Eternal Definitions, Reasonable Changes?

For most of our group, the first anniversary of being received into the full communion of the Catholic Church approaches.  Fr Colven included some very kind words on this subject in this week's parish notes at St James's, and went on to offer a little publicity for an event we hope you will all either attend or include in your prayers.

Sunday 2nd September will mark the first anniversary of the reception into full communion of the local group of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. We will pray for them especially during the 10.30am Mass and would want them to know how their presence within the parish community is valued. The secondary patron of the Ordinariate is Blessed John Henry Newman and to celebrate his feast day there will be Solemn Evensong & Benediction here in Saint James’s on Sunday 7th October at 5.30pm. The preacher will be Father Paul Chavasse of the Birmingham Oratory who has long been associated with the cause for Blessed John Henry’s canonisation.

The poster below should help inspire you to clear a space in your diary, and a Facebook Event has been set up in order to help spread the word.  If you are on Facebook, do please "share" the Event.

Longstanding readers of this blog will remember a fondness on our part for hymns sung by the late Frank Patterson (see here for Hail Redeemer, King Divine and here for Bring Flowers of the Rarest).  News of this upcoming Evensong gives us an excuse to share with you this powerful and rather moving performance of Blessed John Henry Newman's Lead, Kindly Light.



A couple of weeks before this special event, there is the no less significant milestone of the Ordinariate's pilgrimage to Walsingham, taking place on Saturday 15 September.   Another Facebook Event has been created for what promises to be an excellent day in England's Nazareth.

Apart from making kind mention of Ordinariate members in the parish notes last Sunday, Fr Colven took the opportunity of the Gospel readings appointed for the day to make an interesting comparison in his homily, one that can indeed be broadened out even further in order to apply to the context that gave rise to the Ordinariate. 

The Gospel reading had told of how some had found the teachings of Jesus too much, too difficult, too demanding. 

This is intolerable language. How could anyone accept it?

Many left Jesus, but the twelve disciples remained faithful.   Our Lord did not respond to this by altering His message to make it more popular: His message was, and still is, His message.   

Certainly it must be presented in ways that our times can understand, but at the heart of any such presentation must always be that same unchanging message of good news, love and redemption.  Where we water down the message in order to be more popular, then what we convey is no longer His message, but rather it is what we think His message ought to be in order to have more followers, as if we were doing no more than marketing a Facebook fanpage.

Jesus was aware that his followers were complaining about it and said, 'Does this disturb you? ............... After this, many of his disciples went away and accompanied him no more.  Then Jesus said to the Twelve, 'What about you, do you want to go away too?' Simon Peter answered, 'Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the message of eternal life, and we believe; we have come to know that you are the Holy One of God.'

Truth does not depend on popularity, nor indeed on the support of a majority in General Synod.  Fr Colven talked of Blessed John Paul II, who during his long papacy was much appreciated and loved far beyond the Catholic Church and even beyond the realm of Christians, but not everyone who admired this exceptional man wanted to hear the detail of what he had to say.

We might add that the Venerable Fulton Sheen, whose awe-inspiring addresses have featured before on this blog, expressed similar sentiments extremely succinctly and forcefully, as you will see if you scroll down the right-hand side bar of this blog.

Somewhat less succinctly and forcefully, we talked of the same issue in our post Missing the Point, when we explained that joining the Ordinariate is not tantamount to looking at the Catechism and saying "Wow, yes, I would have written exactly that myself," rather it is about accepting what the Catholic Church teaches and the basis of the authority it has to teach.

When you join the Ordinariate, you are not asked to say that if you had the chance to make up your own religion, according to what you felt would represent a popular view in your times of what was good, you would come up with something that was word for word identical to the Catechism. You are not asked to state that there are no hard teachings in the Catechism. You are asked to say that you accept the Catholic Faith as presented in the Catechism. You are asked to say that in Christian obedience you accept that the Church is, using the words of 1 Timothy 3.15, the "...pillar and bulwark of the truth...", and that therefore you accept the teachings of the Church. Specifically, you are asked to declare your faith through the Creed, and to say:

I believe and profess all that the holy Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims to be revealed by God.

You are asked to say nothing more than you have probably sung a hundred times even in your Anglican days, now of course appreciating more completely the meaning of this verse from the hymn (Firmly I believe and truly) drawn from Newman's Dream of Gerontius :

And I hold in veneration
For the love of Him alone
Holy Church as His creation
And her teachings as His own

This has sometimes been criticised as meaning that you must switch your brain off upon becoming a Catholic. That just isn't so. Blessed John Henry Newman explained this point in the Apologia:

From the time that I became a Catholic, of course I have no further history of my religious opinions to narrate. In saying this, I do not mean to say that my mind has been idle, or that I have given up thinking on theological subjects; but that I have had no variations to record, and have had no anxiety of heart whatever. I have been in perfect peace and contentment; I never have had one doubt. I was not conscious to myself, on my conversion, of any change, intellectual or moral, wrought in my mind. I was not conscious of firmer faith in the fundamental truths of Revelation, or of more self-command; I had not more fervour; but it was like coming into port after a rough sea; and my happiness on that score remains to this day without interruption.

He had not changed, he was not a different person. What had happened is that he found himself in a place where what the Church taught was the Truth, however convenient or inconvenient the Truth might be.

That Gospel reading speaks powerfully of a clear message, being the Truth, that is not variable depending upon how popular it is in any generation.  The witness of Blessed John Paul II and of the Venerable Fulton Sheen show the same in two Catholics who lived in our time. 

Those who have left the Church of England to join the Catholic Church are somewhat familiar with the concept, even if on a much less imposing scale.  No-one can say that we have done what we have done in order to be popular.  What we have done is in response to the direct call for Unity expressed in the Gospel, and is, to build on Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor's comments published recently in the Catholic Herald, a step away from the seeming reasonableness of adapting church teaching without reference to Scripture or Tradition towards an understanding of the divinely ordained nature of the Church, its teaching authority, and its guardianship of the deposit of faith.

In the Apostolic Constitution Fidei Depositum, issued in October 1992 upon the publication of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Blessed John Paul II wrote:

Guarding the deposit of faith is the mission which the Lord has entrusted to his Church and which she fulfils in every age. The Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, which was opened 30 years ago by my predecessor Pope John XXIII, of happy memory, had as its intention and purpose to highlight the Church's apostolic and pastoral mission, and by making the truth of the Gospel shine forth, to lead all people to seek and receive Christ's love which surpasses all knowledge (cf. Eph 3:19).

The principal task entrusted to the Council by Pope John XXIII was to guard and present better the precious deposit of Christian doctrine in order to make it more accessible to the Christian faithful and to all people of good will. For this reason the Council was not first of all to condemn the errors of the time, but above all to strive calmly to show the strength and beauty of the doctrine of the faith. "Illumined by the light of this Council", the Pope said, "the Church... will become greater in spiritual riches and, gaining the strength of new energies therefrom, she will look to the future without fear... Our duty is... to dedicate ourselves with an earnest will and without fear to that work which our era demands of us, thus pursuing the path which the Church has followed for 20 centuries."

The message is the message.  We can and must adapt how we present it and explain it, but the message remains unchanged. 

Finally, a brief follow up on a comment received on our recent post A New Direction.  The comment invited us to look at the St Peter's London Docks blog to find out about the latest thinking among Anglo-Catholics still in the Church of England but who used to say that a Code of Practice will not do.

The Peterite blog used to be a very regular read for members of the Marylebone Group, and has been praised in these pages before.  We much admired the continuing efforts of Fr (now also Dr) Jones to teach the Catholic faith in a church whose parish and indeed whose parish clergy have played such an important part in the history of Anglo-Catholicism.  Given our Pusey House connections, we also liked the Ascot Priory link.  However, in the cold light of day, perhaps we might reasonably wonder if our enthusiasm for the Peterite blog was, with absolutely no criticism intended, a reflection of our own views of our then situation as Anglicans associated with a historically Anglo-Catholic parish in the Diocese of London, a parish that, utterly lovely as it is, bears little resemblance to the reality of the rest of the Church of England.  Did we like the blog because it allowed us to imagine that we were a little less congregationalist?

