Slow Moving Traffic in London

As Ordinariate members who used to be part of the Anglican Diocese of London we were, of course, intrigued by the news that Richard Chartres has at long last persuaded somebody to fill the vacancy created by the departure of Monsignor Broadhurst.  We sometimes wonder about what might have been, and indeed about what could still be, for Anglo-Catholics who live in that great and historic territory.  In spite of this topic being so close to home for our group, it is not something we have yet explored in any detail here.  As so far only an occasional contributor to this blog, I thought it might be appropriate for a new(ish) voice to offer some thoughts on this, and thereby to remedy this oversight.

In an earlier post on the subject of Anglican Patrimony, we highlighted the danger to blood pressure levels that goes with reading comments on news articles, and more particularly on blogposts. Once you go even further and start to read internet forum discussions, then you really are starting to take risks with your health.

Mercifully, comments on this blog (if they make it past censorship) are often complimentary, and are invariably constructive either of themselves, or through allowing an important point to be made in response.

Notwithstanding this health warning, recent perusal of a few internet forums that touched on Ordinariate matters revealed a comment that is worth exploring. The comment asked about the Ordinariate in London, specifically in the area where the Ordinariate's territory overlaps with that of the Archdiocese of Westminster. This area is next to territory covered by the Archdiocese of Southwark and the Diocese of Brentwood, where some of the largest Ordinariate groups in the land can be found: yet where the Ordinariate overlaps with the territory of the Anglican Diocese of London, we are not (yet) present in large numbers.

The comment suggested that, because of this, we should all simply forget about the Ordinariate in this area, and that any Anglican who wants to join the Catholic Church should do so solely through the RCIA process in his or her nearest parish. That option is of course available to any who wish to follow it, and always has been, but we have discussed at very great length (here and here, for example) how that recommendation betrays unfamiliarity with, and severely underestimates the tremendous wisdom of, the Holy Father's personal project. That is not a criticism: more than anything else, the comment reflects the ongoing need for the Ordinariate to continue explaining its origins, its purpose and its status in the Church. We referred to this phenomenon here and here, and we understand that an "awareness" programme (to use trendy language) is being planned.

Still, the observation that generated the comment merits further consideration. Why is it that the Anglican Diocese of London, particularly the Two Cities Area (ie the City of London and the City of Westminster), has, so far, seen fewer moves to the Ordinariate than other regions? First we need some historical perspective, then we might speculate as to some of the other causes of this phenomenon (noting, of course, that no one parish and no one individual will have the full combination of the causes suggested).

In "the old days", London was seen as one of the bastion dioceses of Anglo-Catholicism in the Church of England. Alongside other Anglican dioceses like Chichester and Blackburn, it was once at the heart of that movement. Names such as Charles Lowder and Alexander Mackonochie still stand out in Anglo-Catholic history. We have talked before on this blog about the Ritualist Riots at St Barnabas Pimlico, and how the Anglo-Catholics of that time maintained their faith in face of the strongest opposition. Why then, should London, and Central London in particular, not yet have shown itself to be keener on the Ordinariate?

There are many factors that have come together to give rise to this situation, and of course each (and others) might be present in any combination in the minds of those who might have been thought likely to join the Ordinariate, but who have not (yet) done so.

First of all, yes, London was indeed one of the bastions of Anglo-Catholicism, but it has never been a wholly Anglo-Catholic diocese, nor anything like it. There has always been a mix of middle-of-the-road and evangelical parishes, and in more recent times there was seemingly a pattern of appointing diocesans from alternating "churchmanships" (this was a practice that ended when Monsignor Graham Leonard was replaced by Dr David Hope, both Anglo-Catholics upon appointment). Yet, this is in no way special: for the last 150 years, most Anglican dioceses have contained an extremely diverse base of "churchmanship".

One can conjecture that having historically been one of the bastion dioceses London has seen proportionally more than its fair share of departures across the Tiber. Before and after the major exodus around 1993, when hundreds of clergy and thousands of laity left the Church of England for the Catholic Church, there has been a constant and steady trickle of people coming into full communion, still continuing today. The turmoil around 1993, which centred around whether the Church of England, by a system of democratic votes among both its clergy and its laity, had the authority to decide on a major change (whatever that change's merits might or might not be) to Holy Order, saw London very well represented in the transfers.

This was all happening at the zenith of London having Anglo-Catholicism as almost its very own established religion, and as such the fall out was bound to be considerable.

