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.

Thought for the Day

Evan Davis, the skilful communicator on economic affairs for the BBC, is an atheist. For ten years at least he has been saying that the Thought for the Day slot on the Today progragmme just after a quarter to eight “discriminates against the non-religious”. Since he became an anchorman on Today four years ago, he has continued to express this view. Journalists and presenters on the BBC are supposed to interrogate opinion and actions, not to pursue their own agenda, political or otherwise. Yet, despite a conflict of interest, Evan Davis agitates for change in overall editorial policy to conform to his religious worldview. He believes Thought for the Day should be kept, he believes, but instead of being “monopolised… by people of the cloth” it should “give space to serious and spiritually minded secularists”. In a free country he is entitled to his point of view. But surely it is a conflict of interests to press for such a significant change in overall BBC principles - in the programme you work on - when you are deploying your popularity and expertise to gain the BBC's conformity to your personal religious standpoint.


Thought for the Day is not supposed to be a merely “religious” slot. It is supposed to provide a reflection on the affairs and assumptions of the day, from out of the principles and values of the religious and spiritual tradition that formed our civilisation and in which it continues to share. In other words, while we become wrapped up in domestic politics and Westminster gossip, or absorbed with international crises, as well as human interest stories and great intellectual debates, space for the other dimension in our universe is salutary. To leave out the spiritual and religious means we are omitting to address our world and its problems in an holistic way.


What dismays me about his well intentioned campaign is not how misguided it is, but how unbalanced it is. I cannot imagine what a “spiritually minded secularist” is, unless it is someone of personal depth and reflection, who has examined himself and the people around him, mindful of one or other of the great traditions of moral philosophy that have characterised our various civilisations over the last three millennia. To say the least, however, these traditions are not distinctively secular. And, paradoxically, Christian ascetic wisdom agrees with what might be called a “spiritually minded secularist” that God is no mere projection “out there”, for really the “desert lies within”. But I do not understand what value such contemplation without God has, that is not already encompassed in the non-religious opinion, reflection, discourse, theories and debates that constitute all but two or three minutes of the three-hour programme that is the daily national news flagship. To examine ourselves as people and as a society we need to be holistic, and that means we have to make sense of ourselves in terms of all parts of us, including faith and the dimension of us that is in the realm of the Spirit, as much as by other criteria.


The imbalance is that the “space” for secularists that Evan Davis wants on Thought for the Day is begrudged elsewhere on TV and Radio. Occasionally on religious and current affairs programming, you will find articulate star atheists pitched against people of faith, who either do not match their skills at lively disputation and Christian apologetics; or they are so extreme and unrepresentative as to make for “good TV”, but bad examples of what mainstream religious adherence actually is. But the space where religion, especially the Church, is prohibited with Marxist-Leninist ferocity is radio and television comedy. Stephen Fry uses QI to mock the articles of religious faith and promotes atheism without challenge. Russell Howard turns his observational stand-up routines on his Good News to character assassination of Catholicism and its priests. Satire is devastating when it turns fact and experience on those who deserve to be deflated. But Howard is not troubled with accuracy, as all that is needed is caricature to please his crowd. Marcus Brigstocke, who features on The Now Show, one of whose presenters is Hugh Dennis, the son of an Anglican bishop, conveys his personal antipathy towards the Christian faith in his wry comic monologues with a force that is almost visceral. Each of these programmes has been produced at the expense of licence fee-payers by the BBC. Yet there is no challenge, or right of reply; and there is no like investment of public money in routine satire of atheism, such as handsomely rewards those who use the BBC to promote their personal, secularist religious standpoint.


St Gregory Nazianzus rightly counselled against point-scoring debates, because people will recognise Christ best in what we have come to be, not the words we say. St Francis de Sales reconverted much of his Geneva diocese from Calvin, believing that “the bee achieves more by its honey than by its sting”. Nonetheless, there are too many presenters who use Thought for the Day for a short homily, “preaching to the choir”. I am with Evan Davis, if he finds this dull and self-serving. What we need are wise, even witty, mirrors from the water in the well of life that, in the words of Pope Benedict on his visit to these shores, alone answer humanity’s deepest questions, and encourage the dialogue between religious faith and virtue in public life at every level of society.

The Archbishop of Canterbury

In March, Archbishop Rowan Williams announced his decision to leave the most senior non-royal office in the land, that of our country’s principal religious leader, to return to the groves of academy. Immediately, The Times denounced his archiepiscopate as a pragmatic and political failure, absorbed in a “futile quest for unity” among the Church of England’s and the Anglican Communion’s factions. Obviously the writer had never read John 17. It was all so different in 2002 and 2003, when people on all sides were hoping and calling for the Archbishop of Wales to come to Canterbury. Since then many of those same voices have, by turns, criticised, undermined and blatantly disobeyed the leadership they asked of him. At least twice his carefully framed and widely consulted on plans, for enabling people and provinces to be full stakeholders in the Anglican Communion or in the Church of England as a national Church, have been rejected. Presiding with a profound sense of love and duty over a Church which, increasingly, cannot realise its historic purpose as comprehensive of all, as it becomes factional and confessional over two now live issues that were never at stake at the Reformation - nor occurred to the founders and drivers of the twentieth century ecumenical movement, and which several different worldviews now render insoluble, as the present phase of Catholic-Anglican dialogue seems to bear witness - it is hardly surprising that he feels his position is untenable. The great Anglican tradition has come to something, when its two greatest orthodox intellects and teachers in contemporary Britain have given up the chief pastorship of the Church, to revert to academic standing. The loss of Bishop Tom Wright of Durham and now Archbishop Williams from their leadership constitutes a grave loss to the whole body of Christians in this country.


The quest for unity can never be futile, however difficult and even painful it is, because it is the will and prayer of Christ. We greet Archbishop Rowan as he draws to the end of his distinguished service as Archbishop of Canterbury. His deep understanding of Catholic and Orthodox theology have profited us all and, whatever side of the Anglican debates people have stood, his efforts to be true to people’s principles and what Hooker calls their “participation” in the Church, and the wider work of the “unity of all humanity in the charity and truth of Christ” (as Paul Couturier put it), of which the unity among Christians is the sign, have been heroic.


We wish him well; and we thank him for his friendship, even a critical friendship, to the Catholic Church and not least the person of the Holy Father; but most of all for his service to the unity of Christians, not just towards other Churches but within his own too, “so that the world may believe”.

