboys:

Crown him the Lord of years,
the Potentate of Time,
Creator of the rolling spheres,
ineffably sublime!
Glass'd in a sea of light,
whose everlasting waves
reflect His Form - the Infinite! -
who lives, - and loves, - and saves.)


It is no suprise that these inspired six verses, among Bridges' less remarkable poetry, became so popular. They were included in the Appendix to the Oxford Movement's Hymns Ancient & Modern in 1868.  This prompted the Revd Godfrey Thring, a prebendary of Wells, adapted them in Hymns and Sacred Lyrics of 1874 for use in the more Protestant-leaning parts of the Church of England, adding verses to stress the final achievement of the Atonement on Calvary, and to lessen the significance of the Marian reference to the Mystic Rose's role in the history of salvation, and the possible interpretation that the destructive side of the Sacrifice of Christ ("rich wounds yet visible above") is maintained or renewed in the Mass. Thring's verses are not the equal of Bridges' and thus they have not been retained in the memory of the Tradition. Matthew Bridges went to live for many years in Quebec, but eventually returned to England, dying in a villa belonging to the Sisters of the Assumption at Sidmouth, Devon in 1894. The usual tune, Diademata (which means 'crowned') is by Sir George Job Elvey, 1816-1893, who began his musical career as a choirboy at Canterbury, before he won the position of Master of the Boys and Organist at St George's Windsor at the age of 20. He remained there for the next fifty years. His two other famous tunes are Rock of Ages and St George's Windsor, well known as the tune to the great Harvest Festival hymn, Come, ye thankful people, come. Diademata was written for the hymn's inclusion in Hymns Ancient and Modern with its first Appendix in 1868.

At Holy Communion we sang the affecting and much treasured Just as I am, without one plea by Charlotte Elliott, 1789-1871. She came from a clerical family with links to the Clapham Sect in her parents' generation. At the age of 30 she became infirm and retired to Hove, where she spent the rest of her life battling her conditions and writing to poems, prayers and hymns to encouarage other invalids spiritually. Only Just as I am has stood the test of time, having been adopted by the Anglo-Catholic movement as a Communion hymn, because of its (unintended) allusion to the Agnus Dei in the Ordinary of the Mass and to the prayer O Lord I am not worthy that thou shouldst enter under my roof (Domine non sum dignus ut intres....), neither of which occurs in the Book of Common Prayer. The usual tune nowadays is Saffron Walden by Arthur Henry Brown, 1830-1926, written for the third musical edition of the Hymnal Companion to the Book of Common Prayer in 1890, another hymnbook from the Oxford Movement stable but, for a time, aimed at a more mainstream Anglican audience. Brown was an active member of the Gregorian Association, which supports the restoration and use of plainsong in Anglican worship, as did Sir John Stainer, the musical editor of the Hymnal Companion.

Finally, we sang the stirring Lord enthroned in heavenly splendour, by George Hugh Bourne (1840-1925) as a recessional hymn. On the face of it, it is an Ascensiontide hymn, but in fact it is a hymn of adoration to Christ in the Eucharist. It first appeared in Bourne's privately published Seven Post Communion Hymns of 1874, whence it passed into the First Supplement of Hymns Ancient & Modern in the 1875 Edition. So, in modern usage, its proper place is either in anticipation of the Consecration and the Real Presence of Christ in the eucharistic species at the Offertory, at as a hymn of thanksgiving as the Rite of Communion draws to a close. "Here for faith's discernment pray we, lest we fail to know thee now" makes the point, since in the Latin Roman rite we had, by this stage, consumed the Blessed Eucharist. Yet not in the Anglican rite for which Bourne, a long serving prebendary of Sarum, was creatively hymns to meet new liturgical needs. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer provides for the unconsumed "elements" of consecrated Bread and Wine to remain on the Holy Table until the end of the Holy Communion, when they are to be reverently consumed. This may sound odd to modern thinking, but it was a provision (a) to prevent the Consecrated Sacrament being ignored or thrown away as the service moved on (a practice that had grown as the memories of the old Mass and reservation faded), and (b) to promote reverence to Christ in his sacramental presence.

