Ordinariate Pilgrim

‘ “God has not appointed us unto wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, that whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with Him.” Let us seek the grace if a cheerful heart, an even temper, sweetness, gentleness, and brightness of mind, as walking in His light, and by His grace. Let us pray him to give us the spirit of ever-abundant, ever-springing love which overpowers and sweeps away the vexations of life by its own richness and strength, and which above all things unites us to Him who is the fountain and the centre of all mercy, loving kindness, and joy. ‘

The warmth, affection for people, and sheer confidence in the loving power of God to change human hearts, shine forth in this quotation from our Patron, Blessed John Henry Newman. A truly lovely man.

An invitation from my family to join them for the day took me down last Saturday to Portsmouth. St Agatha’s Church were celebrating their Patronal Festival, and I was interested to see how the Ordinariate Use might be presented. St Agatha’s, Landport, is part of that now fading Anglo-Catholic history on which many of my generation were brought up and inspired. Father Robert Dolling had the church built in the dock slums of Portsmouth, but eventually resigned over a dispute with his Bishop concerning prayer for the dead. Indeed, the Abbot of Farnbrough who was the preacher, referred to this in a thoughtful sermon. He pointed out to us that this and other controversies within the Church of England are only now seen to be resolved when Anglicans return to fullness of Communion with the Bishop of Rome. The priest and congregation at St Agatha’s have done this via a time as a ‘Continuing Church’ i.e. those Anglicans who left the Anglican Communion in protest at the growing liberal stance of parts of the Communion, notably America.

The church building itself was closed after the Second World War, as the parish it served had been largely destroyed in the bombing of Portsmouth. Converted into a naval store, it was more recently recognised for the architectural gem that it is. A trust was set up to restore it, and the Ordinariate congregation meets there for Sunday and weekdays Masses. I last saw the building some twenty five years ago, and the restoration has been impressive. The interior is dark and austere, a brick basilica with a wide and open sanctuary. The murals around the apse by Heywood Sumner are particularly fine, and are very visible without the baldachino (which must have been very splendid).

The use of the Ordinariate form in St Agatha’s has been described as ‘the Extraordinary form in English’. My interest then, was to see how this was worked out, in contrast to our own practise at Most Precious Blood, Borough, where the Ordinariate Use (Thursday evening’s) is based on the Ordinary form of the Roman Mass. The Mass was celebrated by three priests – a celebrant, deacon and subdeacon, and there were two laymen who also wore dalmatics (but not stoles or maniples) one of whom carried the processional cross and the other sat with the Abbot.

Like the Procession at the beginning of the Mass this owed rather more to English mediaeval ceremonial than to the Roman Rite. Nonetheless, the High Altar with its numerous candlesticks, the lace albs and birettas, and the heavily embroidered vestments gave the feel of 19th century Anglo-Catholicism, rather than 18th century Belgium or France. The Mass Rite was the Ordinariate Use, with the ministers and servers saying the Preparatory Prayers before the altar while the choir sang. The Mass setting was Mozart’s Credo Mass (with orchestra) and all the movements including the Creed were sung by the choir. After the Blessing the Last Gospel was read by the Celebrant, followed by the Angelus, Salve Regina and Prayer for the Conversion of England. The First Reading (or Epistle) was sung facing the people, and a procession for the Gospel went into the nave (not facing north as in the EF). The Mass was long (five minutes short of two hours) even though some time was saved by the Celebrant beginning the Eucharistic Prayer (Roman Canon) while the Sanctus was being sung. One notable departure from the Extraordinary Form was the recital of the Institution Narrative in a clear voice for all to hear.

I present this description of the Ordinariate Use celebrated in this particular way for comparison: you might like to read my earlier post of our practice at Most Precious Blood.

It puzzles me that so few of our modern fictional heroes have any religious faith. My good read over Christmas is likely to be P D James,  (creator of Adam Dalgleish,) or Ruth Rendell (Chief Inspector Wexford) or more likely Donna Leon with her Commissario Brunetti set in Venice. (I picked up two I hadn’t read in a charity shop last week).  All of them have an, at times, very intense nostalgia for a past world which has slipped away from them, a world which was kinder, more courteous and more ordered. Yet their attitude to religion is the unquestioning modern stereotype: that it is something we can longer believe in, that it was and is irrelevant at best and corrupt at worst.

Here is Brunetti’s wife Paola, talking of her relationship with her students at the university where she teaches English literature. Like her husband she has long since rejected the Catholic faith in which she was brought up.

‘Why is it so bad all of a sudden?’ Brunetti asked.

‘It’s not really all of a sudden. It’s more that I’ve become aware of how bad it’s become.’

‘Give me an example,’ he said.

