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.

One Hundred Not Out

This is the one hundredth post to appear on this blog.  The perfect opportunity, then, to reflect on what all this endless writing has been for.

The blog began as a means to record the first few weeks of a group of ex-Anglicans who had joined the Catholic Church through the provisions of Anglicanorum Coetibus.  Partly, this was in line with the well-known phenomenon of there being Ordinariate groups with blogs (most notably of course Fr Ed Tomlinson's blog and Fr Edwin Barnes's blog), as well as blogs of Anglicans with Catholic-leanings who wonder about their future (for example, Let Nothing You Dismay, Ancient Briton and St Peter's London Docks).  However, it was also because our little group was quite unusual, in that we had left our Anglican parish, St Mary's Bourne St, without having been led by our then clergy, and were finding our way on our own.

True, we had a huge amount of help from Fr Christopher Pearson of the London (South) Group, who with Monsignor Newton worked out the practicalities for us.  Furthermore, we could hardly have ended up in a Catholic parish better suited to cope with a group of ex-Anglicans : Fr Christopher Colven and the clergy of St James's Spanish Place are former Anglicans who joined the Catholic Church in the mid 1990s.  These factors were tremendously helpful, but ultimately we felt there was an unusual story, of hopefully some passing interest, to tell.

Time for a few statistics.  We might not reach the heights of Fr Tomlinson's blog (over a thousand hits per day), but for a little group of three (and perhaps now four) without a priest, we have managed to drum up some reasonable level of interest. 

• As at the time of writing, we have reached the grand total of just over 8,900 hits. 
• That means each of our posts (99 having been published up to now) has been read an average of 90 times (though some have been read much much more than that), and that we have had an average of over 57 hits per day.
• At the current rate, we are heading for 21,000 hits per year.
• Unsurprisingly most of our hits come from the UK, but the other countries in our top ten are the USA, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, Romania and Spain.  We also have regular visits from Italy, Switzerland, Latvia, Sweden, Bulgaria, Malawi, South Africa, Israel, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Mexico, Ecuador, Peru and Brazil.
• A significent number of our hits still come from the Marylebone Ordinariate Group's page on Facebook, although this is a smaller proportion than before.  More and more people arrive on this site either directly after searching for Marylebone Ordinariate on e.g. google, or by following a link from another blog.
• 77% of hits to our site are on Windows, 9% on a Blackberry, 5% on a Mac
• 56% of hits to our site are via Internet Explorer, 15% via Firefox and 18% via Safari or Mobile Safari.

As to the different blogposts, I think my favourite is The Angels Rejoice.....and the ex-Anglicans do too, and not because of being self-satisfied and smug at the last line of the blogpost, and only partly because of the fantastic video footage contained therein (a still photo of the event captured in the film is shown below).  No, I like it because it is short (unlike many of the posts on this blog) and because it says succinctly that what we have done feels natural, we don't feel like strangers in a strange land, we don't feel lost, nor that we have somehow been crushed to conform.

How long will this blog continue, now that we have arrived and have begun to settle in properly?  Christmas originally seemed like the right time to stop.  Perhaps you noted the beginnings of a valedictory tone in Christmas Past, Christmas Present, but this had gone by the time we reached A Catholic Christmas, most likely due to the next "right time to stop" having appeared, the Ordinariate Anniversary Evensong celebrations.   The Ordinariate anniversary came and went, there followed some comment on the outcome of the Church of England's General Synod (something that often makes people, no matter the context, think that it is the "right time to stop (breathing)"), and now here we are, at the hundredth blogpost.

We shall see.  There are three more blogposts stored up in draft, which together kick the decision into touch for a while at least.  In particular, there is a rather fun one ready for later this week, focussing on a towering figure of nineteenth-century English Catholicism whom we think Ordinariate members should take to their hearts, and including some excellent vintage footage.

Until then, thank you for visiting this site and for your interest in this blog and in the Ordinariate.

Nearer and Nearer Draws the Time

And which time would that be, you may ask?  For the purposes of today's post, there are two times to which I refer.