The person who left the comment on our recent post was perhaps referring in part to this, the penultimate paragraph of Fr Jones's recent post.  It encourages a new vision, rather than just pretending that more of the same is possible, and for throwing out this challenge, Fr Jones is much to be admired.  He goes along with Better Together, but he also knows that as a defining vision, it is somewhat limited and risks appearing hollow:

Well, one way or the other, much will be known and decided before Christmas this time, but nothing will be over or ended. There will however be a new paradigm for Anglo-Catholics to grasp. Whatever the House of Bishops offer, whatever Synod decides, Anglo-Catholics in 2013 will need a new way to see and understand their identity, mission and long term role within Anglicanism. A simple overwhelming 'I'm a Roman Catholic paid by the Church of England' will no longer do, not morally, not Spiritually, not Liturgically, not theologically and not practically.

While we might find the first part of the paragraph rather striking in its "We're staying, come what may" approach (and Dr Kirk certainly would), the second part is perhaps a helpful indication of where things are heading.  No longer the claim that Anglo-Catholics are separated from the wider Church solely by accident of Tudor history and misfortune, no, there is now an acknowledged need for frankness and clarity about what is different, and about why it is felt that difference should not only be allowed to persist but should be cherished. 

Those in Affirming Catholicism have for a long time been clear about why they don't agree with Rome, but perhaps Fr Jones is right that the time has come for Anglo-Catholics more broadly to define their position, now that there is no tangible sense of a move towards unity, of a positive trajectory towards reunion, indeed now that in some instances there is an apparent pride in the opposite. 

As Fr Jones says, the approach exemplified by Dr Eric Mascall's famous fictional Ultra-Catholic is no longer possible: there now needs to be an explanation other than procrastination, fence-sitting or anxiety over practicalities for not joining the Catholic Church.  That explanation might perhaps be extremely good (one hopes that it is about more than second order issues), but it has yet to be given. 

I am an Ultra-Catholic -No 'Anglo, I beseeech you!
You'll find no trace of heresy in anything I teach you.
The clergyman across the road has whiskers and a bowler,
But I wear buckles on my shoes and sport a feriola.

My alb is edged with deepest lace, spread over rich black satin;
The Psalms of David I recite in heaven's own native Latin,
And though I don't quite understand those awkward moods and tenses,
My ordo recitandi's strict Westmonasteriensis.

I read the children in my school the Penny Catechism,
Explaining how the C. of E.'s in heresy and schism.
The truths of Trent and Vatican I bate not one iota.
I have not met the Rural Dean. I do not pay my quota.

The Bishop's put me under his 'profoundest disapproval'
And, though he cannot bring about my actual removal,
He will not come and visit me or take my confirmations.
Colonial prelates I employ from far-off mission stations.

The music we perform at Mass is Verdi and Scarlatti.
Assorted females form the choir; I wish they weren't so catty.
Two flutes, a fiddle and a harp assist them in the gallery.
The organist left years ago, and so we save his salary.

We've started a 'Sodality of John of San Fagondez,'
Consisting of five young men who serve High Mass on Sundays;
And though they simply will not come to weekday Mass at seven,
They turn out looking wonderful on Sundays at eleven.

The Holy Father I extol in fervid perorations,
The Cardinals in curia, the Sacred Congregations;
And, though I've not submitted yet, as all my friends expected,
I should have gone last Tuesday week, had not my wife objected.

Deus, qui nobis sub sacramento mirabili.....

There was a wonderful feeling of reassuring familiarity, of being in the right place, yesterday at St James's as we marked the Solemnity of Corpus Christi.  In our previous blogpost, we referred to a sentiment that our arrival in the Catholic Church was the only logical outcome for those who shared the understanding of Anglo-Catholicism that we did: yesterday reinforced that.

As usual, given the busy mass schedule at St James's, we arrived while the prayers after the 0930 Extraordinary Form mass were being said.  This always provides, very conveniently, a few quiet moments of preparation for the Solemn Latin Mass (OF) at 1030.  Once these were over, the organ launched into JS Bach's Chorale Prelude Schmücke Dich, O Liebe Seele BWV654.  This piece, a favourite of mine in my organ-playing days, is based on the tune of a eucharistic hymn very often sung in Anglican churches, and eminently suitable for Corpus Christi.

Deck thyself, my soul, with gladness,
Leave the gloomy haunts of sadness;
Come into the daylight’s splendour,
There with joy thy praises render
Unto Christ Whose grace unbounded
Hath this wondrous banquet founded.
Higher o’er all the heav’ns He reigneth,
Yet to dwell with thee He deigneth.

The procession entered, the Kyrie and the Gloria were sung, and then like a thunderbolt came Latin words that were utterly familiar to us.  Dare I say it, and with apologies for being arrogant, they might even have been more familiar to us than they were to some of our friends at St James's. 

Deus, qui nobis sub sacramento mirabili, passionis tuae memoriam reliquisti: tribue, quaesumus, ita nos corporis et sanguinis tui sacra mysteria venerari, ut redemptionis tuae fructum in nobis iugiter sentiamus.

The collect for Corpus Christi of course, but also the collect used at Benediction.  Every Sunday, the rite of benediction at Bourne St is performed in Latin - that being the result of a congregational vote in the 1970s - and so those of us who had been regular servers and members of the congregation there over the years were immediately struck by these familiar words, now in what was for us their new setting.

The beautiful chant of the sequence for Corpus Christi, Lauda Sion, rang out around the arches of St James's as we prepared to hear the Gospel.



The guest preacher was Fr Christopher Pearson, who is the Ordinariate priest who guided us on the process towards our reception into the Catholic Church.  Fr Pearson's homily reflected, amongst other things, on how differently we consider blood now as compared to how it was considered by those who lived at the time of the Gospels or before: this was in no small part due to a lack of familiarity with blood, not only in the way we live but also in the nature of our worship, the blood sacrifices made regularly in the Temple are very different to our re-presentation and witnessing of the one perfect sacrifice, made once. 

One might also have reflected on how homilies such as he delivered, on the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, are now pretty rare in our former Anglican home.  What once was familiar teaching in Anglo-Catholicism is now unfamiliar.  Now in the Catholic Church, the contents were familiar, they were very much at home.

The prayers of the faithful also contained an echo of Anglo-Catholic history.  The intercessor prayed that we might all recognise Our Lord in the Sacrament, and that in so doing, we might also be better able to recognise Our Lord in the faces of the poor and needy.  This recalled the speech of Frank Weston, Anglican Bishop of Zanzibar, given at the conclusion of the 1923 Anglo-Catholic Congress in the Albert Hall. 

Weston, even if he was only "in place" as such for a pitifully short time, was the only clear leader that the Anglo-Catholic movement had really known and recognised since Blessed John Henry Newman left for Rome in 1845 (and, with no disrespect to our three monsignori in their days of leading the movement, is probably unsurpassed as leader since).  He was addressing the gathering of sixteen thousand on the importance of building on what they had achieved, using their theological, liturgical and ecclesiastical achievements in God's service.  This quotation, his last charge to the Anglo-Catholic movement (he died one year later, at the tragically early age of 53), sums up in a few lines something that was historically at the heart of Anglo-Catholicism, bringing Our Lord, and the Catholic Faith that leads to Him, to His people. 

. . I say to you, and I say it with all the earnestness that I have, if you are prepared to fight for the right of adoring Jesus in His Blessed Sacrament, then, when you come out from before your tabernacles, you must walk with Christ, mystically present in you, through the streets of this country, and find the same Christ in the peoples of your cities and villages. You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the tabernacle if you do not pity Jesus in the slum. . . . It is folly, it is madness, to suppose that you can worship Jesus in the Sacrament and Jesus on the throne of glory, when you are sweating Him in the bodies and souls of His children. . . . You have your Mass, you have your altars, you have begun to get your tabernacles. Now go out into the highways and hedges, and look for Jesus in the ragged and the naked, in the oppressed and the sweated, in those who have lost hope, and in those who are struggling to make good. Look for Jesus in them, and, when you have found Him, gird yourself with His towel of fellowship and wash His feet in the person of his brethren.

For any of you who have not read Frank Weston's speech, I would implore you to read it here.  It is very, very stirring stuff.

After our previous blogpost, when we recalled the different understandings of Anglo-Catholicism, specifically as regards the importance of unity, it is interesting to note that Weston made the groundbreaking move of sending the following telegram to Rome during the 1923 conference.