Vatican II Hymnal: Book Review

Vatican II Hymnal, ed. Jeffrey Mark Ostrowski, Corpus Christi Watershed, Corpus Christ Texas, 2011, pp. 709 plus indices.


In some ways this is the hymnbook Catholics should have had 40, or even 30, years ago. Put briefly, it is a compendium of all the music and text needed for the worthy sung celebration of the revised form of the Roman Mass, supplemented with a modest collection of hymns and tunes that lie largely in the public domain. A good number of these hymns belong to the body of Catholic devotional verse that was available for extra-liturgical services like Benediction, or permitted to be sung in association with Low Mass; but most come from the riches received from other western Christian traditions (through their North American manifestations), thanks to Catholic entry into using the English-speaking hymn tradition at Mass, by way of the ecumenical exchange of gifts suggested from the Second Vatican Council's Decree on Ecumenism onwards and allowed for in the rubrics of the liturgy revisions under Paul VI.

At first glance, it may not look like such a contemporary resource for Catholic worship; but it is actually the print interface of a large online project to ensure that the mass reformed after Vatican II, especially when celebrated in the vernacular, benefits from access to Catholic liturgy's broad and continuous musical tradition in both Latin and English. So, technologically speaking, it would not have been possible to have this hymnal even ten years ago. Furthermore, the Vatican II Hymnal is issued through low-cost self-publishing to order; in other words, production costs do not reflect the business plan of a large book-publishing and distribution house. My hardback draft & review copy cost $17-91; and the final version edition is now ready at $19, costing less per copy the more you order. Also available are supplementary printed books for SATB choir or vocalists' settings of masses and responsorial psalms (notably Jeff Ostrowski's St Noel Chabanel psalm project; and Aristotle Esguerra's modal Responsorial Psalms) and for organ accompaniments, at similarly low prices, or by download to your computer. This in itself is an interesting development for the promotion of quality new writing for Church liturgy and hymn resources, as well as of familiar standard material (and there is also a remarkable parallel online resource providing all the propers in English and Latin with accompaniments). There is now no excuse for churches and their musicians to be bound to the printed books and collections stocked in the organ loft or the choir vestry, or to the poor mass music and low quality worship songs that have formed our habits for decades. For the Vatican II Hymnal not only provides a core repertoire, it also has the capacity to extend itself constantly with the compatible invention of new and restored resources on line.

But what is the Vatican II Hymnal like? Being for Catholic use, it is primarily a liturgical resource to put in order the music for the ordinary and the proper of the Mass, including appropriate "strophic", metrical hymns that can also be included in the Ordinary form of Mass. So it is a hymnale, not a hymnbook, that is a collection or approved selection of hymns. Thus its contents are arranged to serve the celebration of mass. This marks it out as different in structure and presentation from other hymnbooks, even those used and approved in Catholic circles. Thus it is almost a Sunday missal, lacking the variable prayers, but including the readings and the texts of the chants of the Proper of the Mass (think of the similar pages in the English Hymnal), that often neglected but in fact integral component of the Mass, which provides all the Scriptural texts of the variable chants at the Entrance, the Gradual (psalm between the readings), the Offertory and at Communion. Apart from the hymns (to which we will return), the Hymnal draws on a large body of work developed by Watershed, a charity founded in 1996 in the Diocese of Corpus Christi, Texas (see the links above). Watershed has expended considerable energy on collating music from the historic, liturgical patrimony (Gregorian and polyphonic) that can be newly deployed in the service of the revised form of mass - they do not need to have been set aside, and can be re-received. It has also been promoting the work of composers, who see their task is to develop fresh sacred music for the Ordinary Form of Mass (especially in view of the new translation) that stands in continuity with the same traditions as music written for the solemn sung musical celebration of Mass from before the Vatican II reforms, yet not in Latin but the vernacular. In this the group seeks to be in accord with the spirit of Vatican II's Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium. The driving philosophy is that, while for most of us the revised form of mass in the vernacular seemed to mark a radical rupture from what went before, the Council Fathers actually envisaged not abolition but direct continuity - with some desirable organic develoment, certain improvements and corrections -and an aggiornamento, an updating, to enable the people of the present day to be drawn into and participate in the mass, "actively" (i.e. not merely attend as passive spectators) . Far from a wholesale change, the contention is that the Council sought previously obscured aspects of the Catholic tradition to be restored to them, through the growth and enrichment of what was already in place.


Yet, as is well known, in many if not most places, choirs, organs, Gregorian chant, motets and settings in Latin - and even singing the mass apart from some hymns - were abandoned. Two generations have passed since this rupture and we have become accustomed to folk groups, guitars and bands, liturgical music loosely similar to contemporary popular music (although not always of like quality and creative skill). There is also a body of supposedly distinctive Catholic non-hymnic worship songs, created because their advocates reject the English-language hymn tradition as essentially Protestant. Yet they resemble neither the English liturgical custom of strophic metrical hymns, nor the Roman Graduale's native tradition, whether in using Gregorian chant or other compositions to set the Proper (the Latin tradition is, at heart, to sing the psalms of the Bible at mass with responses). As Professor Paul Fiddes, the great English Baptist theologian, has often observed, you will get more Scripture heard and read at a Catholic mass than at many a Protestant service. But these "distinctively Catholic" liturgical songs are by no means always related to the Scriptures or to the Propers, and thus they stand in clear contrast to many a suitable and well chosen classic hymn, rooted in the metrical singing of psalms and the other Scriptures. This is all by way of saying that for years Catholic eucharistic musical worship in English has been in search of its idiom and identity. It began by adopting aspects of contemporary culture; it looked to some of the features of music and hymnody in the worship of ecumenical friends; it developed its own formats to meet the shape of parts of the renewed rite (eg the Gospel acclamation); and, in the influential minds of some leading Catholic "pastoral musicians", strove for a musical and doxological genre that could distinguish vernacular Catholic worship as different. The search has been protracted and hardly successful.