The first, of course, is Sunday's anniversary Solemn Evensong, Procession of the Blessed Sacrament and Benediction at St James's Spanish Place.  This is shaping up to be quite an event.  Fr Colven kindly included a notice about it in this week's parish notes at St James's, inviting parishioners to join us.  The relevant extract is below.

To mark the first anniversary of the setting up of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham (Pope Benedict’s initiative for Anglicans coming into full communion with the Catholic Church), there will be Solemn Evensong & Benediction here at Saint James’s at 5pm (note time) next Sunday 15th January – Monsignor Keith Newton will preside and Bishop Peter Elliott, the Holy See’s Delegate for the Ordinariate in Australia, will be there. Everyone is welcome to share in this example of Anglican patrimony!

Beyond that, we continue to pick up "internet chatter", as the security services say, on the subject.   We have already highlighted posts by Fr Ed Tomlinson and Fr Edwin Barnes about visitors coming to London from Tunbridge Wells, Salisbury and Bournemouth.  We have also now spotted a post by Fr Jeff Woolnough about people travelling in from Southend.  There is even an announcement on the website of the Scotland Ordinariate Groups.  All are welcome, not only Ordinariate members, but all Catholics and all Anglicans, indeed anyone who wishes to mark with joy and thanksgiving this first anniversary of the Ordinariate's existence.

A sterling job seems to have been done about spreading the word (see our earlier blogpost here).  Not only Deacon Daniel Lloyd's excellent poster (as reproduced once again, shamelessly, below) but also a mention in The Portal and a popular Facebook event.  Readers have "shared" messages that have been posted on the Marylebone Ordinariate Group's Facebook fansite on their own "walls", as well as sending emails containing links to our blogposts to their own friends.  For all this publicity, we thank you very sincerely.  Keep up the good work, and please don't relent until 4.59pm on Sunday.

The Facebook Event is intriguing.  Not everyone we know who has declared that they are coming has yet accepted on Facebook, but equally that demonstrates that a lot of people do not manage their diary via Facebook events.  Given that that is the case, we think that the number of people who have accepted on Facebook under-represents the proportion of those who have been invited via Facebook that will attend.  All this makes estimating the quantities of food and wine to purchase rather tricky.

The work associated with the preparations has been shared fairly around between us all in the Marylebone Ordinariate Group, and with Fr Christopher Pearson and Fr Christopher Colven helping and guiding us, we are hopeful that all of you who make the effort to attend will feel more than glad that you did.

• A draft Order of Service has been prepared and awaits its imprimatur. 
• Wine is arriving on Saturday to refresh the throats of those tired after so much singing.
• The St James's choir is very much looking forward to the opportunity to sing from a repertoire that they don't get to sing very often at Spanish Place.  The Director of Music and the Organist, both former Anglicans themselves, are also very keen.
• A serving team has been gathered and is shortly to be briefed.
• Knights of Malta are at the ready to carry the canopy in procession.

Please continue to tell or to remind everyone you know about what is happening next Sunday at 5pm in St James's.  It promises to be an event to remember, and will demonstrate to everyone not just that the Ordinariate is alive and well, confident and keen to show potential joiners and all well wishers that those who join are delighted to have done so, but also that we are of sufficient scale, and sufficiently well organised, to mark our great days in this way.

So what is the other time that is drawing near?  I want to highlight a blogpost by Fr Ed Tomlinson from earlier today.  It picks up on a theme that has been circulating more and more in recent weeks, for example in Geoffrey Kirk's recent peerless article in New Directions (never has the case been argued more succinctly and more irrefutably), and indeed even here on this blog, in one of our most read posts Denial Ain't Just a River in Egypt.    The theme is that the time is coming for those Anglo-Catholics in the Church of England to face up to some tremendously difficult decisions.  We do not envy them this, leaving is never easy, and we offer our heartfelt prayers for all those who find this a very troubling time, yet for the detailed reasons set out by Geoffrey Kirk and by the inimitable and ever-forthright Fr Ed, they are being forced to arrive at the crossroads.  General Synod meets in a few weeks from now to vote on proposals that really would pull the rug out from under the feet of remaining claims of CofE catholicity: with this and with the upcoming second wave of Ordinariate joiners, it will be a difficult time for remaining faithful Anglo-Catholics.