Sixteen thousand Anglo-Catholics in congress assembled offer respectful greetings to the Holy Father, humbly praying that the day of peace may quickly break.

He was of course savaged by the press and the protestant elements of the hierarchy for having dared to open the door to communication with Rome, but he also suffered rebukes from a number of prominent Anglo-Catholic friends, including some who were comfortably installed in the Anglican establishment.

Back to Sunday at St James's.  It was by delightful co-incidence that most of us in the Marylebone Ordinariate Group happened to kneel at the right place before the altar rail for Fr Pearson to be able to communicate us.  It could not have worked out better.

The procession around church was a joy (even if I must confess to being no fan of indoor processions of the Blessed Sacrament where the laity join in, if only to avoid traffic management issues and to encourage the faithful to pray in adoration upon their knees).  A be-coped Fr Colven bore the monstrance around the church, under a canopy, flanked by Fr Pearson and Fr Irwin (another former Anglican) as his assistants.  Fr Nicholas Kavanagh was also in procession (photos of Fr Kavanagh in his Anglican days as curate at St Mary's Bourne St can be found here).

A small number of photos are shown below, but perhaps the greatest joy of the procession was the hymns.

The first hymn is one we have mentioned before on this blog.  The immensely moving O Bread of Heaven, as sung at the Ordination Mass of our three Ordinariate monsignori came first, as the procession formed up and moved off. 

O Bread of Heaven, beneath this veil
Thou dost my very God conceal:
My Jesus, dearest treasure, hail!
I love Thee and, adoring, kneel;
Each loving soul by Thee is fed
With Thine own Self in form of Bread.

O food of life, Thou Who dost give
The pledge of immortality;
I live, no 'tis not I that live;
God gives me life, God lives in me:
He feeds my soul, He guides my ways,
And every grief with joy repays.

O Bond of love that dost unite
The servant to his living Lord;
Could I dare live and not requite
Such love - then death were meet reward:
I cannot live unless to prove
Some love for such unmeasured love.

Beloved Lord, in Heaven above
There, Jesus, Thou awaitest me,
To gaze on Thee with endless love;
Yes, thus I hope, thus shall it be:
For how can He deny me Heaven,
Who here on earth Himself hath given?

The second hymn was again full of significance for former members of the congregation of St Mary's Bourne Street congregation.  It was the Fr Faber classic Jesus, My Lord, My God, My All.  I confess, we did not sing it to a hymn tune I know, but at least we did not sing it to Stella, more often employed for Hail, Queen of Heaven, the Ocean Star.  The tune I had hoped we would have was the following one, a very beautiful melody called Sweet Sacrament.



Fr Faber's hymn can be found in the St Mary's English Hymnal Supplement, few copies of which are in existence now, but being a hymnbook that, in pre-New English Hymnal days, filled in a few of the "gaps" as we might say in the catholicism of the English Hymnal.  Proving that Bourne St was once at the vanguard of catholic teaching, the words in the Supplement are Fr Faber's, whereas those in the NEH are somewhat different.

The third verse of the hymn, as a friend once observed, has the very distinct ring of an Eric Mascall sermon, of the kind he would preach at Bourne Street between Evensong and Benediction.  Eric Mascall has been mentioned at great length on this blog before, in the context of wondering what the great man might have done had he lived a little longer.

Jesus, my Lord, my God, my all,

How can I love Thee as I ought?

And how revere this wond'rous gift,

So far surpassing hope or thought.

Sweet Sacrament, we Thee adore.

O make us love Thee more and more!

O make us love Thee more and more!

Had I but Mary's sinless heart,

To love Thee with, my dearest King;

O with what bursts of fervent praise,

Thy goodness, Jesus, would I sing!

Sweet Sacrament, we Thee adore.

O make us love Thee more and more!

O make us love Thee more and more!

O, see, within a creature's hand,

The vast Creator deigns to be,

Reposing infant-like, as though

On Joseph's arm, on Mary's knee.

Sweet Sacrament, we Thee adore.

O make us love Thee more and more!

O make us love Thee more and more!

Thy body, soul, and Godhead, all--

O mystery of love divine!

I cannot compass all I have,

For all Thou hast and art are mine.

Sweet Sacrament, we Thee adore.

O make us love Thee more and more!

O make us love Thee more and more!

Sound, sound His praises higher still,

    And come ye Angels to our aid;

'Tis God, 'tis God, the very God,

Whose power both man and angels made.

Sweet Sacrament, we Thee adore.

O make us love Thee more and more!

O make us love Thee more and more!

Those who say that there is no Anglican tradition in Eucharistic worship in the Catholic Church would have had no choice to recant had they been present in Marylebone yesterday.  It was even clearer on the 15th January at the Ordinariate's First Anniversary celebrations of course, but still, we were utterly at home yesterday.

Indeed, Eric "Patrimony" Mascall quotations have been doing the rounds of the Catholic blogs on the internet this week, showing just how much Anglo-Catholic theology has been, at its best, in tune with the very best theology of Rome herself.  One particular favourite Mascall quotation on the mass is the following :

The Eucharist of the Church, is not either a commemoration or a dramatic imitation of what was done at the Last Supper; it is the same thing. ‘Do this.’ Both the Last Supper and the Eucharist bring about the anamnesis of the other.

Fresh from receiving Benediction, we left the church, greeted Fr Pearson at the door, acquired Ordinariate badges, and moved round to a nearby hostelry, where with true Anglican Patrimony we shared drinks and talked of mutual friends.

Did we feel that we had in any way missed out?  Did we feel we had lost something compared to the, it must be said, beautiful and spectacular way in which Corpus Christi is marked at Bourne St?  Well, it might not surprise you to learn that the answer is no.  Corpus Christi 2012 was for us a wonderful way of celebrating this most sacred mystery, in communion with the Successor of St Peter, in the heart of the Church that is the guardian of the sacraments, celebrating a feast that is at the core of the Church's teaching rather than celebrating in a context where to do so is seen as extreme and eccentric.

O Lord, who in a wonderful sacrament hast left us a memorial of thy passion; Grant us so to reverence the holy mysteries of thy Body and Blood, that we may ever know within ourselves the fruits of thy redemption.

Before concluding this very long blogpost with photos of yesterday in Marylebone (and with a bonus photo of ecumenical friendship in Oxford), let us counterbalance the very old, if splendid, picture of a Corpus Christi procession in Rome that can be found above with video footage from last year. 

Finally, an act of ecumenical friendship in honour of our Oxford connections: a photo of the Oxford Oratory's Corpus Christi procession as it passed Pusey House, with Pusey House regulars kneeling in the street in adoration of the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament.  My Lord and my God.

Beyond the End of Our Noses

A few days ago, someone left a comment on our blogpost The Extraordinary Form in Hong Kong, asking what the contents of that post had to do with the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham.  A response was provided, stating that, as explained in the opening paragraphs of the post, the Ordinariate was part of the Catholic Church, and that it was a good thing that Ordinariate members were interested in what was going on in the Catholic Church.  It would be ridiculous for us not to be.

The person who left the comment didn't leave any clues as to their identity, so we cannot know if it was someone quite genuinely asking a question without any preconceptions or prejudice, or if the comment was an uncharitable attempt at a snide remark. Given that doubt, it should be made clear that the rest of this post refers to a general phenomenon, and is in no way an assault on (nor a guess at) the views of Anonymous of a few days ago.

I must confess to having been rather irritated by the question raised in the comment: I know, I should know better than that.  What irritated me is that it reminded me of a habit amongst some of delighting in fantasising that the Ordinariate is somehow pointless.  Those prey to this phenomenon criticise the Ordinariate as not being Anglican enough ("What's the point of it?") and yet simultaneously and no less ill-informedly criticise the Ordinariate as not being Catholic enough ("Why don't they just become 'proper' Catholics?").   Anonymous of a few days ago brought all this to mind because his or her remark seemed to imply that Ordinariate members should only be interested in the Ordinariate.