The reason is because it lost touch with its own underlying tradition, continuous for 1,500 years. In England, the Vatican II Constitution seeking to re-establish the solemn sung mass as the norm for Sunday worship - opening up the accessibility and implementation of the sung High Mass - has by and large not been implemented. Instead we have remained wedded to the idea of a spoken out Low Mass, with such additional material for singing as resources or inclination allow, as the intended and welcome manifestation of the reform. Thus, long since English became the norm, it is still usual at many a Sunday Mass for the psalm not to be sung, but to constitute a dialogue between the faithful and the reader. Even where the Alleluia is sung to one of a handful of tunes that people know (often the antiphon from the end of the old Vesperal Paschal Vigil, stuningly effective of in its annual simplicity, but devalued by overuse, as though we are incapable of encompassing anything more demanding), the verse is often merely said. The entrance chant and the communion antiphon as given in the missal, without their psalm verses, are declared as slogans where they are used at all. Few parishes can rely on a well known tune to which to sing the Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus and Agnus. The new translation of the Missal into English, backed with some firm directions from the bishops (e.g. an expectation of the greetings and prayers to be sung by the priest), boldy attempts to move the worshipping Church to the original objective of the full sung celebration as the norm, casting other forms of mass seen as gradations that cut down on that norm, according to available resources and circumstances. But a culture shift from seeing the said Low Mass as the basic buiding block, with musical settings seen as optional and potentially complicating extras, will take decades of unrelenting determination to succeed. This is why such an initiative as the Vatican II Hymnal is a godsend. As its name implies, it sets our to implement the vision of what many are coming to believe is something approaching the shape and culture intended by the Constitution on the Liturgy. Arguably, we had to go through what we have experience and experimented with over the last five decades, in order to evaluate the true direction of our liturgical tradition for the future as well as for retrieving its past. Arguably, too, we may be too late to recalibrate the momentum of the vernacular tradition as it is now, upon the trajectory of the larger tradition out of which it is supposed to have arisen. There are those, too, who will say that the genie is out of the bottle, and that too much change and innovation has become so ingrained and accepted by the faithful as the authentic liturgical language of the Anglophone cultural continuum, that it cannot be undone with more alienating rupture. But at least the Vatican II Hymnal has arrived and can influence for good what lies ahead in the organic redevelopment of our tradition.


Clearly, the Hymnal resonates within a North American culture, at a time when there is fresh heart among a new generation of musicians who have realised that "modern" can soon become dated, and that in the Church's long tradition there are many compositions that were once modern, that stood the test of time, or were later revived when their moment came again, and that this should never have been something we swept away, but built upon. The present writer, a Catholic priest, came from an Anglican musical background, where a mature musical and choral culture was able to take reforms to liturgical texts and formats in its stride because, far from dispensing with the treasury of the past, there was an assumption that it was still available to be pressed into service, and even added to. (Incidentally, this difference in culture is one reason why some Anglicans, convinced of the truth of the Catholic faith, have nevertheless found it difficult at points to make a transition to the Catholic Church's liturgical life in Britain. This is nothing to do with fondness for elaboration in ceremony, or the complexity of music with choirs and organs, but the rupture in the mediation of a culture of sacred poetic and musical art and its sacral performance. A good pastoral and evangelistic point is that music - through involvement in choirs and organ-playing, as well as other kinds of instrumental ministry - strongly embeds its performers in the life, rhythms and custom of Christian belief and worship. As many vocations to the priesthood and religious life came from singing and accompanying at Church services regularly for years on end, as from serving at the altar. Sadly, there are fewer routes for this spiritual deepening nowadays as once there were. In my view, it is an urgent work, for the renewal and building of the Body of Christ, to have choirs and music-making for children and young people that can inspire and stretch their love of worship and, in turn, of God himself. I know from experience that, while it takes hard and long term work, it is not difficult. But the opportunities are now rare. An English vision like that of Watershed in Corpus Christi, Texas, building on, retrieving, newly creating, and developing a deep and continuous liturgical music tradition, is needed sorely. The Music Makers, led by the excellent Jeremy de Satge in Balham, London, are perhaps the standard bearers for a better approach in England and they deserve keen support.

But the Vatican II Hymnal, having been devised with North American customs and familiar pieces in mind, even with so much good new writing, cannot be transferred as it stands to England. That said, whole portions of it - the settings of the Ordinary of the Mass, the excellently conceived psalm response in Gregorian and modern styles, the Alleluia chants - are a model of what a hymnal resource should be. In conception, it reminds me of the Hymnal Companion to the Book of Prayer and the English Hymnal Service Book from the Anglican tradition. In other words, it is not a supplement of hymns, but a handmaid to the liturgy, with the chants that the liturgy requires and the arrangement of hymns to suit the needs of the rite and its seasons. I would take issue with the adaptation of some of the Gregorian chants to English texts, as more than occasionally the relationship between melody, stress and quantity have escaped the editors. But the efforts are nonetheless very singable and serviceable; and they amply demonstrate that it is not only possible to sing the liturgical texts without having to locate or compose a modern substitute, but that the tradition we ought to be more conscious of having received and standing in can adapt, grow and be no less native in English than it is in Latin.

What impresses me most about the Hymnal is its treatment of the hymns as theological and liturgical texts, not as stand along pieces that can be inserted. First, however, I will say something adverse. The selection suffers from being a gathering of texts that are mostly out of copyright. This means that a huge number are at least over fifty years old. The many classic texts have not always been selected with proper heed to the sources. So, accretions and lesser editorially adapted versions have crept in because of common usage, in preference to retrieving, for the formation of the future tradition according to the principles of establishing a classic Catholic liturgy in the vernacular, the authentic texts or their best developments. It also means (and I recognise that there are copyright and royalty implcations that may have made it prohibitive) that the best of the so-called "hymn explosion" in the last half century, has been missed (in England one immediately thinks of the work of the Anglicans Christopher Idle and Bishop Timothy Dudley-Smith, and there are many more Catholics and Reformed/Methodist writers who justly stand in the classic hymn tradition).

