Marylebone Ordinariate Group: Spread the Word

Tuesday, 3 January 2012

Spread the Word

A Happy New Year to all of our readers.

January is often a slow month, painfully so. However, the first January of the Marylebone Ordinariate Group's existence is far from slow. Preparations for the Solemn Evensong and Benediction being held at St James's to mark the first "birthday" of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham are well underway, and as you might expect the workload will increase day by day until we finally reach the fifteenth. Music, clergy, serving, wine/food, orders of service, publicity etc. The largest challenge of course is estimating numbers, much of the rest flows from that.

The enthusiasm of Fr Christopher Pearson and the extraordinarily helpful welcome, patience and accommodativeness of Fr Christopher Colven make life much easier in putting things together. To both of them we say thank you.

We have been very pleased to read of the plans being made by other Ordinariate groups around the country to join this great celebration. Fr Edwin Barnes's excellent blog Ancient Richborough (to which we provide a permanent link on the right hand sidebar of this blog) has talked of people planning to travel to London from Bournemouth and Salisbury. Fr Ed Tomlinson's Tunbridge Wells Ordinariate Group blog (to which we also provide a permanent link) mentions that he hopes that a group will travel in from Kent.

No-one can be sure of course until we see the numbers in church on the day, but the impression we have, from emails received and internet postings spotted, is that Ordinariate members seems to be very keen on there being an opportunity to get together to celebrate one year of the Ordinariate. For many, there will of course be the extraordinarily happy memory of a visit to Westminster Cathedral on 15 January 2011, where we witnessed the ordination as Catholic priests of our three Monsignori, and were gather together in large numbers at the birth of something really quite extraordinary. The atmosphere of hope, joy, welcome and indeed thanksgiving that day was astonishing.

One part of that will be the music. There will be a selection of very rousing and mostly very well known treasures of Anglican cathedral evensong repertoire. No doubt the ever-impressive St James's Spanish Place choir will turn in a excellent performance. What a joy it will be to hear this music in our new Catholic setting.

You can see what music has been chosen on the Facebook Event page for our celebrations. You do not have to be signed up to Facebook to view this, but if you are and if you intend to come along, please do sign up to attend, and from there you will have the option to invite your own Facebook friends. This is a fantastically easy and efficient way to spread the word about the 15th, so please do invite people you know through the Facebook system: if they have already been invited by someone else, Facebook will stop you inviting them a second time, so there is no need to worry about deluging your friends.

Indeed, more generally, do please tell all your friends about this event, and if you run a blog of your own, please do mention it there too. This could be a great occasion, when we will have the chance to come together and express our joy at where the last year has brought us, and along with Catholics and Anglicans present, give thanks for this wonderful gift of the Holy Father to the cause of Christian Unity.

You may wish to display a poster on your church noticeboard. If so, you can find the very attractive poster designed by Deacon Daniel Lloyd of the Oxford Ordinariate Group below. Decent A4 prints will result even from saving and printing this image.

Finally, you might find the article in this link interesting. There, William Oddie talks about how some of the linguistic treasures of the Book of Common Prayer are being brought into the Catholic Church through the Ordinariate, particularly the newly Catholic service of Evensong and Benediction. His article talks of earlier evensongs run by the Oxford Ordinariate Group, following Monsignor Burnham's pioneering work in sorting out a form of evensong approved for use in the Ordinariate.

Don't forget : tell all your friends about the 15th.

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Blessed John Henry Newman on the hope for Reunion

… I gather up and bear in memory those familiar affectionate companions and counsellors, who in Oxford were given to me, one after another, to be my daily solace and relief; and all those others, of great name and high example, who were my thorough friends, and showed me true attachment in times long past….

And I earnestly pray for this whole company, with a hope against hope, that all of us, who once were so united, and so happy in our union, may even now be brought at length, by the Power of the Divine Will, into One Fold and under One Shepherd.

Apologia pro Vita Sua

Blessed John Henry Newman's Prayer for Unity

O Lord Jesus Christ, who when Thou wast about to suffer didst pray for Thy disciples to the end of time that they might all be one, as Thou art in the Father and the Father in Thee, look down in pity on the manifold divisions among those who profess Thy faith and heal the many wounds which the pride of man and the craft of Satan have inflicted on Thy people.

Break down the walls of separation which divide one party and denomination of Christians from another. Look with compassion on the souls who have been born in one or other of these communions, which not Thou, but man, hath made.

Set free the prisoners from these unauthorised forms of worship, and bring them all to the one communion which Thou didst set up at the beginning – the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.

Teach all men that the See of Peter, the Holy Church of Rome, is the foundation, centre, and instrument of Unity. Open their hearts to the long forgotten truth that the Holy Father, the Pope, is Thy Vicar and representative; and that in obeying him in matters of religion they are obeying Thee, so that as there is but one company in heaven above, so likewise there may be one communion, confessing and glorifying Thy holy Name, here below. Amen

Fr Ignatius Harrison, the former Provost of the London Oratory, on Unity

Another of the Holy Father’s outstanding achievements is his inspiring work for Christian Unity in setting-up the Ordinariates for former Anglicans. What a brilliant way of cutting through the plethora of mealy-mouthed verbiage and foggy thinking that has characterized so much ecumenical activity in recent decades, verbiage and fogginess which may indeed have had the very best of intentions, but which nevertheless achieved so little in real terms.

Let us also pray with all our heart and mind and strength that our vitally important ecumenical journey with our Greek and Russian Orthodox brethren will continue apace, that our charitable and respectful dialogue with them will bear much fruit, so that the universal Church might once again breathe with two whole lungs, and so that soon there may be but one flock and one shepherd. Domine, ut sit!

Tuesday, 3 January 2012

Spread the Word

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