When they leave polemic aside and reflect calmly, I wonder what these people believe that those like me thought we would be signing up to when we joined the Ordinariate.  I wonder what they think our motives were.  They cannot seriously imagine that we wanted to create a little ghetto for disgruntled ex-Anglicans to hang about in, a ghetto in which we could ignore the rest of the Church.  They must surely know that we were answering a call to Unity in the Catholic Faith, in the Catholic Church, in communion with the Successor of St Peter.  No longer do we sojourn in a halfway house.  They cannot be under the misapprehension that we were called upon to renounce anything of our Anglican past, they must know that indeed the contrary was asked of us, that we should bring our Anglican Patrimony with us so that this might become part of the wider treasures of the Catholic Church. 

Ordinariate members are fully part of the Catholic Church, and we are full of joy to be so.  We are not Ordinariate members first and somehow members of the Catholic Church second.  We are delighted to have come into the full communion of the Catholic Church: joining the Ordinariate was a wonderful means of achieving this, it was not itself the goal. 

We do indeed look beyond the end of our noses, and realise with great happiness that we are part of the Church, part of an "organisation" that is present around the world and has over a billion members.  We are not interested in obsessing only about our little constituent part of the Catholic Church. 

Ordinariate members do not (and should not) spend their time focusing solely on their own immediate environment, ignoring the wider Catholic Church around them. The shortest of trawls of Ordinariate-related blogs makes this perfectly clear. Fr Ed Tomlinson talks regularly of the joy of unity that the group of Anglicans he led out of St Barnabas Tunbridge Wells and into the Catholic Church now shares with their now fellow Catholics in Pembury, and of what has been achieved for his group by both Monsignor Newton and by the Archbishop of Southwark and his Area Bishop John Hine. Fr Edwin Barnes frequently highlights joint events with diocesan parishes, indeed one of his recent posts talked of how he had attended two Chrism Masses this year, the Ordinariate Chrism Mass and also the Portsmouth Diocesan Chrism Mass.

As Anglo-Catholics, we for many years managed to cling on to the belief that the Church of England was part of the one Universal Church, separated from the wider Church only by misfortune and accident of history.  This was the vision that was shared for generations, but it was also a vision and ecclesiology that crumbled around us, a phenomenon that caused Dr Eric Mascall and many others great anguish.  Now that we are undoubtedly fully part of the Catholic Church, why would anyone think that we would not rejoice in being in that wider communion, why would anyone think that we would not be interested in the Catholic Church as a whole?

Two follow-on comments :

• Criticisms of this nature are often accompanied by melodramatic sweeping comments such as ".....and I know lots of Catholics who are very worried by the Ordinariate."  Well, perhaps such people do, but from personal experience, I can only say that I have encountered nothing other than joy and welcome from my fellow Catholics.  Members of the Marylebone Ordinariate Group were especially touched at the support shown to the Ordinariate's First Anniversary Evensong and Benediction by members of the St James's parish congregation.
• There are some who rather mystically decree that the Ordinariate is not about Unity.  Their logic escapes me entirely.  It really does.  Unity is about people coming together, not about finding new and exciting ways in which to split Christianity.  This marvellous initiative from Pope Benedict, who is truly showing himself to be the Pope of Christian Unity, is a real gift. 

In one of our earliest posts on this blog, The Universal Church, we referred to how when we were Anglicans we thought we knew all about the concept of believing in unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam, we even sang those words every week, but now that we were truly part of the Catholic Church, we had realised that we had a lot to learn.   What a joy it is to learn about being part of the Catholic Church, and to come across its treasures across the world.

Don't Misunderstand

Somehow, an important part of the Ordinariate's message isn't getting through.  A lack of awareness of an important part of what makes the creation of the Ordinariate such an important gesture is causing the usual internet forums to get unnecessarily excited. 

Therefore, it's time to provide a little explanation, in a purely personal capacity of course, on a topic that seems to get people very wound up indeed.

The issue relates to what Ordinariate members think they were doing when they were still Anglicans.  Do they consider they were involved in high pantomime rather than in devout worship?  Do the newly minted Catholic priests consider that they were play acting when they were in the Church of England?  Once people reached a decision to join the Ordinariate, why did they not just leave overnight rather than announce an exit and then have various forms of farewells (including liturgical farewells) some time later?

Some of these points are raised in an understandable if misplaced kind of defensive anger ("Their leaving inherently criticises me and my decision to stay"), and some are raised as an argument against joining the Ordinariate at all (usually by those without any other argument, as if questions about the decisions of others who have joined the Ordinariate outweigh the wider rationale for doing so).  Nonetheless, if people still ask these questions, it is because we have failed to convey the full message behind the invitation that is inherent in Anglicanorum Coetibus.  Whatever the motives behind people repeating these questions, they are fair questions, and deserve an answer.

Speaking from personal experience, all members of the Marylebone Ordinariate Group can confirm that new members of the Ordinariate are not asked to state that their previous church and sacramental life was pointless.  No-one is asked to sign Apostolicae Curae with some kind of addendum stating that questions and answers in the 1890s relate to the position today.  What does happen is that in prayer we give thanks for all that has gone before, for all that has led us to this point, and for all those who have led us to this point.

One of the texts that has taken many members of the Ordinariate, and indeed many other former Anglicans who have joined the Catholic Church, over the line is Newman's Apologia.  Anglo-Catholics past and present will know that they would jokingly advise each other against reading it, "....because you know what will happen if you do."  This extract from the May 1843 section of the Apologia speaks powerfully to concerns that people are asked to deny their previous life.

At present I fear, as far as I can analyze my own convictions, I consider the Roman Catholic Communion to be the Church of the Apostles, and that what grace is among us (which, through God's mercy, is not little) is extraordinary, and from the overflowings of His dispensation.  I am very far more sure that England is in schism than that the Roman additions to the Primitive Creed may not be developments, arising out of a keen and vivid realizing of the Divine Depositum of Faith.

Newman is saying that in the Church of England there is "not little" grace in his Anglican life.  He is saying the precise opposite of what some people, for one reason and another, speculate would be required of them to say if they ever joined the Catholic Church. 

How very apt that this Newman extract was also cited by Fr Aidan Nichols OP (whose understanding of Anglo-Catholicism is beyond question) in his homily at the "first mass" of Monsignor Andrew Burnham (the inverted commas were used by the Oxford Oratory, they are not my addition).  Fr Nichols made a reference to Newman saying that there was "not little grace" in the Church of England, and referred to Mgr Burnham as Bishop Andrew - so like Fr Nichols and Mgr Burnham, no Ordinariate member regards joining the Ordinariate as a rejection or as a negation of anything they have done, rather, to paraphrase Fr Nichols again, this time from his homily at the deaconing of Mgrs Newton, Broadhurst and Burnham, a "quiet rectification" of their position.

How is this reflected in practice?  Well, before being chrismated, as one would expect, new members of the Ordinariate are asked to make their confession.  Technically, it is a first confession, and so takes the form of a general confession.  However, this approach in fact allows respect to be shown for all the confessions a new Ordinariate member will previously have made, and for the Anglican priests who heard them : it means no-one is asked to list specifically, item by item, sins that might already have been confessed to an Anglican priest. 

In terms of the wider approach to becoming an Ordinariate member, away from the purely sacramental aspects (as important as they are), the approach is very much that the Church knows that new Ordinariate members are unlikely to need the same introduction to the Faith as a brand new convert.  Therefore, rather than simply putting Ordinariate arrivals in with the nearest RCIA class, discussions are held and a tailored programme of catechesis can be constructed, usually by the Anglican priest leading the group, that being the person most likely to know what has been preached and taught to the group in recent years.

In terms of the question of the chrismation / the reception / the confirmation, I think that lay people take the same approach as priests take when looking at the question of ordination.  The confirmation I had when an Anglican bishop lay his hands upon my head (and, by the way, conveyed to me, so he claimed, a short message from above) suited me perfectly for my existence in the Church of England.  When Mgr Newton chrismated me along with the other members of the group last year, we became beyond any shadow of a doubt full members of the Catholic Church, in communion with the Successor of St Peter, and with all other members of the Catholic Church: whatever else had happened at our Anglican confirmations, it was not that. 

The topic of ordination is a difficult one for a layman to comment on.  However, my understanding is that the very same approach is taken.  Some Catholic bishops ordaining former Anglican clergy encourage them to mark the date of their ordination as Anglican priests as their anniversary of ordination, and to mark the date of their being ordained as Catholic priests as the date when, quite simply, they became priests in the Catholic Church.  The ordination service, just as it has since the 1990s, includes a special prayer of thanksgiving for the clergyman's previous ministry in the Church of England.  Incoming clergy are not sent off to seminary for years before being set free, they operate at once, with a tailored programme of ongoing formation.