As it is, given the texts of the missal, lectionary and propers, the hymns in the Vatican II Hymnal occupy perhaps just a fifth of the book. But the positive thing to say is that these have been set out with regard not just to the seasons, but also to the place they could occupy - and the purpose they could serve - in the liturgical celebration. For many years, hymnbooks, and the various guides to liturgy and music for it, have proposed helpful lists of suggested hymns and songs - a tradition begun by the English Hymnal of 1906. But unless I am very much mistaken this is the first time we have had a hymnbook (even with so few hymns - just items 203 to 373) that sets out in order its suggestion of which Christmas or Lent hymn should come at the Entrance, Offertory, or Communion, or after the eucharistic action. 170 hymns is not much to work on for an English hymnodist, but the structure and conception is very helpful. Hymns need not replace or overshadow the Proper of the Mass in the Roman rite. But in a contemporary liturgical setting, where we use the vernacular for the engagement and access of the people of the present age, hymns - another aspect of our deep-rooted religious and doxological tradition alongside the historic riches of our tradition - can supplement and amplify it. For instance, as I wrote in Hymns: the Sound of Communion in 2010, this treasury of our religious, social and musical culture, faithful both to the Scriptures and the Tradition of the Church's teaching grounded in them, can provide splendid adornments to the Latin rite liturgy both in English and Latin. For instance, a great hymn in English can precede the Introit and form an act of worship at the conclusion of mass. Certain kinds of English hymn can serve as a Sequence alongside the Gradual and Alleluia (Adeste fideles began in this way, but there are other great hymns that likewise reflect on the scene to be announced in the Gospel). Already, even in some Latin celebrations, an English hymn can stand in for the traditional motet in the place of the Offertory or at Communion. I think particularly of the Solemn Christmas Mass at St George's Cathedral in Southwark, England, where a Latin ordinary of the mass and other chants, has been adorned with the addition of Latin and English hymns for the sake of the people's "active participation", and it works very well. By the same token, there is a wealth of Wesleyan and Anglican hymns that were devised for the celebration of the Eucharist, and not for eucharistic adoration at Benediction, which lend themselves to the rite of Communion in a way in which some English Catholic hymnody does not. All this is pointed to in the Vatican II Hymnal. What is needed in an English milieu, however, is a much more ample treatment of the classic English hymn tradition, along with its development in the last half century and more. This would call for a collection of nearer three hundred strophic, metrical hymns (in association with the provision of the other liturgical music setting the Ordinary and the Propers as in the Hymnal, as well as the online resources), but arranged not in reference to themselves as a collection from the great corpus of hymns, but in terms of how, when, where and how, they can serve the celebration of the Mass and the observance of the Catholic liturgical year. This would be a large ambition, exceeding in scope what the editors of the Vatican II Hymnal set themselves, but it would be a remarkable service to the Church in its present situation and to the development and re-enrichment of our tradition in its English vernacular and pastoral appearance.

Fr Mark Woodruff (RC Diocese of Westminster), Priest-Director of the League
Precentor, St Edmundsbury Cathedral, 1989-91, Organist, St George's Anglican Cathedral, Jerusalem, 1982.

Special Messenger now Online

The 2010 Special Edition of the Messenger, Anglicans & Catholics in Communion: Patrimony, Unity, Mission, is now available for download. Visit the dedicated page from the menu above to download the available papers.

Growing Together in Unity and Mission

Here is the second part of the presentation of slides featuring displays from the Exhibition at the Vatican Museums in 2002 and subsequently in Norwich Cathedral on the shared history of Anglicanism and the Catholic Church, and their common mission in the England of the 21st century.

Growing Together in Unity and Mission

Anglicanism and the Western Christian Tradition

Ten years on from the successful exhibition at the Vatican Museums to mark half a century of warm ecumenical relations between the See of Peter and the Church of England, here is the online presentation of the first part (made possible with a grant from the Catholic League), charting Anglicanism's communion of origins with the Latin Catholic Church of the west and thus their shared commitment to fullness of communion.

Anglicanism and the Western Christian Tradition

Priestly Ordination of our trustee, Fr James Bradley

Fr Mark Woodruff writes:

Three officers of the Catholic League, Fr Mark Woodruff (priest-director), Mary Bacon, and David Chapman (secretary-general) were present for the ordination of our fellow trustee, Fr James Bradley, to the priesthood of the Catholic Church in the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. Also ordained was our friend from the Oxford Ordinariate Group, Fr Daniel Lloyd. As Mgr Keith Newton pointed out, the ordination was historic and more than usually joyful, because these were the first new priests for the Ordinariate who have not previously served as Anglican priests and parish priests. We offer our warmest congratulations and the promise of our prayers for Fr Daniel and Fr James in our Lord's service as his priests.

Over the last year and more, we have offered some reflections on the great services of reception and ordination that have marked such significant moments in the establishment of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, with an eye to aspects of the great Anglican patrimony, as their distinctiveness meets the fullness of communion in the Catholic Church with integrity for both. This is to observe "united, not absorbed" in action, as one foretaste of the unity of Christians in the Universal Church of Christ, which the Catholic Church is bound to realise and manifest, according to the most urgent appeal of Christ to the Father, in his high priestly prayer on the night before he died. So the ordination of every priest is intimately connected not only with Christ's institution of the Eucharist and the offering of his Sacrifice, but also his pleading for the oneness and unbroken communion of his disciples - "that the world may believe it was you who sent me". So we also pray that, from the beginning of their priesthood, consciously bearing their Anglican Christian formation and identity, in fullness of communion with the successor of Peter as witness to the Lord's resurrection, they may live for the fullness of communion of all Christ's followers as ministers of reconciliation.  The Liturgy of Ordination at which this work was set in motion indicated the richness of the "noble simplicity" of the Latin Roman rite of the Catholic Church, but also the way in which it now receives treasures from other Christian traditions, and makes them her own precisly because they already belong as gifts to the Universal Church of Christ which subsists in the same Catholic Church. In a way, the natural home for the Anglican tradition is the Catholic Church, "united, not absorbed", and not in our continued separation.

The Mass was celebrated at the most magnificently restored Church of St Patrick, Soho Square, in London. The Ordinariate currently lacks churches of its own (please pray and give generously towards this, as its future mission will rely on centres of liturgical life and pastoral mission), so various diocesan Catholic cathedrals and church have been generously offered for significant events. The Ordinariate's first Chrism Mass was held at St James's,  Spanish Place, and these ordinations benefited from the astonishing beauty of a once struggling church, that is now a centre for bold Catholic evangelisation in the heart of London. Fr Alexander Sherbrooke deserves gratitude not only for his great hospitality, but also for his faith and vision in transforming an historic church (there is a plaque inside the door marking its foundation in the 18th century, not all that long after penal times, and before both the relief of all civil discriminations against Catholics in Britain and the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England and the foundation of the present diocese of Westminster) from a crumbling inner London building that had lost its old constituency and some of its sense of purpose, only to recover its confidence through the pressing task arising from Pope Benedict's proclamation of a "new evangelisation of old Europe".