In his post, Fr Ed explains why it is only natural that those of us in the Ordinariate should continue to be interested in and care about what is happening in our former home, and sets out his vision of the future for the various groups who would categorise themselves as Anglo-Catholics, or as being on the catholic wing of the Church of England.

We commend his whole blogpost to you.  It can be found here.  As a taster, here is Fr Ed's powerful conclusion.

I hope this post, which could do with more time to be written properly, presents the reasons I believe Ordinariate members not only have a right but a reason to debate with those left behind. Our hope is not to poach happy Anglicans – that would be rude- but to call to those people who rightfully belong in the Catholic church. And who could oppose such desire which springs from a concern for truth and spiritual welfare?

Doubtless though some readers will be angry. They will not like what I have written. I only ask this question. Is it because the analysis is wrong or because it touches a raw nerve? I have no desire to upset but surely we need clarity and honesty as we look to the future…

Perhaps it is time those who now lead the Anglo-Catholic movement to provide a coherent and convincing argument of why they claim to remain ‘Catholic’ having said no to the offer from Rome and having accepted the reality of life within a fast evolving synodically governed church?  Out of respect this needs be done without downplaying or dismissing the Ordinariate which is an initiative of the Holy Father himself.

If they cannot do this conviningly then it is surely time they were honest with their people. The Catholic option is the Ordinariate. The stay at home option is now, logic and honesty dictates, that of being- not Catholic- but congregational high church protestants within a liberalising body. I would dearly love an answer that is consistent with everything the Catholic movement of the C of E has said over the last half century. A movement which always looked to Rome and prayed for unity with Peter.

One thing that we hope and pray that Sunday will achieve is that we will be able to demonstrate that we are a happy and confident body of people, delighted with the decisions we have taken (as hard as they were) and without any regrets.  The Holy Father has offered the same welcome to all who wish it, a chance to bring treasured Anglican heritage and usually extremely "sound" catholic teaching with you into the full communion of the Catholic Church.  Let us all do our very best to make any Anglicans who attend on Sunday, and any who might read of the event, hear of it, or see photos of it, want to find out more about what makes us so happy with the path we have chosen.

See you on Sunday, DV.........

An Idea Whose Time Has Come

We have previously mentioned Dr William Oddie's reflections in his marvellous book The Roman Option that an Ordinariate in the UK might well have come about in the 1990s.  If he is right, and certainly his writing is very convincing, then perhaps that might have smoothed the Tiber crossing for some, but our feeling is more and more that the way things have worked out is by no means an inferior outcome. 

The turn of the year is a natural time for this kind of reflection (both the end of the liturgical year and the end of the calendar year), but so too is the upcoming first "birthday" of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham.  Preparations for the great day continue, and we are pleased to note multiple blogposts by Fr Edwin Barnes and Fr Ed Tomlinson talking of plans for their groups to join us on the big day, and we can tell from acceptances being received on the Facebook event set up to advertise the 15th that people are putting the date in their diary.

Thinking of these anniversary celebrations has brought home just how much we feel that there is indeed something to celebrate, not just something to mark or to note, but in fact something that we truly feel like celebrating with joy and thanksgiving.  There have been adjustments to make of course, not least losing such frequent contact with many very good friends from St Mary's Bourne Street, but none of our little Ordinariate group feels the slightest regret at our decision to become Catholics. 

The timing of the birth of the Ordinariate was perfect for us.  Of course we sometimes wonder, with the great benefit of hindsight, how it was that we didn't make the leap earlier, but frankly it doesn't matter.  The Ordinariate came into existence at precisely the time when we felt that our situations were starting to become untenable : the huge sense of welcome present in Westminster Cathedral on 15 January 2011 (at the ordination as Catholic priests of our three monsignori) was precisely the right thing to set us on our way.

A truly excellent article by Geoffrey Kirk in the latest edition of New Directions, and brought to our attention by the Ordinariate Portal talks of why it is that those Anglo-Catholics still trying to live out the Catholic Faith in the Church of England might also consider that the solution that the Ordinariate provides has arrived at precisely the right time for them. 