So there is no denial that God's grace operated in and for Ordinariate clergy and laity during their Anglican years.  What there is, is a strong desire to bring those gifts into the Catholic Church, that "all might be one".

Despite all the above, some continue to cry "Apostolicae Curae, Apostolicae Curae".  Not just ultra-zealous traditionalist Catholics who might make even the SSPX blush (NB, even Bishop Fellay, Superior General of the SSPX, thinks bringing Anglicans into unity with Rome is a wonderful thing and does not join that particular refrain), but also there are some Anglicans whom one might have thought would be keen on Christian Unity, who prefer to hide behind a wound alleged to have been caused by Apostolicae Curae.

To use Apostolicae Curae as a reason not to join the Ordinariate is to understand neither Apostolicae Curae nor the Ordinariate.  The Church of England countered Apostolicae Curae with Saepius Officio, but more importantly took steps to resolve the issues raised by Apostolicae Curae by implementing the "Dutch Touch", and through that mechanism and some good record keeping, it was possible for Monsignor Graham Leonard to be ordained conditionally.  So the Church of England itself clearly thought that there were things it could change in order to render Apostolicae Curae itself null and void in respect of the future.

Would the answer to the questions raised in Apostolicae Curae be the same if they were posed today?  Who knows, but it's not impossible at all.  The doubt about Anglican orders was shifting to being about whether they really were invalid rather than about whether they were valid, but rumours that the subject was to be re-examined in the 1970s and 1980s swiftly came to an end when the Church of England changed its own approach to the importance of unity as regards Holy Order in the 1990s.

Isn't that exactly the point though?  Who wants doubt about orders, about sacraments?  Who wants to have to look up directories of "sound" parishes where it's "safe" to go, isn't that about as uncatholic an ecclesiology as one can find?  Who wants to be a smaller and smaller part of an institution that perceives you as more and more extreme, more and more troublesome?  Those who have joined the Ordinariate have done so because they answered a call to Unity, but also because they actively want and are attracted to there being no doubt about these things.

Since I wanted to be part of that, I accepted that I needed to assent to the same things as everyone else who is a part of it, and that I needed to take part in the same rites to get there.  I had no interest in arguing why something I did many years ago, out of communion with Rome (indeed through an Anglican bishop of a very protestant variety, not that that matters) was or was not enough to admit me into the same communion as those who have received chrismation at the hands of a Catholic priest in communion with Rome. 

By way of comparison, no clergyman can seriously think that all they have to do in order to be able to say mass at the Brompton Oratory or at Westminster Cathedral is to say that their Ordinary is no longer Richard Chartres, but it is Vincent Nicholls or Keith Newton, as if it were a minor procedural matter of changing your line manager.  Everyone knows there is something missing there.  Anglican ordinations were perfect for Anglican life, but in the Catholic Church, like every other Catholic priest, ordination must be carried out by a Catholic bishop : why would it be fair to leave the slightest whiff of doubt about orders in the minds of the congregation? 

What we are all after is sacramental certainty, sacramental assurance.  That comes through Unity with Rome.  All the fuss over the past 30 plus years in General Synod has been about what the changes would do to Unity and what the changes would do to sacramental assurance.  Why allow the slightest trace of that to persist?  Doubt over all this, and moreover ever-increasing doubt, is one element of Anglican Patrimony that  nobody wants.

The Ordinariate is about Unity and sacramental assurance.  However, it is also about recognising the Anglican Patrimony, the gifts, the abilities, the faith, the learning, the pastoral strengths, the music, the approach to liturgy, the relationship with the wider community, the philosophy and so many other things that are inherent in the best of Anglicanism, and finding a way to bring those into the Catholic Church.

Doesn't this recent letter say exactly that?

The Ordinariate is not about denying one's past, denying that one was an Anglican, denying that one retains strong Anglican characteristics.  Not at all.  Once a decision was made to leave, we were all encouraged to do so in an orderly fashion, minimising disruption, and it was made very clear that there was no panic to leave, because no-one was asking us to deny what was then the present, what had nourished us for so many years : we were being asked about our views of the Catholic future, not about what we thought or didn't think about the Church of England.

No-one suggests a move is easy, and we have referred before to how this caused great agonies for Dr Eric Mascall and many others, but a fair appraisal of a possible move is not helped by an absolutely and utterly mistaken belief that Rome sets past existence and ministry at naught.

Facing Facts

As its 2.30pm debate begins, it really would probably be safer and fairer to avoid any comment on this week's General Synod in the Church of England.  Having left the Church of England, the debate has no direct impact on members on members of the Marylebone Ordinariate Group, other than being a source of concern for those of our formerly fellow Anglo-Catholics who are very anxious at the moment.

However, it might nonetheless be topical and not too much of an intrusion to comment on one particular aspect of the debate.  Not the fundamentals, but the way in which the debate risks heating up unnecessarily.

There is much outrage about the seemingly unsympathetic attitude of some of the most notable proponents of the legislation to bring women to the Church of England's episcopate.  An article has appeared in The Telegraph, and the blogosphere is aflame (for example, see here, here and here).

It is true that some might have expressed themselves in more diplomatic language, for example the Revd Rose Hudson-Wilkin has painted things rather starkly in this recent Telegraph article.  This section in particular has caused much upset :

The Church is desperately trying to hold everybody together, and we haven’t understood that this is not going to be possible. To try to do that is to put on a sticking plaster that is going to curl at the edge and fall apart. It cannot be sustainable. The whole thing is a mess. We need to say, as a Church, 'We ordain men and women.’ Full stop. All the way to the top. For those who feel that they can’t live with it? They’re adults. By all means, go to Rome. Join the Ordinariate. Don’t stay and make demands of the Church. It’s wrong.

However, if one scrapes away the veneer of the tone and looks at the underlying message, is the Revd Hudson-Wilkin really saying anything that unreasonable or unrealistic?  All she is saying is that the Church of England has made up its mind about ordaining women to its episcopate, and that those who don't like it will just have to accept it and act accordingly.  There is no magic solution that will be acceptable to everyone.  As to the tone, well, after 37 years of debate, surely we can all (including the Revd Hudson-Wilkin) be excused a little frustration.

Is what she says in the article really any different from the message that Dr Chartres, the Anglican Bishop of London, was giving to his clergy when he made it clear that he did not wish them to use the new translation of the Roman Rite?  In what remains our most read blogpost by some margin, we wrote the following :

The difficulty is not so much that the Bishop of London is strongly critical of any of his clergy adopting the new translation.  Rather, it is his argument for taking this approach.  In short, he says that Anglicanorum Coetibus has called bluffs : those who wanted to use texts issued by Rome that express communion with the Pope have headed off to the Ordinariate, those who remain should not be following instructions issued by the Pope to those in that other communion.  His conclusion is that if people in the Diocese of London use the new translation, they are rejecting the instructions of both the Catholic Church and those of the Diocese of London.

The messages sound strikingly similar, and in fact are rather simple : this is what is happening, this is what the Church of England has decided, and if that's not you, then you need to look elsewhere for something that is. 

While instinctively and historically we have enormous sympathy with the comments of the Revd Ross Northing on a current post in the blog of the famous Anglican Bishop of Buckingham (Dr Wilson's tone is far more brutal and strident than the Revd Hudson-Wilkin's, especially in his responses to comments on his blog), despite coming at things from a different perspective of course, it is hard to disagree with the comments made by Erika Baker on the same post.

I still don't understand why those who are deliberately members of the CoE suddenly claim that it isn't the church ...... when they don't like its decisions. Yes, there are those who believe that the CoE doesn't have the power to make this decision.  But the CoE disagrees and it has made that decision and it has had women as priests for a long long time now.

We can do little more than refer once again to Geoffrey Kirk's excellent recent article in New Directions, and to a recent blogpost written by Fr Ed Tomlinson.  Links to both of these can be found in the second half of this recent blogpost of ours.