Fr Alexander encourages complete silence in the Church outside of services - as a sign reads in a Church in France that I recently visited, "Si vous parlez ici, ou prierez-vous?" Thus, in deep spiritual concentration and anticipation, we began John Mason Neale's unrivalled translation of O Filii et Filiae - and we needed ten verses of Ye sons and daughters of the King to accomplish the entrance procession. The Latin hymn is traced back to Jean Tisserand, a French Franciscan of the Order of Friars Minor, who died in 1494. With its opening triple Alleluia, and its sole Alleluia refrain - and given that the last verse in Latin is a trope on the closing versicle and response in the Divine Office (Benedicamus Domino - Deo Gratias), it was presumably written as a joyous conclusion to Lauds and Vespers of Easter Day, possibly for procession. Thus it later became associated in the parishes of France with Benediction on Easter Day. It remains very popular in France, and this is immortalised in the electrifying 1973 recording of Pierre Cochereau, titulaire at Notre Dame de Paris, with the choirs of the Cathedral, Grandes Heures Liturgiques. Neale's translation (from Medieval Hymns and Sequences, 1851) is the superior of Fr Edward Caswall's (see The Catholic Hymn Book, Gracewing, 1998, no. 86, and you will see what I mean), but sadly, like Caswall's version, it is little known. Indeed, I cannot remember singing it since the late 1980s, when I served with Fr David Skeoch, my vicar at St Gabriel's, Warwick Square, who, I am delighted to remark, was my fellow-concelebrant at this ordination, having been ordained priest for the Catholic Church in the Ordinariate only in June last year. Perhaps the problem for this hymn's popularity is Samuel Webbe's ornate arrangement of the 17th century version of the tune. Mercifully, the robust late-plainsong version that is native to the text was chosen. The plainsong strongly suggests its being sung in triple time (like Corde Natus from the Sarum rite), because the verse-writing accords neither with the rules of classical metrical quantity nor of more modern accent and stress - the lilt keeps the "rude Latin" to a discipline and enables it to be sung. Neale observed the canons of poetic metre and so, even when the congregation faltered at the beginning, by the third verse we were singing lustily and unforgetfully. Perhaps this particular jubilant Latin Catholic hymn, mediated by perhaps the greatest of English scholars in classical hymnography, can restore some Catholic patrimony by way of the receiving of gifts from the Anglican patrimony. It deserves to be far better known and we learned how quickly it can be much loved. One interesting note on the triple Alleluia: an ancient design was that it be sung by a sole cantor, repeated by the choir, followed by the verses (each concluding with a single Alleluia), alternated between the cantor and main body of singers, and interspersed with the triple Alleluia until the last turn is taken by the sole cantor at the solemn zenith, so to speak, of the entire canticle. Judging from the order of service, the intention seems to have been the custom (from North American usage) to open with a triple Alleluia and sing the verses through with just their sole Alleluia and dispensing with a triple refrain. Inspiration seems to have taken hold of us all, for we all sang every word, and each verse was adorned with the exhilarating triple Alleluia.  It was quite unforgettable.

Bishop Alan Hopes, Titular Bishop of Cuncacestre and Auxiliary Bishop of Westminster, presided as Episcopal Delegate to the Ordinariate from the Bishops' Conference. The first reading, Hebrews 5.1-10, was read by the Revd Dr Robin Ward, Daniel's and James' Anglican theological college principal at St Stephen's House, Oxford. Those clergy who have not yet read his On Christian Priesthood, a model of classical Anglican divinity and of the theological methodology beloved of Archbishops William Temple and Michael Ramsey, synthesis (namely integrating different and even sometimes opposing perspectives in exposition of the received truth, in this case Anglican divines, Catholic saints and theologians and Eastern Fathers and teachers), are missing a feast for the mind and spirit alike. Servers were supplied by the young and reinvigorated community at St Patrick's, monks of Farnborough Abbey, and seminarians from Oscott and Wonersh. Deacons likewise came from Wonersh and the ordinariate's permanent deacon, who cannot proceed to priesthood for the moment because he is a serving judge - His Honour the Revd James Patrick. The gospel, read by a deacon from Wonersh, was from John 17, verses 6 and 14-19. The text of Mgr Newton's Homily concludes this post.

The Ordinary of the Mass was the Missa Laetatus sum a 12 by Fr Tomas Luis de Victoria, 1548-1611; the related motet setting of Psalm 121/2 (Laetatus sum - I was glad), also for three SATB choirs, was sung at Holy Communion. These works were published in 1600 in Madrid, in the collection Missae, Magnificat, Motecta, at alia quam Psalmi plurima, Victoria's penultimate collection, during his 17-year appointment as the chaplain to the Dowager Holy Roman Empress Maria of Austria, daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and brother of King Philip II of Spain (king matrimonial of England as husband of the Catholic Mary I), at the Convent of Royal Discalced Clares in Madrid, where he also served as an organist and choirmaster. There is not much "Anglican patrimony" in Victoria's liturgical music, except we can note that, as the most significant composer of the late Renaissance as it was affected by the Counter-Reformation, especially while it was undergoing the influences of spiritual renewal in Spain familiar to us in the Carmelite reform movement and the foundation of the Society of Jesus, he will have been deeply aware of the turmoil in the Church in Europe in the times he lived in. So, just as north European Protestant musicians were influenced by developments in music led by Catholic composers embracing the liturgical and pastoral reforms of the Council of Trent, Catholic musicians, too, were writing in a context deeply conditioned, not only by religious renewal movements within Catholicism, but also by the phenomenon of the Protestant Reformations and the Church's reaction to it. Victoria is seen as belonging to the "Roman School" and thus influenced by Palestrina, under whom he may have studied while cantor at the Jesuits' German College and whom he succeeded as master of music at the Roman Seminary after his wife's death, the first Spanish composer to master Palestrina's style. The Fleming Lassus was a contemporary, as was Guerrero. We have observed elsewhere the influence of this school on Protestant musicians with contacts in Italy (fourth paragraph from the end). It is thus worth bearing in mind that Victoria was born in the year of the first English Order of Holy Communion and died in the year of the publication of King James I's Authorised Version of the Bible. As a Counter-Reformation priest, as well as a musician, he will have been stirred by contemporary strife between Catholics and Protestants - and the need to address it - not least through the engagement of Philip II with England through his wife Queen Mary and through an attempted conflict with her Protestant sister Elizabeth I. Victoria was greatly admired by King Philip, so it is possible that his music was known and and sung in Queen Mary's chapel royal, since Mary was keen in her religious policy not to turn back the clock but to embrace the Catholic reforms and make England the best exemplar of the Tridentine Church's efforts at aggiornamento. Victoria's place in the repertoire of church choirs in England was pioneered by Sir Richard Runciman Terry, first organist and choirmaster of Westminster Cathedral (from 1896).