‘Ten years ago, I could force them (her students) into accepting the fact, or at least giving lip service to the idea, that the culture that formed me, and those books and ideas that our generation grew up on – Plato, Virgil, Dante – that it was superior in some way to whatever fills their lives. Or, if not superior, then at least interesting enough to be worthy of study…. but that doesn’t happen any more. They think, or ay least they seem to think, that their culture with its noise and acquisitiveness and immediate forgettability is superior to all of our stupid ideas.

‘Like?’

‘Like our no doubt ridiculous idea that beauty conforms to some standard or ideal; like our risible belief that we have the option to behave honourably and should take it; and like our idiotic idea that the final purpose of human existence is something more than the acquisition of wealth.’

Donna Leon –  Wilful Behaviour – p.68  (Arrow Books 2003)

 

This past week I have been on retreat at the Convent of the Sisters of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Maryvale on the edge of Birmingham. I hope that many other priests and laity will go there, now that the Sisters are more settled, and find as I did, a place of prayer, warm Benedictine hospitality, and profound quiet.

I went with a priest friend of many years standing; we agreed our pattern of silence, walking and recreation, and both took to read Evangelical Catholicism by the American writer, George Weigel.

Many of you will know that our Ordinariate Sisters came from the Anglican community at Wantage, founded in 1848 by W J Butler, Rector of Wantage. The Community was part of that rebirth of Catholic life and spirituality which we call the Oxford Movement. It is not surprising that, with the marginalisation of the Movement within the C of E in recent years, the majority of the Community (including Reverend Mother) decided to enter into the full communion of the Catholic Church. Twelve Sisters were received, and constituted by the Ordinary, Mgr Newton, into the Community of the Sisters of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  On leaving Wantage they found a temporary home at St Cecilia’s Abbey on the Isle of Wight, and then came to their present home at Maryvale in Birmingham.

Outwardly the new Convent is very different from Wantage. It looks like a Junior School from the 1970’s as you approach it. It is plain, functional, warm but not overheated, comfortable but not luxurious. It has no Gothic cloisters, no turrets or pointy windows. The chapel is extremely simple, with a small choir for the sisters behind the plain altar. It is not romantic, nor even very beautiful, yet it is one of the most profoundly quiet and prayerful places I have ever been. It is hard to believe that the Community has only been
there a matter of months.

The Wantage Sisters had a significant reputation for their work in researching, printing and singing plainchant to English texts, using the forms and melodies from the pre-Reformation Church in England. This has much in common with the chant known by Catholics throughout the world, but with fascinating variants and differences. The Sisters at Maryvale are working hard to rebuild this tradition, with great success. The four day offices are entirely sung (in English with the Gospel Canticles and their antiphons in Latin) and they plan to introduce the Vigil Office (best known to most of us as the Office of Readings) very soon.

We received a wonderful welcome from the sisters, and had the great privilege of celebrating and concelebrating at their daily Mass. Everything had been thought of, the food was plentiful, and there was discrete help at first in finding our way around the office books. Just to sit and absorb psalm, canticle and scripture as the Community prayed them, was worth coming to Birmingham for.  I think we in the Ordinariate should be deeply grateful to Mother Winsome and the Sisters for their brave faithfulness to Pope Benedict XVI’s call to Anglicans to re-union within the worldwide Church. It has not been an easy journey for them, and they want to be of service to us.

So two very grateful priests of the Ordinariate commend the Community to your attention and to your prayers. Above all, go their on retreat and find it, as we did, a place of blessing.

 

 

 

The newspapers have just loved Dr George Carey’s recent intervention over the future of the Church of England. But of note is the article by A N Wilson in the Daily Telegraph, occasioned by the Carey sermon.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/10460230/Lord-Careys-vision-for-the-Church-might-kill-it-off.html. I suggest that it is well worth reading for a realistic assessment of where Christianity – not just the Church of England – is in Britain. Wilson argues that  two attitudes are now so deeply entrenched in the majority consciousness that they are hardly questioned. The first is the acceptance of sexual relations at whatever point in a relationship two people want it. This is so far from the Church’s teaching that the sexual relationship belongs only within the married life of a man and woman, as to make the moral position of Christians incomprehensible to the modern mind.

There is a second attitude and Wilson considers it fundamental to the Church’s difficulty in engaging with this generation. This is the widespread inability to believe in the supernatural.  In a poem once widely read in schools and at Carol Services, the late poet laureate, John Betjeman, summed up Christmas:

    ….   that God was Man in Palestine/and lives today in Bread and Wine …

Incarnation – Eucharist – incomprehensible without belief in the power of miracle – and therefore incomprehensible, and largely irrelevant, to the secularised society of western Europe.

There is a certain wistfulness, even sadness, towards the end of Wilson’s article. Indeed, he compares the loss of religious faith with its habits of prayer to the enjoyment of classical music which, we are told, is catastrophically on the wane in Britain. This is no trivial comparison, for the music of centuries of great composers and performers is an integral part of the civilisation of Europe and the movement of its people from darkness to light. To lose such music from the common experience would be to return to the Dark Ages. And the demise of Christian belief, morality and practice, would that also be a return to the darkness?