Monsignor Graham Leonard, the then recently retired diocesan bishop, joined the Catholic Church, the most senior Anglican cleric ever to do so, and soon became a very high profile example of ordination sub conditione. One of the London suffragan bishops (in Anglican parlance, this means an assistant bishop to the diocesan) also became a Catholic priest: now Monsignor John Klyberg, he had been a very vocal and visible presence in the Anglo-Catholic world. The present Rector of St James's Spanish Place, where our Ordinariate group attends Mass, was at that time the Vicar of the Anglican Parish of St Stephen's Gloucester Road: over the years since he left, somewhere between 70-100 people have followed him to Rome. If we think of our own former Anglican home, St Mary's Bourne St, some 30-40 left for Rome in the early to mid 90s (the tales of the empty rows at the front of the epistle side of church are still fresh), with a small trickle that has never completely dried up continuing thereafter.

Given that attendances in Anglican parishes in Central London are typically around the 80-120 level, these are significant numbers. Just as we have seen with the Ordinariate, the people who leave are often among some of the most committed, not merely those with the most knowledge of the Faith, but also those who give the most of their time (and sometimes of their money) to the running of the parish. How could the impact of these departures have been anything other than significant on the forceful drive for Catholic Unity that was once the proud boast of many an Anglo-Catholic parish?

How was this dealt with? In many parishes, the solution adopted was (and still is) quite simply not to talk about it. A number of people had gone, that was sad but there it was: life went on. One can understand, up to a point. By not talking about what had happened, by putting away considerations of why it had happened, a false sense of calm and tranquility could prevail. The divided opinions were there, but opportunities for them ever to come to a clash were carefully avoided. This despite the fact that a PCC of such a parish might contain any combination of (1) those worried by Anglican developments and on the impacts on Unity; (2) those in agreement with developments in principle, but not with the way they were being introduced; (3) those vehemently in favour of the developments; (4) a fierce anti-Roman or two; and (5) a healthy sprinkling of people who had no knowledge of or interest in what was going on in the Church of England more widely.

The last group often has much in common with a significant proportion of many a congregation, who quite simply like what they see before them every Sunday morning, and are not in the least bit worried if somewhere else, someone they have never heard of is causing difficulties for other people they have never heard of on a subject for which they care little.  One can understand: church politics are rarely appealing.

The Fawlty Towers style solution "Don't mention Catholic Unity, I mentioned it once but I think I got away with it" was and still is the best way of keeping calm and carrying on, even if it also recalls the childlike response to any overbearing problem "Don't think about it and it will go away."

To be fair to those involved, even at the best of times, the situation would have been extremely difficult to manage. Through years where many leaders of one's constituency had gone, and where holding together existing congregations was tough, leading a parish, politically, theologically and ecclesiologically was a task that few would choose to tackle head on. The conspiracy of silence that resulted did indeed hold many congregations together, papering over cracks whenever necessary, but it also had a rather deleterious side effect, from all perspectives.

In the 1990s, there was a certain amount of flow between many of the Anglo-Catholic parishes in London. Some would move to somewhere more in favour of what was going, others would move to somewhere less in favour, but there was little net change in numbers overall. However, a trend emerged for those from a more mainstream Anglican tradition to start attending what had been Anglo-Catholic strongholds (perhaps because of the music, the language - both real and faux Cranmerian - the architecture, or even the aesthetic appeal of a respectfully executed liturgy with vestments), at first this seemed like a wonderful opportunity for bringing new people into the Anglo-Catholic fold, but in an atmosphere where robustly pro-Catholic teaching had to be handled delicately, the result was in fact of dilution of previously resolutely Anglo-Catholic practice. If you want proof of this, just take a look at how many entering an Anglo-Catholic church now lustrate themselves upon entering the building, ask the Vicar about numbers for confession, consider how many of the congregation at a service marking the Immaculate Conception or the Assumption are from the regular Sunday congregation, and if they are, how well they understand the feast of the day.

None of what is described above is necessarily a bad thing, none of the paragraph above is a criticism. Nurturing faith is a good thing. Blessed John Henry Newman himself, hardly an apologist for Anglicanism, made reference to God's grace existing in the Church of England "through the overflowings of His dispensation". Catering for all, not just for its dedicated constituency or even just for its churchgoers, has historically been a huge strength of the Church of England, and it is an element of Anglican Patrimony of which everyone should be extremely proud.