The reality is, and there is no point in debating the rights and wrongs of how we got here, that the Church of England has made certain decisions.  People can either live with them or they can't.  The levels of frustration, and sadly animosity, increase on both sides when there is an inability or an unwillingness to see the new reality.  As Mark Twain never said, Denial Ain't Just a River in Egypt.

Enough intrusion.  For those in the Church of England who might join the Ordinariate, perhaps the next few days and indeed months will be an important step in that process.  Decision making can be difficult, and has always been able to be so (see this article on how it agonised Dr Eric Mascall): all we can do is assure you that we do not regret our decision for so much as one second.

For those in the Church of England who do not feel comfortable with the idea of joining the Catholic Church yet are unhappy with the likely changes, we hope very much that you find a way to respect and cherish the Anglo-Catholic heritage that has formed you.

What Would Dr Mascall Have Done?

One of the many subjects debated between those who have decided to join the Ordinariate and those who have not is what the late Fr X or Bishop Y would have done if they had been faced with a similar decision. 

It is, of course, impossible to come up with a definitive answer.  The circumstances are too different in most cases, and indeed the Church of England, and its Anglo-Catholic constituency, have transformed themselves dramatically.  (To be fair, the way Rome engages post Vatican II and the initial stages of ARCIC also change the analysis.)  People used to talk of corporate reunion between Canterbury and Rome, of a need to remind the Church of England that (if one accepts the theory) her rightful place is as the  historic Ecclesia Anglicana, part of the one universal Church.  Instead, people now talk about whether or not to preserve a cordonned-off space within the Church of England in which Anglo-Catholics can carry on peacefully ie a more or less catholic enclave within a Liberal Protestant church, or even about whether the Catholic Church and the Pope have the monopoly on being the Catholic Church.

None of this was properly imaginable even a generation ago.  Indeed, it is so bizarre that it barely seems imaginable even today : yet it is reality. 

Of the three most famous founding fathers of the Oxford Movement, we all know what Newman did, and perhaps Keble seems the one most likely to have understood the approach of the modern day deniers.     Pusey, well, it's true that he was not burning with enthusiasm for a ticket to Rome, but on the other hand would he have felt more positive about following his friend Newman's example if he had been a part of the Church of England as it is now, where Holy Orders are defined by majority vote?  There is quite simply no way of knowing, although one rather thinks that the scope for debate would be rather more limited if one imagines Dr Pusey having to decide between Rome and for example the US Episcopal Church as it now is.

All such debates are fun but rather futile.  To stand a chance of coming close to being able to speculate slightly more accurately on what the great figures of Anglo-Catholicism might have done, one needs to move much nearer to current times.  The most obvious example is Dr Eric Mascall, a towering figure of Anglo-Catholicism and indeed of theology in the twentieth century, who was for many years one of the clergy at St Mary's Bourne Street (the former home of the members of the Marylebone Ordinariate Group). 

Clearly, there can be no certain answer as to what Dr Mascall would have done.  While the dramatic events of 1992 and 1993 unfolded in England, he was too ill to reach a conclusion about what path he might take, and indeed he died before the first of the ordinations of women priests in the Church of England (although after the decisive vote in General Synod).  Nonetheless, Mascall is probably the nearest to us in time of those leaders of Anglo-Catholicism who died before a decision came to be necessary.  Monsignor Graham Leonard and the Rt Revd Eric Kemp both lived long enough to make their decisions, and as such they fall just this side of the dividing line : there is very little gap between the time of their decisions and the death of Mascall. 

Having had some email correspondence with Professor William Tighe on the matter, we have included below an article that he wrote for the excellent Anglo-Catholic blog in February 2010, on the 17th anniversary of Dr Mascall's death.  Many of you may have seen the article already, but fewer of you will have picked up on one of the comments, one posted by Professor Tighe himself.  The comment demonstrates just how awkward the situation is for faithful Anglo-Catholics who remain in the Church of England, as compared to the more compassionate and pastoral approach that would have been favoured by Dr Mascall.  Here is the comment, followed by the text of the original article by Professor Tighe, with thanks and acknowledgement to the Anglo-Catholic blog, where the article was first posted.

In my posting, I wrote:

"His correspondence, now in the archives of Pusey House, Oxford, contains some tense and even fraught exchanges with his old friend Michael Ramsey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, over some of the resolutions of the 1968 Lambeth Conference, and over the Anglican-Methodist unity votes of 1969 and 1972, which the Methodists supported, as did Ramsey, but which failed to achieve the requisite majority in the Church of England’s General Synod, and which, in their final form, Mascall opposed."

When reading through Mascall's correspondence in the Pusey House archive in July 2007 I was struck by one exchange between Mascall and Ramsey in the lead-up to the 1972 vote. Ramsey had written rather vehemently to Mascall protesting the latter's eventual opposition to the scheme (Mascall had earlier joined with his fellow Anglo-Catholic Graham Leonard, and with two Evangelical Anglicans, Colin Buchanan and James Packer, to propose alterations which, if adopted, would make the scheme acceptable in their sight); evidently Mascall had expressed the view that to proceed with the union, even with the requisite two-thirds majority in the General Synod, would be inappropriate, given that to do so would make it morally necessary for a large portion of the opposed minority to separate from the Church of England, as likewise for a considerable proportion of the approximate 20% minority in the Methodist Church who opposed it. Ramsey, in reply, urged Mascall to consider how unsatisfying and absurd it would be to allow a small bitter-end rump of Protestants (or words very much to the same effect) to block the achievement of sacramental reconciliation between the Church of England and the Church of Rome, "a cause which, as you know, is as dear to my heart as it is to yours."

In his reply, Mascall acknowledged his long-standing desire for just such a reconciliation, but he went on to declare that if there were any organized and recognized body of Anglican opinion within the Church of England that could not accept the terms of such an Anglican/Catholic reconciliation, he would prefer that such a proposal be deferred, or even defeated, rather than seeing conscientious fellow-members of the Church of England being driven to leave. Mascall's reply is a vivid expression of his pastoral sensitivity — but it also related rather closely to his final apprehension that that the Church of England in particular, and "Anglicanism" more generally, was a church structure consisting of "three parties or groups 'severally holding three irreconcilable views of the nature of the Christian religion' existing alongside one another in the same church" — a logical inference from which is that until the triumph of one particular party, the one with the least scruples about treading upon tender consciences, the illiberal "Liberals," that is, in order to achieve their goals, which is what recent decades have seen among Anglicans in America, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and elsewhere, and more recently in England, Angican churches generally would be unable to achieve ecumenical goals of any sort without the risk and reality of fragmentation.

How times changed over the past forty years.  The General Synod in its voting record has much to learn from the charitable approach of Dr Mascall, concerned as he was to bring people along with him rather than leave a minority in an impossible position.


ARTICLE FROM THE ANGLO-CATHOLIC BLOG
DATE 14 FEBRUARY 2010
ORIGINAL TEXT CAN BE FOUND AT THIS PAGE


Eric Lionell Mascall as Anglican Patrimony

February 14, 2010 marks the seventeenth anniversary of the death of Eric Lionel Mascall, one of the great luminaries of English Anglo-Catholicism in the Twentieth Century, a man to whom his distant kinsman through marriage, Fr. Aidan Nichols, O.P., dedicated his admirable book, The Panther and the Hind: A Theological History of Anglicanism in 1993 — a book of which a new edition may be in prospect — referring to Mascall in the dedication as magistro catholicae veritatis, which one might render as a “masterful teacher of catholic truth.” He would be pleased, I think, at the prospect of the “rescue mission” for elements of the “Anglican patrimony” offered in Anglicanorum Coetibus, and at the place within that patrimony which his writings will surely come to hold.

Unlike his friend Dom Gregory Dix, Mascall did not espouse an overtly “Anglo-Papalist” ecclesiological stance, but neither did he espouse an anti-papalist one such as did Austin Farrer, another one of his friends. His criticisms of some of the excesses and conundrums of a “hyper-papalist” ecclesiology in the last two chapters of his The Recovery of Unity: A Theological Approach (1958) are cogent and forceful because of their limited scope, and given his explicit acceptance of the postulates that Christ conferred a primacy over the Church and the other apostles upon St. Peter, that that primacy was transmissible to his successors, and that his successors are the Bishops of Rome. One might even claim to find in the writings of Joseph Ratzinger, now happily reigning as Benedict XVI, some of the same kinds of criticisms and reservations, and one might likewise see in Vatican II the beginning of a remedy for some of these “excesses,” while the greater “excesses” of theological revisionists have underlined the need for a magisterial authority rooted in the Tradition which it both serves and defends.