The Responsorial Psalm was 109/110, with a Gregorian psalm-tone for a response and Sir Henry Smart's double (Anglican) chant in G, often associated with the second section of the Te Deum (Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ), for the verses. It was wonderful to hear this perfectly executed by the superb choir, the Newman Consort from Oxford, and various onetime choristers among the clergy and among the faithful, joining in the harmonies. It was an inspired musical choice from among the best loved parts of Anglican liturgical and cultural heritage.

With respect to the rite of Ordination itself, it is worth pointing out that the Anglican Use of the Latin Roman Rite that is currently in development will not included liturgies for the sacrament of Order. As the Ordinariate is not a sui iuris church with a separate liturgical tradition belonging to a different canonical integrity, it is to use the same rites of ordination as other Latin Catholics. Thus, at the vesting and anointing of priests, on this occasion the (fine but somewhat approximate) translation of Veni Creator Spiritus by Bishop John Cosin (Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire) from the Anglican Ordinal was not used. Instead the hymn was sung in Latin. It was interesting to note that many of the Ordinariate priests know this by heart - given so many ordinations in the last year. The full complement of priests now stands at 60. In itself, this small detail was a profound sign of communion.

The Litany of the Saints included appropriate petitions to additional saints - for example, St Anselm, the great philospher Archbishop of Canterbury whose feast it was; St Patrick, patron of the parish; Saint Frideswide, in recognition of the Oxford Ordinariate group for whom Fr Daniel is serving; Saint Claude de la Colombiere, patron of the Parish Hall and evangelisation centre in which we would later enjoy a reception; Saint Jose-Maria Escriva, founder of Opus Dei, which operates a student house and ministry near the parish of the Holy Ghost in Balham where Fr James is serving.

Sadly, the custom in Westminster diocese and many others, of laying of hands by all the priests present in complete silence after the ordaining Bishop does so, was not followed. The rubrics enjoin silence when the Bishop lays hands, and insists that likewise the priests say nothing. So while the priests laid hands, in place of silence there was an organ improvisation referencing Veni Creator. While this was executed with great discretion and sensitivity, and it is not technically forbidden by the rubrics, nonetheless the usual silence is arguably among the most profound opportunities for the lay people to enter at length and deeply into reflective prayer that exists in our Rite, as they pray for the new priests in the moment of their ordination and as they enter into the liturgical action of the presbyterate in union with the Bishop as one priesthood, through a genuine and utterly absorbing participatio actuosa. Truly this point in the rite is a moment out of time.

The hymn in place of the Offertory was John Mason Neale's translation of an Easter hymn by St John Damascene, Come, ye faithful, raise the strain, on which we reflected last Easter (sixth paragraph).

During the Eucharistic Prayer (the Roman Canon), Bishop Alan Hopes rightly did not commemorate the diocesan Bishop, Archbishop Vincent Nichols, because, even though the Ordination physically took place within a church of the Diocese of Westminster, ecclesiologically and in terms of communion with the Catholic Church and the successor of Peter, it took place within the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. Nonetheless, as an Auxiliary of Westminster within the territory of the diocese, he referred to "Keith the Ordinary", not "our" Ordinary, having referred to his own ministry as principal celebrant in the usual way.

The Lord's Prayer was in Latin, a csutom increasingly taken up once more with great vigour by Catholic congregations. The Communion antiphon, Ego sum pastor bonus, was sung to the setting by Claudio Monteverdi, from the Sanctae Cantiunculae published in Venice in 1582.

Also at Communion was sung Father Edward Caswall's translation of St Thomas Aquinas' Adoro te devote, O Godhead hid, devoutly I adore thee, to the tune Aquinas by Sir Richard Terry. This hymn and its tune are not so familiar to Catholics today as they once were, but the choice was felicitous for two reasons. First, Caswall (1814-1878) had once been an Anglican priest, steeped in the Church of England's Oxford tradition. After his wife died in 1849 he was received into the Catholic Church. Strongly influenced by Newman, he joined the Oratory of St Philip Neri in 1850. This hymn was included in his 1849 collection, Lyra Catholica, containing all the breviary and missal hymns. It was his wife Louisa who mostly translated The Altar Manual, a translation of a popular French devotional book,  that Caswall issued at the same time as the Lyra. The title Lyra Catholica is a clear reference to the Lyra Davidica of 1708, a collection of English hymns, including translations from German Protestant sources (the best known today being Christ the Lord is risen today - famous for its tune, Easter Hymn - and How brightly beams the morning star), and perhaps more particularly the Lyra Apostolica, a collection of hymns by Tractarian writers edited by Newman in 1836. Texts we recognise from this collection today include Hail, gladdening light, and Newman's Lead, kindly light. Keble's Blest are the pure in heart comes from his Lyra Innocentium of 1846. Secondly, the choice of hymn signals that Anglican patrimony, in this case the judicious use of the English hymn tradition in the mass of the Roman rite, is not static or locked in Anglican custom from the past, but is able to grow and develop through its contact with another religious tradition (itself influenced by Anglican hymnody in its earlier stages). In this particular case, the Ordinariate is not only embracing a favourite old Catholic hymn, it is somewhat restoring it within a community that risks losing the use of it. Reading the words, one can see how influential Caswall's translation was on the version by Gerard Manley Hopkins; another reason to sustain its use within the Church's living Tradition.

The Mass was concluded with Regina Caeli, set by Gregor Aichinger (1565-1628), organist to the great Fugger family in the mixed Catholic-Protestant imperial city of Augsburg in Bavaria. Jakob Fugger sponsored his trip to Rome and Italy for music studies for two years from 1599. Musically he was influenced by Giovanni Gabrielli, but religiously he was so inspired by the Catholic reform movement of the Counter-Reformation that he became a Catholic himself, was ordained priest and became, on his return to Augsburg as a vicar choral at the Cathedral, one of the principal exponents in Germany of the principles of the Counter-Reformation - itself an outreach to meet the concerns that had driven many to the extreme of rupture of communion within the Church - as they were implemented through the music of the liturgy. This little piece (no mere choral work, since it constantly refers the listening worshipper back to the joyful salutation of the Virgin Mary on account of the Resurrection of her Son - Regina Caeli, laetare) dates from after the period of deep change in Aichinger's passions, faith and outlook; and it is a sign of the need at once for reform and renewal, and of the Church's deep instinct and need for the fulness of communion. Apparently, it is a great favourite with the choir at St Stephen's House, where Frs Daniel and James trained; and it is in so many ways the aptest of choices with which to end this magnificent and inspiring Liturgy.