In our previous post Denial Ain't Just a River in Egypt we talked about some of the same group of people that Geoffrey Kirk considered.  There are those who do not (or in some cases who wilfully refuse to) see the clear logic of the case Dr Kirk presents.  However, our thoughts should most of all be for those who find themselves very confused by what is happening around them, who see the difficulties facing their beloved Church of England, and yet who do not feel that the Catholic Church (whether through the Ordinariate or otherwise) is right for them at the moment.  Those people are in a very tricky situation, and they fully deserve our prayers and best wishes.  We can only hope that the joy with which we feel the anniversary of the Ordinariate's existence should be marked will be a sign to them that there is a solution, and that there are people who are more than willing to help show them the clear benefits of accepting it. 

For all this discussion of now being the right time for the Ordinariate, there are nonetheless those who continue to want to knock the Ordinariate.  In the same earlier blogpost we talked of various groups of people who are not yet sure of what the Ordinariate is about, and we acknowledged a continuing obligation on the part of all of us in the Ordinariate to explain ourselves to our fellow Catholics and to interested Anglicans.  However, we also talked of those who are not belittling the Ordinariate out of unfamiliarity or ignorance, but out of a deliberate desire to be dismissive. 

For example, there are those who argue that being made up of around 60 clergy and around 1000 laity makes the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham very small.  Another c.20 clergy and another c.200-300 laity entering the Ordinariate this year doesn't seem to cause them to change their opinion on this.  The idea that if the Church of England's General Synod goes the way that most expect it to in February, there might well be one or two more Ordinariate joiners seems to fall on equally deaf ears.  True, even the most ardent fan of the Ordinariate would have to concede that these figures are not Pentecostalist in scale, but you have to be pretty obstinate to argue that this is not a significant shift.   With the obvious exception of the years following 1992-1993, how many other times in living memory has there been a shift on this scale between the Church of England and the Catholic Church in this country, with the realistic hope of more to follow? 

Others criticise the Ordinariate for not being a single homogeneous entity, with disparities between its constituent groups (though it isn't easy to see how those in the Church of England can say such things with a straight face).  It is fair to say that the groups are in many varied situations, but it seems ludicrous to suggest that this is a sign of failure or insignificance. Some groups are smaller than others; most have their own masses while the members of other groups attend parish mass with their new Catholic brothers and sisters; some are geographically in a diocese which is more overtly supportive to the growth of the Ordinariate than others; there are more groups in the south than in the north.  Yet, to this list of differences, my response would be "So what?"  There is one thing that is far more important than all these differences, and that is that all those who have joined the Ordinariate have followed our convictions and have become Catholics, by means of a structure put in place by the Holy Father, specifically recognising that we do not join with nothing, that we have years of sound teaching, sound tradition and sound faith behind us, and that we might even have something useful to bring into the Catholic Church.

The time had come for us, just as it has for many ex-Anglicans over the centuries (not just in the period following 1992-1993), and just as it will for many others who wish to avail themselves of the provisions of Anglicanorum Coetibus and come into the full communion of the Catholic Church.  The Ordinariate was there to welcome us into the fold, and it behoves all of us to do our best to ensure that anyone else who might consider joining the Catholic Church is aware of the benefits that working towards Christian Unity by being a part of the Ordinariate might bring. 

The fruits of Anglicanorum Coetibus are not limited to this country.  This is no flash in the pan, no phenomenon that will drift away quietly after the first people joining the English Ordinariate have quietened down.  We would like to congratulate Fr Jeffrey Steenson on the announcement of his appointment as Ordinary of the Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter, the Ordinariate that will welcome former Anglicans into the Catholic Church in North America, in the same way as the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham does here.  What an excellent name for this second Ordinariate formed under Anglicanorum Coetibus, with its link both to the relic enshrined so prominently at St Peter's in Rome and to the feast day that starts the annual Week of Christian Unity. 

The establishment of this North American Ordinariate is also a source of great joy, as will be the establishment of the Australian Ordinariate later this year. 

Let us all make every effort to display that sense of joy and thanksgiving by being present at St James's for Solemn Evensong, Procession of the Blessed Sacrament and Benediction on the 15th January.  The time for the Ordinariate is indeed now, as is the time to celebrate its first year of existence, and the birth of sister Ordinariates in North America and Australia.