Like Wilson, I too am 63. The loss of the religious experience of life, like the loss of classical music to ordinary people, has largely happened in my lifetime. How have we allowed such a disaster to befall our age and time? I take this question to be one for society, and not just for the Church.

Some years ago my connections with the 59 Club led me to ask what happened to the highly successful church-led youth clubs of the fifties and sixties. I came to the conclusion, as I wrote then that   “the young people of this country were not so much lost to the Church as stolen from her, and that by the forces of an aggressive commercialisation of music, fashion, and interests.”  It was vital, in order to relieve impressionable adolescents of their money, that they should be separated from the wisdom and influence of older people. Institutions – schools, the Church, parents and family, politicians, the police – which might advise caution or a longer term view were lampooned and ridiculed in the creation of a ‘generation gap’ which was now under the control of the exploiters.

The painful results of fifty years of such exploitation is now becoming clear: the breakdown of the family and  loneliness in later life which stems from  divorce, the loss of the fun and innocence of childhood, the banality and ugliness of so much supposedly ‘popular’ music, drunkenness and drug taking, and the evil of abortion. There is widespread cynicism about politics and the people who engage in it, and little vision for the future.  A world of celebrities is paraded before us, grossly overpaid, loud-mouthed and protected from criticism by the deference of the media. Their opinions are sought and their life-style imitated. And behind them, pulling their strings – the money makers.  We believe ourselves to be free, and yet we are continually manipulated. We hear constant calls for openness and transparency, and yet those who would call us to a better way of life and to a fuller way of living are ignored and silenced.

A N Wilson is right to be sad for a lost way of life. The recovery of a better way , of something lovelier and truer, will be very difficult.  Just as it is unthinkable that the music of the ages should be lost to the trivial racket pumped out over the loudspeakers in our supermarkets, so it must be unthinkable that the wisdom of two thousands years of Christianity should be given up without a (spiritual) fight.

An American writer, Francis Kelly, comments  “We have undergone a major cultural shift in this (past) century, and it has left a profound impact on society and therefore on the Church. It is pastorally crucial to acknowledge and to accept this changed … context … and to see it as a pastoral challenge…. The new sociocultural situation needs to be faced with tranquillity and with a spirit of discernment. As in the past, it is filled with positive and negative factors, opportunities and perils.”             F D Kelly – The Mystery we proclaim – p.31

Northern France, which I have come to know well over the years, is dotted with the cemeteries of the First World War.  The great memorial  at Thiepval to the dead of the Somme battles, rises atop the ridge – sixteen great square pillars supporting its arch.  These huge pillars are constructed of fine brick and Portland stone. As you approach it dawns on you that the stone has names carved into it, column upon column, line upon line…. Well over 70,000 names, and these of  soldiers who fought in the battles of the Somme, but who have no known grave. Their bodies were never recovered, having been blown to pieces or lost in the mud.

At the heart and centre of this memorial is a stone in the shape of a great altar, a poignant symbol of the offering of life. And beyond the arch is the cross, so familiar to us from the many war memorials up and down our own country. The altar and the cross, stand in quiet witness to the dead, and point us to the sacrifice of Christ, to the offering of his life so that we might have eternal life.

Looking back now from the 21^st century the endless slaughter of not one, but two, world wars is heart-breaking.  In addition to the death of soldiers in the Second World War, the murder of civilians – most particularly the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust – is a terrible blot on our civilisation. We must never forget what we human beings have done to each other, lest in forgetting we are doomed to repeat the horrors of war.

In ‘The Church in the Modern World’ the bishops of the Second Vatican Council said this:

 ‘Peace is not merely the absence of war. Nor can it be reduced solely to the maintenance of a balance of power between opposing forces. Nor can it arise out of government by tyranny. Instead peace is rightly described as ‘the effect of justice’.  A peace of this kind cannot be obtained on earth unless the welfare of individual persons is carefully protected and unless men are prepared freely and trustingly to share with each other the riches of their own minds as well as their talents. A firm determination to respect the dignity of other men and other peoples, as well as a deliberate practise of fraternal love, is absolutely essential if peace is ever to be achieved. Hence peace is also the fruit of love, because love goes beyond what justice can provide.  ‘Church in the Modern World. ‘

And here are the words of some school children, which they wrote on the four petals of the Remembrance Poppy.

Understanding: I think we can make peace. If we understand one another we will care about each other, so our world would be more peaceful.

Fairness     Treating others how we wish to be treated ourselves by being fair: this would lead to peace.

Love   By loving one another and God’s creation our world would be peaceful and loving

Forgiveness   To forgive and not hold grudges is very important, especially to make our world peaceful.

Both the majestic words of the Bishops, and the simple words of the children, hold true for us and for our world today.