This reverence led some to a contemplative devotion to the Risen and Ascended Christ at this point in the Anglican Liturgy. In particular, this is expressed by the great and holy Charles Chapman Grafton, 1830-1912, who became second Bishop of Fond du Lac,  Wisconsin USA. He was a devout Anglo-Catholic priest serving in Maryland, but after the American Civil War he went to England where, with Richard Meux Benson and Simeon Wilberforce O'Neill, he was one of the three founders of the Cowley Fathers, the Society of St John the Evangelist, the first monastic foundation for men in England since the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII. Sixteen years he returned to the USA to take the missionary work of the Society there (its last surviving monastery is still in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the English congregation having to all intents and purposes died out), he was elected bishop of Fond du Lac and withdrew from the Society to concentrate on his new mission as a bishop. He has left behind a wealth of sermons and writings, which are testament to his evangelistic vigour and the significant growth he brought to his diocese. One of these is the beautiful Plain Suggestions for a Reverent Celebration of the Holy Communion. In chapter nine, The Mystical Meaning of the Liturgy, he focuses on the Post Communion section of the Anglican liturgy, in which the Eucharist is not merely left on the altar to be dealt with later but forms the climax of the reception of Holy Communion, with priest and people standing in the presence of the Lord of heaven:

It is full of the spirit of the risen and ascended Christ. As the first two portions of the Liturgy set forth His prophetical and priestly work, here He is brought before us as our risen and ascended King. The Roman mass practically ends with the priest's communion, and then he consumes the elements. Is it not something worse than disloyalty for an Anglican priest to imitate this in the face of our rubric, which enforces the reservation of the sacrament until after the benediction? If it was for communion only that the sacrament was instituted, we might conceive that as soon as the communions were made the sacrament should be consumed. But the Prayer-Book orders its reservation and that the Benediction shall be given in its presence. Like the apostles, we assemble about our risen Lord, and are with Him, like them, in the sacred enclosure of the closed doors. He is in the midst of us, and we have received Him, and He is in us and we in Him. We rejoice in Him and adore Him as our King. We are incorporated into His mystical body, and are ready to do all such good works as He has prepared for us to walk in. We gather about Him as when the disciples took their last walk with Him in the glorious sunlight of His resurrection, and He led them out as far as Bethany. Not unfittingly does our Liturgy reserve the Gloria in Excelsis for this place. It is the triumphantly filled-out response made by the Church to the angels’ song at Bethlehem. We have been raised up and made to sit in heavenly places. We gaze not up into a material heaven, but into the heaven whereof we form a part and wherein we are one with the apostles, as when they gathered beneath the benediction of the uplifted hands, and worshipped Him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy. 

And then, after the blessing, the priest immediately and reverently consumes the sacred gifts, and can we but think of the saying: "He was taken up; and a cloud received Him out of their sight.

So, although it was not intended, here was a particularly thought-provoking reference to a forgotten facet of old Anglican Patrimony, that the shape of its classical eucharistic rite translates the Church on earth to stand among the Church Triumphant before the "Lamb who died, risen, ascended, glorified".


The hymn's tune is usually St Helen of 1874 (although I would love one day to hear the roof of a Catholic cathedral raised by Bryn Calfaria, the English Hymnal 's tune, by the Welsh congregationalist slate quarryman, William Owen, 1813-1893, written in 1852). It is by Sir George Clement Martin, 1844-1916, composed in 1874, the year he left being organist of St John's Edinburgh, to take on the training of boys at the new choral foundation at St Paul's Cathedral, where he stayed for the rest of his career, succeeding Sir John Stainer as organist in 1888. He wrote the Te Deum that was sung on the steps of St Paul’s for the famous open-air Diamond Jubilee service, celebrating Queen Victoria’s 60 years on the throne, for which she knighted him.