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.

Memories of Bourne St, Lepanto and Fr Hunwicke

Our recent blogpost Our Lady of Victories, Our Lady of the Rosary and the Battle of Lepanto seems to have been popular with our readers.  Inspired by that, we cast our minds back a little over a year to early October 2010, to when we three members of the Marylebone Ordinariate Group were attending St Mary's Bourne St, and were privileged to hear a very fine homily from Fr John Hunwicke on Our Lady of Victories. 

The day after his visit, Fr Hunwicke's blog Liturgical Notes included a charming report of his day out in London, in which he highlighted the very important job performed by my two daughters, who took occasional breaks from their playing in the Presbytery Library to come through to the Dining Room to help out with the serious business of chocolate eating at lunch. 

The comments below that post on Liturgical Notes are of relevance to a particular point raised by Fr Edwin Barnes in his blog Ancient Richborough, the question of the sung Angelus as a piece of Anglican Patrimony. 

The comments on Liturgical Notes include information not only on how the sung Angelus began being sung at Bourne Street, but also on how it went from there to the USA along with Monsignor Graham Leonard.  There are also two links to video footage of the Angelus being sung at Bourne Street (posted by me, it must be admitted).

By kind permission of the author, here is that truly invigorating homily, given one year ago.  Our Lady of Victories, Our Lady of the Rosary, Our Lady of Walsingham, pray for us.

Homily preached in S Mary’s, Bourne Street, October 3, 2010.

Don John of Austria has burst the battle line!
Don John of Austria, pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
Purpling all the Ocean like a bloody pirate’s sloop,
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,
Breaking of the hatches and bursting of the holds
..........................................................................
Don John of Austria has set his people free ...
Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath ...
Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.

For a few blissful years after 1571, this Sunday, the first in October, was kept as the feast of our Lady of Victories. And why not! The Battle of Lepanto, in which the Holy League defeated the navy of the Ottoman Turks, preserved Catholic Europe from the fate which had befallen Orthodox Byzantium. We, I suppose, are a bit more reserved than Chesterton was about the glories of war. His rhetoric about Don John’s galleys crashing through the line of the Turkish galleys “purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate’s sloop” is not entirely to our taste ... a trifle bloodthirsty. And perhaps I’d best be careful what I say about a battle between Christendom and Islam; I wouldn’t like to fall victim to the barrage that met our Holy Father after his Regensburg lecture. So I won’t make any more references to “scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds”. I shall deny myself the pleasure of repeating the mannered alliteration of “breaking of the hatches up, and bursting of the bonds”. Above all, you will not hear, falling from my lips, the dread C-word, the word Crusade. No; I shall even leave unsaid the offensive words “slaughter-painted poop”: and, instead, whisk you up from the sea at Lepanto to deposit you in the City of Rome. What were they doing there on this fateful day? They were holding a rosary procession, round the Piazza di San Pietro. And this was not only happening in Rome; all over Catholic Europe, the Confraternities, the even-more-lofty Archconfraternities, even the very Sodalities, were fighting the Battle of Lepanto. Pope S Pius V believed that the great victory was secured by the rosaries that clanked through the hands of the pious multitudes of the Catholic heartlands. Indeed, the Pontiff had a vision of the victory long before its news reached Rome. (What a Pontiff! Regnans in excelsis one year, Lepanto the next! In the Brompton Oratory, a few feet from the new altar to B John Henry Newman, his statue stands in the Lady Chapel. At a time when some people in the C of E are playing with a Society of Ss Hinge and Bracket, I wonder if a more virile and combative title would have been “The Legion of S Pius V” ... the Pope who won Lepanto with the rosaries of the faithful.)

Of course, we don’t find such simple talk, all this stuff about prayer being answered by naval victories, quite so easy nowadays. Living in our more sophisticated age ....  NO!!   I am not going to be convinced that our age is in the least sophisticated. Never was there an age so unsophisticated, so dominated by what S Augustine and the medievals called nugacitas – a preoccupation with the trivial and the frivolous. I want suggest to you a Christian duty of turning our backs on the culture of the silly – and the ephemeral – and of 95% of what flickers across our Television screens. I want to put before you the notion that what people call our Christian mumbo-jumbo is Truth and Reality. I want to remind you of S Paul’s neat and pointed dualisms: what the World calls strong, God calls weak; what the World calls folly, God calls wisdom. And I even want to tell you that there is a God and that he has a Mother and that he has put it into the hands of his Mother to deliver the goods – in union with the synergy, the co-working, of the Christian multitudes.