One could say that if you visit many a Catholic parish, the parish priest might comment on some of the same things. However, for the Anglo-Catholic movement, the inessentials of the Faith, such as lustration and making the sign of the cross have been vitally important. “Vitally” in both senses, both in terms of the "inessentials" being, in fact, essential parts of the movement, and in terms of their being a sign of life in the movement. Members of the Catholic Church never had to prove that they were Catholic, whereas Anglo-Catholicism sought to prove that its members were, sometimes by being "more catholic than the Pope" in adherence even to these small signs and gestures.

This shift in balance bears witness to a certain degree of de-catholicisation of the once entrenched catholic practices of Anglo-Catholicism. When there are so many in a congregation who like the way the "worship" looks, sounds or feels, but would never dream of genuflecting or of asking for the intercession of Our Lady themselves, why should one expect there to be a rush to join a body designed to welcome Anglicans into the universal fold of the Catholic Church?

David Hope, Monsignor Leonard's successor as Anglican Bishop of London, maintained the diocese on a steady course, and held it together as it was. Nothing new of a dramatic nature happened, to the diocese at least, during his tenor.

Then we come to Richard Chartres, whose complex relationship with Anglo-Catholicism was described in our most popular post so far, More Than Words.  Going beyond what was said in that post, there are perhaps two points to highlight.

First, the recent history of the Anglican Bishopric of Fulham. The person who held that post until December 2010 was the Ordinariate's Monsignor John Broadhurst and his predecessor was Monsignor John Klyberg. Before Monsignor Klyberg, there was Brian Masters, who after three years at Fulham was translated to take on what had arguably become the London area bishopric most associated with Anglo-Catholicism, Edmonton. Brian Masters died a little over a decade later in 1998, at the young age of 65, and had a funeral service in St Paul's Cathedral that by all accounts did not leave a dry eye in the house, perhaps because of the ecclesiology disappearing from sight as much as for the loss of great man. Having run the Edmonton area in as Anglo-Catholic a way he could, he was replaced by Peter Wheatley, who, like his boss Dr Chartres, is rather less pro-Roman. Now Dr Baker is to pack up his cappa magna and forsake Pusey House for Fulham, presumably never having discovered the whereabouts of Ebbsfleet, so brief was his tenure there.  One should, perhaps, not be surprised that he has elected to leave the home of lost causes in order to join another, for the ever-diminishing band of Anglo-Catholic clergy are thought better together.

The Church of England heading in a new direction?

Second, the wider history of Provincial Episcopal Visitors, the “PEVs”, and their involvement with London.  Outside London, alternative episcopal oversight was provided by PEVs, the famous "flying bishops", which roles our own Monsignor Newton, Monsignor Burnham and indeed Monsignor Barnes have each held. In London (and in the neighbouring Anglican dioceses of Rochester and Southwark), this role was carried out by the Anglican Bishop of Fulham, except in the Two Cities Area of the diocese. In the Two Cities Area, alternative oversight to the diocesan bishop is provided by another Anglican bishop called......Dr Richard Chartres. Will those central-London Anglo-Catholic parishes presently under the direct rule of Dr Chartres now seek the alternative oversight of Dr Baker?  We will watch with interest.

As mentioned in our post More than Words, whether acting in his capacity as diocesan or in his capacity as provider of alternative episcopal oversight, Dr Chartres let Anglo-Catholic parishes get on with things, allowing the temptation for individual parishes to think that all was well in their world to continue, allowing them to think that all was safe in their comfortable bubble, that the publicity surrounding troubles in the Church of England at large was nothing to do with them.  After all, did not their diocesan bishop still come along, vest properly (more or less) and do pretty much everything that was asked of him liturgically?  Outwardly, all was well.

Beyond this reasoning, why so little movement?

There are those who very properly feel that they should not disrupt their family life or who are understandably reluctant to give up homes and financial security. Some will argue that they do not want to surrender their role as "parish priest" ministering to all within their territory even though such a role has long ceased to have any real meaning in central London. Yet others will be reluctant to abandon a lifestyle that would be less readily tolerated in the Catholic Church. And then there are those who enjoy being a part of the Establishment, even, we suspect, those who covet the opportunity to wear scarlet cassocks, whether given in Anglican shape by HM the Queen or tailored into multi-buttoned catholicity for the more particular clerics.

Perhaps, though, we delude ourselves if we think there are vast numbers of Anglo-Catholics (whatever that term now means, that arguably being exactly the point) who are in some way languishing in the CofE, feeling that they should be elsewhere, who accept what Rome teaches and who are not among those who convince themselves that they ought to be contented with their lot.