Mascall has chronicled his life in charming and full detail in Saraband: The Memoirs of E. L. Mascall, which appeared in 1992, months before his death (he once told me that his preferred subtitle was “the memoirs of a senior citizen,” as he was much taken with that American term). Briefly, here — he was born December 12, 1905, read Mathematics as a Cambridge undergraduate, taught Mathematics from 1928 to 1931, then studied for ordination, and was ordained in the Church of England in 1933. Curacies followed, then in 1937 he became Sub-Warden of Lincoln Theological College, in 1945 a don at Christ Church, Oxford, and in 1962 Professor of Historical Theology at King’s College, London, from which he retired in 1973. During his years in London he lived in a suite of rooms in the top floor of the presbytery of St. Mary’s, Bourne Street, an Anglo-Catholic “shrine church” close to Sloane Square, and he continued to live there after his retirement until ill-health necessitated his retirement to a nursing home in 1987 where he passed the remaining five years of his life in some loneliness and among mostly demented fellow patients.

I had discovered the works of Mascall on my own, as a library-haunting undergraduate at Georgetown University in the early 1970s. Later, as a graduate student at Yale I happened to read in a newspaper that he was preaching the three-hour’s devotion at the Church of the Transfiguration in Manhattan on Good Friday, and so I decided to go down to the service, and after it met him. He invited me to correspond with him, and when I told him that I would be leaving Yale for Cambridge in 1978 he invited me for tea with him at his flat.

That was for me the beginning of a long and valued acquaintanceship. In the years that I lived in Britain, 1978 to 1986, we tended to meet three or four times a year, and more often during the two years I lived in London. In subsequent summer stays in London I traveled to the nursing home in Sussex in which he lived to visit him, for the last time in August 1992, some six months before his death. Our conversation ranged through many areas, theological, historical and ecclesiastical. He gave me copies of many of his books and articles, and we discussed others. In his earlier years he had professed a robust Anglo-Catholicism, believing that the Church of England was a truly “Catholic church,” although unfortunately (in his view) separated from the mainstream of Western Catholicism by the self-interested actions of Tudor monarchs in the Sixteenth Century, and the subservience to them of Archbishop Cranmer (for whom he expressed to me more than once a thorough detestation), and although interested in contemporary Roman Catholic theology, had many lively and ongoing contacts with the Orthodox world through the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, of which he had been “present a the creation” in 1927 and in which he was to be active for over sixty years, but by the time that I met him his confidence in the tenability of such a view had weakened.

There were various reasons for this. One was what he saw as the remarkable “opening” of the Roman Catholic Church to ecumenical activities, discussion and hospitality — a hospitality he personally enjoyed in various Catholic venues in Rome, Europe and America from the late 1960s onwards. He had a strong admiration for Pope Paul VI, an admiration that seems to have been reciprocal, and as one who, as he told me, had always thought the 1930 Lambeth Conference’s acceptance of the practice of contraception an error, he was a strong supporter of that pope’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae. Secondly, he had come to believe since around 1968 and in connection with that year’s Lambeth Conference, that the Anglican Communion was becoming more and more “unprincipled” in its ecumenical dealings with other Christian traditions, and more tolerant than was wise of heterodox theologians and their theologies. His correspondence, now in the archives of Pusey House, Oxford, contains some tense and even fraught exchanges with his old friend Michael Ramsey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, over some of the resolutions of the 1968 Lambeth Conference, and over the Anglican-Methodist unity votes of 1969 and 1972, which the Methodists supported, as did Ramsey, but which failed to achieve the requisite majority in the Church of England’s General Synod, and which, in their final form, Mascall opposed. Thirdly, he was an “impossibilist” on the ordination of women, at least to the priesthood and episcopate (I never heard him express an opinion on the ordination of women to the diaconate) and felt that to “ordain” women destroyed the credibility of the “Catholic claims” of any church body that did so.

From the 1960s onwards his more “polemical” books, such as The Secularization of Christianity (1965), Theology and the Gospel of Christ (1977) and Whatever Happened to the Human Mind (1980) — none of which dealt solely, or even mostly, with matters of Anglican concern — reflected this concern with “things gone awry.” His final unpublished book manuscript, now in the Pusey House archives, which seems to date from about 1985 and had the title The Overarching Question: Divine Revelation or Human Invention, is, like these other works, not primarily Anglican in its focus, but has a final chapter, “And Anglicanism Whither?,” in which he attacks both the synodical structures of modern Anglican churches, in which truth is “created” by legislative-assembly-style votes, as with the “ordination” of women, and the inability of successive Lambeth Conferences to exercise the type of authority which he believed was inherent in the episcopate as understood by Catholics. In what seems to have been remnants of an earlier draft version of the book he attacked the Anglican theory of “comprehensiveness” and the related idea that it was the glory of the Church of England and Anglicanism generally that it possessed three “schools of thought,” the “catholic,” the “evangelical,” and the “liberal,” each one of which embraced a part of the truth but each of which needed the others to “complement” and “balance” it — he saw it rather as an administrative devise or plausible fiction to conceal the fact of three parties or groups “severally holding three irreconcilable views of the nature of the Christian religion” existing alongside one another in the same church; and in it he went on to criticize what he saw as a return of a form of the Anglican “Liberal Catholicism” of the 1920s and 30s, in which a “magisterium” of academic scholars would be the ultimate arbiters of Christian Truth and Church Tradition.

On my final visit to Mascall in August 1992 I found him visibly and emotionally upset in a way that I had never previously experienced. The Women’s Ordination (Priesthood) Bill was to come up for its final vote in November of that year — it squeaked by the necessary two-thirds majority by only two votes, the votes of Evangelical laymen who changed their minds (or at least their votes) in response to the emotional pleas in favor of the bill by the new Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey — and he was alarmed a the prospect. “I know what I shall have to do if the bill passes,” he said to me, “but I don’t know if I shall have the strength and health to do it. I hope I die first.” I didn’t dare to ask him what “it” was, and he did die first: the General Synod did approve the measure in November 1992, but the passage of the legislation through Parliament subsequently, and the “Act of Synod” providing compensation for those opponents of women’s ordination who would feel compelled to leave the church, and a scheme of Provincial Episcopal Visitors (or “flying bishops”) for those who wished to remain in the Church of England — a scheme now evidently to be withdrawn and terminated in connection with the legislation to allow women bishops — ensured that the measure did not come into legal effect until February 1994, a year after Mascall’s death.

What would he have decided? After his death I made some attempts to contact the executor of his will, listed in his obituary in The Times as “Col. Robert Gould,” but to no avail. A friend of mine inquired some years ago of the recently-deceased former Bishop of Chichester, Eric Kemp (1915-2009), a friend of Mascall’s, who in his memoirs said that in the unlikely event that he would ever feel compelled to leave the Church of England he would become Orthodox, who replied that he thought he would become Orthodox. Another friend made the same inquiry of the late Msgr. Graham Leonard (1923-2010), a former Bishop of London who became a Catholic in 1994, and likewise a friend of Mascall, who responded that he was sure that he would have become a Catholic. Then a chance telephone conversation with a friend led to another with a colleague of that friend, who identified “Col. Robert Gould” as in fact “Fr. Robert Gould,” a man who in his youth had been a colonel in the “territorial army” (the British equivalent of the National Guard), had then been ordained in the Church of England, served as a priest in it for many years, until he had become a Catholic at the time of Mascall’s death, and had resumed the use of the “courtesy title” of colonel until his subsequent ordination in the Catholic Church. I was given Fr. Gould’s telephone number at the retirement home in which he lived, and in subsequent conversations with him learned that Mascall, whose confessor Fr. Gould had been, had after much agonizing come to the conclusion that he would have to leave the Church of England if the legislation should pass — but that by the time it did pass his advancing debilitation had reached such a state that he concluded that he did not have the mental faculties to make such a decision. At the end, though, it seems that he was a Catholic in desire if not in fact. We should remember him today, and on this day, as someone whose thought, writings — and lived experience — forms a bright tessera in the mosaic of the Anglican patrimony that is moving towards reconstitution within the Catholic Church. Perhaps he might one day be a candidate for canonization, a suggestion made recently concerning Edward Bouverie Pusey, as one of the earthly inspirers and heavenly patrons of this movement.