At the end, hundreds of the faithful lined up to receive the first blessings of the new priests. I am very glad to report that Father Daniel Lloyd did so in a full English surplice. Vivat traditio Anglicana, patrimonium Catholicum vere.



Mgr Keith Newton's homily, preached at the ordination to the Sacred Priesthood of Fr James Bradley and Fr Daniel Lloyd on Saturday 21 April 2012:

As you send me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be consecrated in truth. John 17:19

The popularity of David Attenborough programmes such as Frozen Planet, Life of Mammals, and so on, shows the continuing fascination many people have with the natural world. We inhabit this planet with many other creatures but, in a large measure, its future is in our hands whether we believe in global warming or not. That God is the creator of the world and all that is in it is a basic doctrine of the Faith. It was for this world that our Blessed Lord lived and died, as Saint John reminds us in one of the most well-known verses of the Gospels:

‘God so loved the world that gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life’ John 3:16

Did you notice, then, that the word ‘world’ occurred nine times in today’s Gospel reading? In it, Jesus tells his disciples that they do not belong to the world. They are in it but not of it. This is because they have been chosen by Christ, and the world will hate them as it hated him. There are really difficult words, and certainly Jesus did not leave his followers under any illusions about the consequences of following him, and in those early years his followers experienced what it meant to be persecuted.

But how are we to understand this passage? What does it mean for us not to belong to the world, when at so many levels we obviously do belong to the world? We eat and drink and breathe, fall in love and marry, buy and sell houses and take part in politics. Such passages have led some Christians to shun the world and to see Christianity only involved with the things of the Spirit. But other parts of scripture lead us to believe that creation is good and the material world has been sanctified by the incarnation of Jesus, who took flesh for our sake.

In Saint John’s Gospel, the world ‘world’ often seems to suggest not only the created order, but also a human society which has no place for God. Inevitably there is bound to be a clash between those for whom God is the all-embracing and abiding reality for whom the demands of God control the way we live, and those for whom such talk is meaningless or irrelevant. But even within the Christian world there is significant difference between those who believe that God has acted and revealed himself in Jesus and that revelation challenges us about the way we conduct our lives, and those for whom religion seems little more than a way of expressing our deepest human aspirations. Between those who think faith is a gift to be received, however challenging for us, and those who think we should always be acceptable to the world as a way of gaining followers.

It seems to me that Pope Benedict’s teaching often focuses on this; the need to stand up for the values of the Gospel in a secular world. We are, as Catholics, counter-cultural; we will often find ourselves against the world as far as the prevailing culture is concerned - which in the ‘post-Christian world’ does little more than pay lip-service to the Faith. We are beginning to learn this as never before, when a government tells us it values the Christian Faith, and yet is planning to bring forward legislation on marriage which will undermine some of its basic truths.

James and Daniel: it is in this world that you are called to minister and will have to live out your priestly calling. It is an office of great dignity, but of great challenges. Indeed, for the most part, the world does not understand what a Priest is. It will often be an heroic struggle, as there must be an element of sacrifice in your life, where your priestly ministry must be put before your own personal needs. For this you will need to put your life close to Christ. Indeed, in a few moments you will be encouraged to ‘model your lives on the mystery of the Lord’s cross’.

Of course, the words of that opening text apply to all Christian disciples, but they apply in a particular way to those who have been chosen to share in Christ’s Priesthood through ordination.

As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be consecrated in truth.

Jesus was aware that he had been sent by the Father, and he now send you out with the same mission, to preach the Gospel and administer the sacraments in a secular and sometimes hostile world. In the second volume of his book Jesus of Nazareth, our Holy Father Pope Benedict considers this passage and points out that consecration and mission are intrinsically linked. Sanctity or holiness belongs only to God, so to be consecrated means to be set apart for God, but also for his mission to the world. “Consecration”, he says, “means that God is exercising a total claim over this man, ‘setting him apart’ for himself, yet at the same time sending him out for the nations”. There is your commission.

No doubt you will both be feeling ill-equipped and unworthy of this great calling: and so you should, as none of us can be Priests because of our own goodness or in our own strength. A few years ago my attention was drawn to a poem by George Herbert, a seventeenth century Anglican Divine, which I hope is part of that Anglican Patrimony we bring to the Catholic Church. The poem is called Aaron, and in it he begins by describing the lovely robes of Aaron the priest, and goes on to lament the defects of his own life by comparison, and says ‘poor priest thus am I drest’.

In the following verse he gives the solution. The priest is not a priest in his own right, but acting as a representative of someone else. It is that persons character and goodness he ‘wears’ as if it were a garment. In him, he says, he is ‘well drest’.

Then he reveals that the person is Christ himself who is described in the Epistle to the Hebrews as ‘our great high priest’.

Christ is my only head,
My alone only heart and breast,
My only music, striking me ev’n dead;
That to the old Man I may rest
And be in him new drest.

James and Daniel: I hope you have prepared for this day with awe and trepidation. It is a great calling, but one all priests know they can never live up to - you will live with that knowledge all your life. But you need also to have confidence that, through his grace and the power of the Holy Spirit, you will be set apart to stand in his place as you present his sacrifice in the Mass, and in him you will be ‘well drest’.

What do we pray for when we pray for Christian unity?

Fr Mark Woodruff writes:

After the November 2011 Council Meeting of Churches Together in South London, we discussed the different visions of unity we have in mind when we pray for it - do we mean the same thing when we pray for unity, do we unconsciously want our vision to be the one that prevails while others come round to us, or do we want to go beyond where each of us is at the moment and, as Pope Benendict once wrote in 1992 as Cardinal Ratzinger, "enter more deeply into the mystery of the Church where we are and find that it is none other than one"?

Here follows the thoughtful presentation from the Bishop of Southwark of the Anglicans, the Rt Revd Christopher Chessun:

On my first visit to Africa in the summer of 1981, while training for the priesthood at Westcott House, part of the Cambridge Federation of Theological Colleges, there was a moment of revelation for me about the journey towards Christian Unity.  The legendary Fr Robin Lamburn (who had been sent out as a young missionary priest by UMCA in the 1930s) came to meet me in Dar-es-Salaam and we journeyed together by bus to the River Rufiji in Masasi Diocese.  We boarded canoes, with a decoy sent on ahead of us to divert and distract the Hippos, crossing a vast expanse of water to reach the village settlement of Kindwitwi where in retirement Fr Lamburn cared for a community of Muslim men and women living with Leprosy, administering medical supplies, having agreed not to proselytise them in any way.  Nevertheless his very evident prayerful and faithful love of the Lord won souls for Christ. 