Clearly, there are some in that position, perhaps even a good many. However, there are not thousands upon thousands of them. There are many who would describe themselves as Anglo-Catholic who are extremely happy with where the Church of England is going. We might not share their view, but nor do they see themselves as ignoring a call that they ought to answer.  We might challenge their self-definition as any kind of Catholic, but they might challenge the Catholic Church’s claim to hold the monopoly on the use of that term.

They are Anglicans, and happy to be so. There is absolutely nothing wrong, of course, about being a happy Anglican. These are good and honest people who stand by genuinely held positions.

Perhaps, then, what William Oddie foresaw in The Roman Option has come to pass, a positive conclusion where people have a clearer idea of where they stand and of where they want to stand. Perhaps we will now see a Church of England happier in what it is, less divided, more confident in itself and in its interpretation of Christianity, not feeling the need to follow Rome or the Orthodox. Those who wanted to be Catholics have mostly moved on, those who have a different vision are in a place where they are free to proclaim and share that vision without what they might see as being "held back" by those of a more Catholic leaning.

As the Vicar of St Peter's London Docks has written on his own blog :

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.

Perhaps, therefore, this article's premise is entirely wrong, perhaps it is incorrect to wonder why there hasn't been more traffic moving at speed towards the Ordinariate in London. Perhaps Dr Oddie was right all those years ago, and that a happy and more defined, even if rather strange and, for many, largely unexpected result has been attained.

Whether anything will change once Dr Chartres has either retired or been translated elsewhere, who knows, but for now, it seems that most people are where they want to be. Whether it is where they should be and what they may think they are doing there is the subject for another post. 

The Catholic Church: heri et hodie ipse et in saecula  

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.

A New Direction

There were a couple of surprises in the recent edition of New Directions, the magazine of Forward in Faith.  Many of the articles were interesting and good (the famous Davage writing style is always a treat to read), a hallmark of New Directions over many years, but there was some of the magazine that took me rather aback.

In the magazine, a prominent Anglo-Catholic was asked who his favourite historic figure was.  The reply: "Dr Pusey".  Anyone with an Anglo-Catholic background and/or a connection with Pusey House will be able to reflect thoughtfully on that, indeed I have prints of Dr Pusey and Blessed John Henry Newman side by side on my wall at home.  However, the reason for his choice was rather striking.  It was "Because he stayed in the Church of England".  I suppose we can take it that the interviewee is not a great devotee of Blessed John Henry Newman.

Has the mask of the modern Anglo-Catholic slipped?  Is there not even the slightest pretence any more of a shared goal of corporate reunion, something that seemed so important when Blessed John Paul II knelt beside Robert Runcie, then Archbishop of Canterbury, in Canterbury Cathedral?  Is the goal to remain in the Church of England, come what may, and if so, what on earth has all the fuss in General Synod been about, why not just sit quietly in a congregationalist bubble and let everyone else get on with what they wish to do?

Even Dr Pusey himself, in Eirenicon, a publication in which he outlined many of what he perceived to be faults and errors of the Catholic Church, was in fact arguing for a reunion of Catholic Christendom.  His old friend Blessed John Henry Newman, whom shortly before publication Pusey had met for the first time in 20 years, acknowledged as much in a letter to Pusey, in spite of Eirenicon's criticisms :

you discharge your olive branch as from a catapult.

Of course, I am being terribly unfair.  I should put my own Puseyite catapult away.  It was probably a rather tongue-in-cheek comment, in the context of a friendly and jovial discussion at which none of us was present.  We cannot assume that this means we should translate "Better Together" as meaning "Better Together away from the Catholic Church".  Still, I wonder if there is not some small kernel of truth in the analysis as it at first seems to be.   Dr Geoffrey Kirk, a former regular contributor to New Directions in his days as Secretary of Forward in Faith, and one of the newest members of the Ordinariate, put it rather more eloquently than I have, and perhaps rather more bluntly too, talking of Anglo-Catholic leaders who, notwithstanding all that is happening around them, carry on regardless, thereby allowing others to believe all is well :

This ignominious ending to a long and hard-fought campaign is properly a cause of grief and shame. Shame, because it is a betrayal of the entire Catholic movement – of Keble as well as Newman, of Pusey as well as Froude. Grief, because it has exposed a fault-line which, in our generous optimism, many of us supposed not to be there. When Benedict XVI called their bluff, men whose rallying cry had been ‘Look to the Rock from which we are hewn!’ looked the other way. When the life-boat was launched, they complained about its colour. They claimed to act out of affection for the Church of their baptism and ordination. Tragically that is a demonstration of loyalty which, in the course of time, the Church of England will discover that it can well do without.