Our Lady of Fatima, Bishop Fulton Sheen, and what we think of the Bishops

Once again, just as with our series of posts on Our Lady of Victories and Our Lady of the Rosary, which you can find here, here (including a homily from Fr John Hunwicke preached at St Mary's Bourne Street,  and here,  we have focused on one commemoration in the Church's calendar at the expense of another.  October 13 is indeed our local feast day, a celebration of St Edward the Confessor.  Yet, elsewhere in the Catholic world, millions also mark events in Fatima.  The last of the six apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Fatima occurred on this date in 1917.  If you watch the film at the end of this post, you'll see Bishop Fulton Sheen explain, in his awe-inspiring style, the implications and remarkable nature of these events in this truly remarkable footage. 

Now there's a Bishop telling like it is without any apology.  His unique and inimitable style brought many to the Faith, and reinforced the faith of many others.  His weekly television broadcasts in the 1950s attracted audiences of up to 30 million, achieving more viewers than the most popular entertainers of the time.  Yet, Bishop Sheen, even if blessed with the same dramatic screen presence as the Pope at the time, Pope Pius XII (to whom frequent reference is made in the footage below), was no mere showman.   He rose to become an Auxiliary Bishop in the diocese of New York and eventually became Archbishop of a Titular See.  He was a convincing and eloquent speaker on world affairs, condemning the Vietnam War but also well known for his outspoken condemnation of communism, especially under Stalin (a few weeks after Bishop Sheen's famous February 1953 broadcast in which he announced that "Stalin must one day meet his judgment", Stalin had a stroke and died). He held a Doctorate in Philosophy from the Catholic University of Louvain, and was the first American to win the Cardinal Mercier prize, awarded for his doctoral thesis.  The Cardinal's name is very familiar to the former regulars of St Mary's Bourne St who make up the Marylebone Ordinariate Group of course, and another Sheen connection to Bourne St is that while teaching at St Edmund's College, Ware, he met Ronald Knox.

Warmly embraced by Pope John Paul II at St Patrick's Cathedral in New York in 1979, the Cause for his Canonisation has been open since 2002.  Let us pray that the Church will soon be able recognise its loyal son, this Servant of God, as a saint.

Do all these kind words about a Bishop seem strange when coming from a former Anglo-Catholic?  After all, Anglo-Catholics have always been well known for having a deep suspicion of their bishops, even if their respect for the office of bishop is beyond question.  Anglo-Catholic history is full of huge disputes with the bishops of the Church of England (and still is).  Anglo-Catholics were always happier with a selected group of like-minded Anglican bishops: in recent days that meant the "Flying Bishops", almost all of whom are now with us in the Ordinariate, and in days long gone that often meant those from far flung corners of Empire.  This phenomenon is referred to in a poem by Eric Mascall (another giant in the history of St Mary's Bourne St), the "Ultra-Catholic", and in John Betjeman's "Summoned by Bells".

I am an Ultra-Catholic -No 'Anglo, I beseeech you!
You'll find no trace of heresy in anything I teach you.
The clergyman across the road has whiskers and a bowler,
But I wear buckles on my shoes and sport a feriola.

My alb is edged with deepest lace, spread over rich black satin;
The Psalms of David I recite in heaven's own native Latin,
And though I don't quite understand those awkward moods and tenses,
My ordo recitandi's strict Westmonasteriensis.

I read the children in my school the Penny Catechism,
Explaining how the C. of E.'s in heresy and schism.
The truths of Trent and Vatican I bate not one iota.
I have not met the Rural Dean. I do not pay my quota.

The Bishop's put me under his 'profoundest disapproval'
And, though he cannot bring about my actual removal,
He will not come and visit me or take my confirmations.
Colonial prelates I employ from far-off mission stations.

The music we perform at Mass is Verdi and Scarlatti.
Assorted females form the choir; I wish they weren't so catty.
Two flutes, a fiddle and a harp assist them in the gallery.
The organist left years ago, and so we save his salary.

We've started a 'Sodality of John of San Fagondez,'
Consisting of five young men who serve High Mass on Sundays;
And though they simply will not come to weekday Mass at seven,
They turn out looking wonderful on Sundays at eleven.

The Holy Father I extol in fervid perorations,
The Cardinals in curia, the Sacred Congregations;
And, though I've not submitted yet, as all my friends expected,
I should have gone last Tuesday week, had not my wife objected.

And now the Betjeman extract, reflecting a different time of course, when the Church of England, in the words of Archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher, was happy to state openly that "The Church of England has no doctrine of its own save that of the One Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church" and when it still thought that the "greater question" as Betjeman put it, was something other than a need to create greater divides with the Church in the West and the East :

Silk-dressing-gowned, to Sunday-morning bells,
Long after breakfast had been cleared in Hall,
I wandered to my lavender-scented bath;
Then, with a loosely knotted shantung tie
And hair well soaked in Delhez' Genêt d'Or,
Strolled to the Eastgate. Oxford marmalade
And a thin volume by Lowes Dickinson
But half-engaged my thoughts till Sunday calm
Led me by crumbling walls and echoing lanes,
Past college chapels with their organ-groan
And churches stacked with bicycles outside,
To worship at High Mass in Pusey House.

Those were the days when that divine baroque
Transformed our English altars and our ways.
Fiddle-back chasuble in mid-Lent pink
Scandalized Rome and Protestants alike:
"Why do you try to ape the Holy See?"
"Why do you sojourn in a halfway house?"
And if these doubts had ever troubled me
(Praise God, they don't) I would have made the move.
What seemed to me a greater question then
Tugged, and still tugs: Is Christ the Son of God?
Despite my frequent lapses into lust,
Despite hypocrisy, revenge and hate,
I learned at Pusey House the Catholic faith.
Friends of those days, now patient parish priests,
By worldly standards you have not 'got on'
Who knelt with me as Oxford sunlight streamed
On some colonial bishop's broidered cope.
Some know for all their lives that Christ is God,
Some start upon that arduous love affair
In clouds of doubt and argument; and some
(My closest friends) seem not to want His love -
And why this is I wish to God I knew.
As at the Dragon School, so still for me
The steps to truth were made by sculptured stone,
Stained glass and vestments, holy-water stoups,
Incense and crossings of myself - the things
That hearty middle-stumpers most despise
As 'all the inessentials of the Faith'.

Those were the old days.  Now we are happy members of the Catholic Church, in the Ordinariate, there are some, such as the eminent and always interesting Damian Thompson who would tell us that we should not worry that our attitude to the episcopacy and the hierarchy needs to change.   That may or may not be right, we are too young in the Church to know : let us pray that the Bishops of England and Wales, like all of us, follow the clear message and reminder given by Cardinal Levada recently that the Ordinariate is the Holy Father's personal project and it is his will that it succeed and be encouraged to succeed.  Any loyal son or daughter of the Church will work for the success of the Ordinariate, that is beyond question.

At a more practical level, in the Ordinariate, we have as our Ordinary Monsignor Keith Newton, not the local diocesan Bishop. In that sense at least, the debate is to some extent irrelevant.  All being recent arrivals from the Church of England, we know each other's approach.  Furthermore, for us specifically, the Marylebone Ordinariate Group attends Mass in a diocesan church, where we have been made to feel extremely welcome.  The Ordinariate has much to offer the Church in England and Wales (not least many extra pairs of consecrated hands to assist where and when needed, when Ordinariate commitments permit), and the Church in England and Wales has much to offer the Ordinariate.  In a spirit of charity and positivity, and in obedience to our Holy Father, there is much we can achieve together.

There may or may not be politicking among the hierarchy, but even if there is, for as long as they are still committed to teaching the Catholic faith, for as long as they believe in the Mass, for as long as they are in communion all with each other, all with us and all with the Holy Father, there is nothing too much to worry about.  All that makes our journey worth it, with absolutely no regrets.  Our Lord prayed that all might be one, and so that must remain a priority: a lot of the matters of politicking, whether in the Catholic Church or in the Church of England do not have the same status.








Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.