The feast of our Lady of Victories only lasted a few years. A more pusillanimous pope, Gregory XIII, soon renamed it “Our Lady of the Rosary”. The Orthodox are more robust; in their Akathist Hymn they call our blessed Lady the hupermakhos strategos, the Protecting General with the aprosmakheton kratos, the power that cannot be fought against. They see Mary as less a simpering if pious girl and rather more as the Woman You Don’t Tangle With. By one of those curious coincidences, at the start of October Orthodoxy celebrates the Feast of the Protecting Veil of the Mother of God; that relic which, in the glory days of Byzantium, used to go into battle at the head of her armies. So the commemoration of our Lady of Victories, at this time of the year, is truly ecumenical! The tradition of both East and West is that our Lady of Victories Rules, OK! Because Mary does still win battles today. She still delivers the goods, just as she did at Lepanto. In the old Roman Liturgy, one of the anthems at Mattins on her feasts is Gaude Maria Virgo:cunctas haereses sola interemisti in universo mundo: Mary alone, joy to her, has put down every heresy in the entire world. She put down the heresy of Islam in the waters of Lepanto; because Islam is, for those who hold the Christian Faith, a heresy. People will tell you that Islam treats Jesus with respect and even says nice things about Mary. That is perfectly true. But Islam is, in Christian theology, a heresy because it doesn’t acknowledge Jesus as being God. And because its adherents don’t believe that he is God, they can’t understand why we call Mary the Mother of God, Mother of the Incarnate Creator, Mother of the enfleshed All-Merciful One. But perhaps I should avoid the Quixotic error of tilting only at Islamic windmills – I do not believe that they are the real enemies whom we in our culture are facing. Our Lady of Victories puts down heresies much closer home than Islam; for example, the heresy (which our Islamic brethren join us in condemning) of regarding sexuality as our toy at our disposal, rather than as God’s gift to be used as he wills and how he wills and even – dare I say it – if he wills. Mary puts it down by the glory of her perpetual Virginity. As the good old English Missal translates the Preface for her feasts, “the glory of her maidenhood yet abiding”. Mary puts down the great current Western heresy that life is to be lived for the personal self-fulfilment of the individual: she puts it down by her command “Whatever he says unto you, do it”. Our Lady of Victories puts down the heresy of Dawkins the Daft, and of all his minions, side-kicks and running-dogs – the error that this world is empty of God: Mary puts it down because she sits at the central point of the Universe and in the middle point of all the ages, sits there great with child. For Mary’s child is God and the Bump in her tummy is the One who made the Universe, so that S Ambrose calls her plena deo , the one who is Full of God, her belly growing broader as the months pass; a belly which the Orthodox call platutera tou Kosmou, broader than the Universe. Between ourselves, I suspect that poor Dawkins knows in his heart of hearts that our Lady of Victories is his nemesis – witness his tirade against the Catholic Church with its “stench of incense [you can be an atheist and still share the ancient prejudices of the Kensitites!] and a rain of tourist-kitsch Sacred Hearts and preposterously crowned Virgins”.

Preposterously crowned as she is, the great Mother of God Mary most Holy, our Lady of Victories, will do for the whole lot of them, just as she did for Ali Pasha at Lepanto. And how will she do it? I conclude with a reminiscence of my second bishop, Mervyn Stockwood. As you will know, he peopled his diocese of Southwark with what you might call a wide diversity of clerics. At his last clergy meeting which I attended, he surprised the trendies, the Honest-to-God tendency, the Christian Marxists, by simply reminding his clergy of the power of the daily Rosary. There’s the Patrimony for you!

Our Lady of Victories, our Lady of the Rosary, carried aloft by the sculptors on billowing draperies, her bulgy baroque crown precariously, preposterously, perched upon her head, Mary is the Woman of Triumph whom God is giving to this world.