It may simply be that there is, even among Anglo-Catholics, a residual, irrational, atavistic anti-Romanism which the passage of time has not been able to erode. But I think there is a deeper and more disturbing explanation for this sorry state of affairs.

A characteristic of modern Anglicanism, of all parties and opinions, has been creeping indifferentism. In increasing numbers people have concluded that doctrine does not matter – that it is merely ‘theological’, in the Harold Wilson sense of abstruse and irrelevant. How vividly I remember Dennis Nineham celebrating in the college chapel in a chasuble bought by Austin Farrer, behaving for all the world as though he believed in the Real Presence, when he did not even believe in the Incarnation. And I wondered what John Keble would have made of that.

The old argument was that the Church of England maintained the same historic teachings and traditions as the wider Church.  It was said that there were no differences, even if some work was necessary to make sure that all in the Church of England might come to share this understanding.  As Cardinal Kaspar suggested, since the latter half of the twentieth century, the Church of England has changed its approach from a period just after the second world war when the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, could say

The Church of England has no doctrine of its own, save that of the one Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church.

to a time when Holy Order can be redefined with no reference to the Churches of the first millenium.

The Church of England is of course perfectly entitled to take this approach, and people are perfectly entitled to remain in the Church of England whatever its decisions might be.  Nobody argues the contrary.  There are those who say that the Church of England, as part of the Church Catholic (note the order of the words used), should not take such decisions alone, but the fact is that it does.  A leading proponent of the ordination of women to the Anglican episcopacy, Erika Baker, has said :

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.

She's right.  If you believe that the Church of England is the Church, and that it does not need to have its decisions approved by Rome or Constantinople, then it doesn't make sense to say that the Church of England isn't the Church on the occasions it reaches a conclusion other than one that matches your own opinion.

Certainly, there is nothing wrong with those who are Anglicans wishing to remain Anglicans.  It is their choice, and we as former Anglicans who remained in the Church of England for many years are in no position to criticise that decision.  However, the pretence that nothing has changed (or that nothing is about to change) is wilful blindness.  The line that Dr Fisher took (and we all know that he was not exacly ablaze with Roman Fever) cannot now be uttered other than in wistful nostalgia.

What has happened (or is in the process of happening) is not Catholic at all.  It is not even what one might call Anglo-Catholic.  Part of the great argument for Anglo-Catholicism, for the branch theory, for the Church of England being part of the one universal Church, separated by mere accident of history (ie Tudor politics and Dr Cranmer's subservience), was that the absence of full unity with the wider Church of East and West, while something to be resolved one day in the future (preferably by someone else), did not diminish the Church of England’s self sufficiency. Each individual diocese was the Church in that area, and the resultant disparate nature of the wider entity was not perceived as a problem sufficient to alter the Church of England's historic role as the Catholic Church in this land, a Church that held on to the Catholic Faith as it always had done (even if that last part required considerable intellectual gymnastics to prove it to any degree).

In Tract 90, Blessed John Henry Newman, while still an Anglican (although Tract 90 became a turning point in his process of seeking reception into the Catholic Church), expressed it as follows

The Anglican view of the church has ever been this: that its portions need not otherwise have been united together for their essential completeness, than as being descended from one original. . . . Each church is independent of all the rest. . . . Each diocese is a perfect independent church, is sufficient for itself.

[the]….Bishop of Rome, the head of the Catholic world……. is not the centre of unity

[the Anglican church is]….. essentially complete without Rome

Newman, as we all know, came to realise the error of his ways and to see that this image of a fractured, broken, dismantled Church is not the one to which we should seek to aspire, and is the vision neither of the Gospel nor of the Fathers of the Church. By the time Newman wrote the Apologia, not only had he very much changed his views on the Bishop of Rome, but he also now attached the most tremendous importance to unity (he perhaps realised that to agonise about the accidence and essence of the status of the Petrine Ministry, as he had in Tract 90, was as a mote to the plank of ignoring the Gospel imperative of Unity) :

The Anglican disputant took his stand upon antiquity or apostolicity, the Roman upon catholicity. The Anglican said to the Roman: “There is but One Faith, the ancient, and you have not kept to it”; the Roman retorted: “There is but one Church, the Catholic, and you are out of it.”

How strange it now seems that nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholic arguments were that Rome innovated whereas Anglicanism held firm to the Faith.   Newman himself commented on this in May 1843:

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.

Well, General Synod no longer takes its stand upon antiquity or apostolicity.  Even Newman's Tract 90 arguments cannot now be used : Newman's Tract 90 views as an Anglican depended on a shared

possession of the Succession, their Episcopal form, their Apostolical faith, and the use of the Sacraments.