On my first Sunday we walked several miles to the nearby town of Utete where Fr Lamburn regularly celebrated the Eucharist.  At one point I asked a little naively about sacramental ministry for other denominations.  The old missionary priest with a rather reproachful and exasperated tone in his voice said: ‘don’t you realise, we cannot afford the luxury of division here’.  Those words have reverberated through nearly 30 years of ordained ministry and continue to challenge me in very different ecumenical territory and contexts.  I often reflect whether the search for unity would be advanced for us if our mindset enabled us also to recognise the truth of those prophetic words: ‘we cannot afford the luxury of division here’.

At that stage of my journey of faith I had a strong sense that I would live to see structural reunion among the ecclesial communities of the Western Church – Roman Catholic, Anglican and Protestant.  Our Gospel reading for the Third Sunday before Advent was the Parable of the Ten Bridesmaids from Matthew 25 (vv 1-13), five foolish and five wise having prepared themselves for a long wait with enough oil for their lamps to greet the bridegroom when he came.  When reflecting over the weekend on this passage, for the first time I made a connection between those disciples of the early centuries having to wait longer than they had anticipated for the coming again of the Lord in Glory and our waiting, also longer than expected, for Christ’s will that we should be one to be fulfilled.  Thirty years on from my walk with Fr Robin Lamburn I realise that I continue to pray with strong hope that this will indeed come to pass but also acknowledge with what I trust is a good dose of realism and a deepened understanding about the journey to unity, which I now realise is likely to continue beyond my life time. 

Two years ago John Richardson, whom we are very blessed to have as the Ecumenical Officer serving Churches Together in South London, asked Bishop Paul Hendricks to give a paper on Receptive Ecumenism followed by one from me on Spiritual Ecumenism.  Two years on I continue, in terms of prayer and commitment, to be aided and helped by the thinking behind spiritual ecumenism, which makes ours the prayer of Christ on the eve of his Passion, that ‘they all may be one’. ‘As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe you have sent me’ (John 17, 21). During a visit to participate in a summer course at the Anglican Centre in Rome in 2009, I came to appreciate more deeply insights into Spiritual Ecumenism and realised that it lies at the heart of understandings of the ecumenical journey from the perspective of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and its then President, Cardinal Walter Kasper, a devoted servant of recent fruitful ecumenical dialogues between the Churches.  It lies at the heart of recent Papal teaching on ecumenism and indeed of efforts to unite divided Christians. 

Canon David Richardson, the current Director of the Anglican Centre in Rome, directs us to consider the early days of the ecumenical movement:  “It is winter now for our ideas; probably we shall not see the new spring.”  A familiar phrase?  Perhaps so, yet it dates not from the present scene at all but rather from 1912 and was written by the R.C. Abbé Fernand Portal in a letter to his friend Viscount Halifax.  The years since he penned those words have seen an unprecedented, unpredictable and unimaginable series of ecumenical springs and summers.  “No doubt there are innumerable difficulties in the way, but with God everything is possible.  Have a little imagination, a little faith.  We must be daring if we expect great results.”  So wrote Halifax in the same series of letters.  Halifax also saw that ecumenism needs conversations and meetings – “For all this we must get to know each other” he wrote, “people are led much more by their hearts than their heads.”

“Getting to know each other” and being led by the heart draw us to look beyond where we are at the moment; they form part of what is an accompanied journey and characterise all fruitful ecumenical interactions. Indeed, they are part of the pilgrimage towards unity in which we are fellow travellers and companions. It is a journey of hope and promise, already bearing fruit.  This is evident in a number of ways. I give just a few examples:

• Words spoken by Cardinal Basil Hume at Wesley’s Chapel in the early 1990s during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity: ‘Our journey towards unity must be accompanied by friendship and supported by prayer’
• Cardinal Kasper at the end of his time as President of the Pontifical Commission for Promoting Christian Unity in publishing ‘Harvesting the Fruits’ which looks back on 40 years of ecumenical dialogues between the Churches and challenges us implicitly not to forget all that has been achieved, not to lose heart, but to persevere.
• The warm embrace between the Archbishop of Canterbury and Pope Benedict XVI in Westminster Abbey during the Papal Visit to the United Kingdom a year ago, reminding us that signs and symbols are often able to speak louder than words.
• For the Church of England, the Porvoo Agreement of 1992 with the Nordic and Baltic Lutheran Churches (The Lutheran Church of Denmark the latest to join), which has established communion and mutual recognition of orders with these churches, thus helping to overcome some of the divisions in the Western Church brought about by the Reformation.  In the Diocese of Southwark we are especially thankful for the blessings of the Porvoo Agreement with the great blessing  of three Porvoo Churches – Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish – in Rotherhithe.
• For the Church of England, claiming to be ‘part of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church’, living with the tensions and opportunities of an inheritance and identity which is both Catholic and Reformed, itself seemingly at times its own ecumenical movement!
• Our capacity to unite in common purpose when we are Christ centred and outward focused on the needs of others, something very evident for example in the Robes Project which brings together local churches across the denominations in the Boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark to reach out with Christ’s love in engagement with homeless people during the winter months.
• The work of Street Pastors extending a ministry of care at night to people on the streets of each of our South London Boroughs, again an expression of ecumenical common purpose serving the common good in Christ like ways.
• The inspiration and encouragement we find when brothers and sisters in Christ dwell together in unity, something which I experience annually when accompanying groups of young people to the Ecumenical Community at Taize.

Each of you will have your own additions to these, for which I give special thanks, not least in focusing my own prayers and journey on the hope and promise of Christian unity. ‘As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe you have sent me’.    (John 17, 21)

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity: 25 January Overall Intention

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

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.

See also: Westminster Diocese Interfaith & Interreligious Dialogue
The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity
Paul Couturier, Apostle of Unity

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity: 23 January Intention

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.

See also: Holocaust Memorial Day, 27 January
The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity
Paul Couturier, Apostle of Unity

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity: 22 January Intention

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

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

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

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

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.

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