When that has gone, what is left may be wonderful, it may do huge amounts of good, it may be treasured and loved, it may be run by the most kindly and charitable of people, it may even, through the overflowings of His dispensation be filled with not little grace, but it pays no heed to Christ's prayer for Unity.  What's more, this isolationist strategy is adopted for the sake of "second order issues".

In a stunning sermon given during the celebrations held to mark the 125th Anniversary of Pusey House, Canon Robin Ward, the Principal of St Stephen's House, reminded us that Blessed Pius IX had told Dr Pusey that he was like a bell summoning people to church but never entering it himself; Dr Ward went on to wonder whether Anglo-Catholicism might not be able to hope for a better future than that, now that the Church of England with its two integrities was coming to an end. 

What Dr Pusey sought was a recovery of the Catholic nature of the Church of England.  It was the Catholicism of the Church of England that interested him, not primarily its Anglicanism.  If he had lived to see a day when the Church of England's Anglicanism led it to harm what he argued was its Catholic nature, one has to wonder if he really would have "stayed in the Church of England".

As a matter of fact of course, Dr Pusey did stay in the Church of England, but it is very bold to take a nineteenth-century decision made in a nineteenth-century context as being conclusive proof of what he might have thought today.  As we have argued before in an article on Dr Eric Mascall, it is impossible to conclude what the heroes of Anglo-Catholicism might have done had they found themselves facing the current situation. 

The other surprise for me in New Directions was an article by Dr Philip North.  In it, he talked of explaining to some evangelical Anglican clergy (who have taken over the running of a beautiful Anglo-Catholic parish church that has fallen on hard times) what his understanding was of the Mass, of Eucharistic theology, of the Real Presence.  He reported that some of the evangelical clergy had started to "say mass" and had been immensely moved by his no doubt utterly sound descriptions.  It reminded me of the diametrically opposed and mutually incompatible views that can be held in the Church of England, and I'm afraid it rather brought to mind the Nineham phenomenon to which Dr Kirk refers above.

I thought further on this on Sunday, during an excellent homily on the Real Presence, the Bread of Life, from Fr Colven at Mass in St James's.  During the homily, he recounted an anecdote he feared he might have told before (I don't recall it) about an elderly nun that he visits once a month. 

This nun was raised in the West Country, with no religious upbringing whatsoever.  At the age of 16, she and a friend decided that it would be the right thing to seek confirmation, so off they went to the Anglican Vicar.  This holy, kindly and erudite man taught them much.  Before one confirmation class, the future nun's friend urged her companion to ask if they would be required to believe in transubstantiation.  The nun-to-be, having no idea what this was, willingly asked the Vicar. 

This learned cleric proceeded to give her a clear and indeed utterly sound explanation of transubstantiation, of the Real Presence, of what happens during the Mass.  It was impressive and affecting.

He then said that as Anglicans they were entirely free to believe that or not.

His explanation had been so lucid and so powerful that the young woman was very moved by what she had learned.  However, it struck her that, quite simply, what she had been told was either true or it was not, and if it was true, it was a most tremendous truth and of the utmost importance.  She became a Catholic.

Some would perhaps argue that those discussions with the Evangelicals were about catholicising the Church of England, carrying on the work of the Oxford Movement.  If anyone were to argue that, then it would seem, to me at least, to display a rather extraordinary degree of optimism on their part.

Among the musical offerings at St James's on Sunday, we had Esquivel's beautiful Ego Sum Panis Vivus, which was often heard at Bourne St, as well as Tallis O Nata Lux, a fine piece of English Catholic music (we cannot claim it as Anglican patrimony). 



The setting of the ordinary of the Mass was new to me, being the Missa Fac Bonum by the German baroque composer Valentin Rathgeber (the Agnus Dei of which reminded me very much of the theme music from the television series of Brideshead Revisited).  The Gloria of the mass setting is shown below, accompanied by some very improving images. 



As the post-Mass hymn we had a true favourite of the Marylebone Ordinariate Group, O Bread of Heaven, eminently suitable to accompany the readings at Mass and Fr Colven's homily.  Although this hymn has featured many times on this blog before, including in our article Catholic Treasure, Anglican Patrimony, we make no apology for its reappearance, because we share the view of that elderly nun that what St Alphonsus Liguori's hymn speaks of is indeed a most tremendous truth. 

The Sacrament of Unity indeed.  O may we all one bread, one body be.  Let us hope, as Dr Ward dared to do, for a better future for the vision of Dr Pusey and of the Oxford Movement than one limited by a test of whether its inheritors can hold fast to the Church of England, come what may. 

Even Wilfred Knox, a prominent Anglo-Catholic in the early twentieth century, and who unlike his more famous brother Monsignor Ronald Knox did not become a Catholic, included a sentence in the preface to his book The Catholic Movement in the Church of England that seems far from a goal of holding fast, come what may :

It is possible that I shall be accused of a lack of loyalty to the distinctive position of the Church of England. But if in being loyal to the teaching of the Church Catholic I am disloyal to the Church of England, I fear that I shall bear the reproach with equanimity.

We leave the final word to the famous Fr Davage, whom we mentioned at the beginning of this post.  Here is his conclusion from a lecture he gave in Bristol in 2009, entitled "Edward Bouverie Pusey : Post Reformation Saint?" :

........we are invited in this series to consider Dr Pusey as a Post-Reformation Saint. John Henry Newman is poised for beatification and possibly canonisation. Even if we forget about the process and the miracles for a moment, there is something right about that because Newman spent half his life as an Anglican and half as a Roman Catholic. He represents one vital strain of Anglo-Catholicism. Keble and Pusey represent another strain, and [in] the recent papal offer of an Ordinariate that respects and values an Anglican, and more specifically, an Anglo-Catholic patrimony, they would be candidates for admission to the saintly band and could share with Newman a patronage and saintly oversight, joined in heaven as they were in the life of the Oxford Movement. Until that day dawns, perhaps our last image should be of those three profoundly great and holy men dining alone in Hursley Vicarage on the one occasion that they met after Newman’s conversion: Keble at seventy-three, Pusey at sixty-five, Newman at sixty-four, not quite all passion spent. Three elderly clerical gentlemen who had met at Oxford, "the fulcrum from which [they] … hoped to move the Church," together after twenty years. Keble had only one more year to live, Pusey seventeen, Newman twenty-five. The shadows are lengthening, the candles are guttering, the tempest and turmoil of the battle has stilled for a moment as they talk and reminisce quietly and easily. We can only hear the murmuring of voices as we back silently out of the room and quietly close the door: ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem (out of the shadows and images into truth).

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?

Another Joins from Bourne Street

We are pleased to welcome another former member of the Bourne St congregation into the full communion of the Catholic Church.  Having been baptised by the previous Vicar of St Mary's, the lady in question found her own way to St James's, and it was Fr Colven's excellent initiative to ask one of our members to be her Sponsor at her Reception.

Welcome, Agnes.  Please be assured of our prayers for you.

From this week's parish notes at St James's:

We give thanks to God for the reception into the full communion of the Church of Agnes Duffield during this past week. Agnes was formerly a member of the Anglican congregation at St Mary’s Bourne Street, Pimlico - a parish which has offered us a whole raft of new Catholics in the past year. We are grateful for these signs of enrichment to the mix which is Spanish Place.

A raft indeed.  To turn the use of that word, how pleased we are to have been on the raft that took us to join the Barque of Peter.

We are also delighted to report that Rupert Brennan Brown, who left St Mary's a few years ago to become a Catholic, has recently signed up as a member of the Ordinariate, attached to the Marylebone Group.  Rupert's first event with us was last week's spectacular St James's day Mass, celebrated by the Abbot of Farnborough, and in the presence of the Spanish ambassador....more of which in an imminent post.

Yes, how true: a raft indeed.

Perfectly Re-Established

A thought provoking article appears in this week's parish notes from St James's.  Not only does Fr Colven remind us of St Paul's famous recognition in his letter to the Romans that he, like all of us, fails to live up to the standards he knows exist, but he also restates forcefully and clearly that the divine sacrifice, the outpouring of that Most Precious Blood, changed things for everyone.  Not for a select few, but for all (even if some do not understand it).

Some of the less well informed fall into a trap of arguing that the Catholic Church amuses itself by spending all day every day condemning people for whatever their peccadillos, or indeed peccados, might be.  As we all know, their misconception could hardly be further from the truth.

Yes, unlike some places, the Catholic Church maintains both the "Go and sin no more" approach of Our Lord in John 8 and the "Neither do I condemn you," but in that dual approach it recognises, as St Paul did of himself, that we all fall short, and provides a sure path to all of us sinners to share in the redemptive love shown so clearly in the shedding of that Precious Blood.  Those who focus only on the "Go and sin no more", often of a very protestant hue, forget the boundless saving love of Our Lord, and cast aside from their theology the Catholic teaching that we can all be saved, whoever we are and whatever our own personal blend of proclivities to sin.  Those who think only of "Neither do I condemn you" are often of an ultra-liberal bent, seeming to believe that sin doesn't really need to be forgiven, indeed they show little sign of believing it exists at all: they talk much of the Incarnation, but little of the Sacrifice of Calvary and what it achieved (other than when doing so gives them a chance to put on fancy clothes and listen to nice music).

Having the fullness of that Gospel text built into its approach, the Catholic Church remains faithful to the Jesus of the Gospel rather than to the Jesus of our preferences and selfish wishlists.  While Our Lord was certainly clear in saying we should sin no more, he was no less clear about a refusal to condemn and about unbounded compassion, understanding and forgiveness.

One of the earliest posts on this blog was entitled Shattering Stereotypes.  Those who labour under the falsehood that the Catholic Church is about condemnation would do well to read that post, to ponder the Holy Father's words in the video footage contained therein and to reflect on Fr Colven's notes below.

Before leaving you all to those notes, here are two classic hymns associated with the Precious Blood. Among the other possibilities we could have chosen (sadly there is no particularly good youtube version) is Alleluia, Sing to Jesus.  Written by the Anglican hymnwriter William Chatterton Dix in 1866 (published in his 1867 collection Altar Songs, Verses on the Eucharist), it bears the title Redemption by the Precious Blood.  Now extremely popular, probably more on account of its association with the much loved tune Hyfrydol than on account of modern Anglicanism still having the fervour for more Eucharistic hymns that drove Dix and his contemporaries to transform Anglican hymnody in the nineteenth century, this hymn was originally written for Ascensiontide but is suitable for any eucharistic celebration.  Indeed, it was sung at two Marylebone Ordinariate Group weddings (in our Anglican days) and more recently at the Ordinariate anniversary celebrations at St James's in January.





The Rector writes:

The traditional devotion for the month of July is to the Precious Blood of Jesus. As we contemplate the cost of human redemption, literally secured through the tortured body of the incarnate Lord, we are forced to take sin seriously - quite simply because God himself was prepared to take its reality so seriously. For the Christian, any reflection on the existence and power of evil cannot do other than centre on the Cross. It is our belief that the self-offering of Jesus, even to the opening of his own heart by the soldier’s spear, is the death blow to all that is not of God - we are not dualists believing in a tug of war between equally opposed forces (evil on one side and good on the other): for us the final outcome is not in doubt - the battle has already been fought and secured on Good Friday - but the consequences of alienation have still to be worked out: though these may be the "end times", the ferocity of evil will continue until the last day even if Jesus’ promise is being fulfilled: “when the Advocate comes, he will show the world how wrong it was about sin, and about who was in the right, and about judgement” (John 16:8).

A preface to a recent publication from the Catholic Truth Society says: “the struggle with the powers of evil is part of the experience of every human being. While human beings have a natural orientation towards the good we find ourselves confronting evil in various ways” - or as St Paul famously  observed in writing to the Romans, “I cannot understand my own behaviour. I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the very things I hate” (7:15). It is easy to caricature evil in ways that diminish its malevolence - the Devil is often portrayed as a cartoon figure, and the razzmatazz surrounding Halloween “domesticates” and tames the whole notion of sin’s destructive power. If C S Lewis was correct in the Screwtape Letters then it is the greatest achievement of the forces of evil to have themselves treated with benign mockery.

Jesus’ life blood points us to a very different understanding, where evil has to be recognised, named and confronted for what it truly is. No one who has lived through the horrors of the 20th century - the concentration camps , the genocides, with inhumanity and cruelty exhibited on an  industrial scale - can afford to be sanguine about something which is so much more than the sum total of individual human wrong choices, “for it is not against human enemies that we have to struggle, but against the Sovereignties and the Powers which originate in the darkness in the world, the spiritual army of evil in the heavens" (Ephesians 6:12). The recognition of the forces which spoil and mar so many aspects of the creation, and the individual damage done by our personal sin, goes to the heart of the Christian dispensation: the world needs, we need, a salvation which is held out in the person of Jesus. God offers his Son as the antidote to sin. 

Our understanding is that what God has done, and continues do, in his Christ is not narrow or sectarian in any way - it is the catholic act, embracing everyone, excluding no one (whether what is on offer is understood or not). The shedding of the Precious Blood on  Calvary alters the whole cosmic balance: we can now look forward in hope to a time when “together with the human race, the universe itself, will be perfectly re-established in Christ” (Lumen Gentium). The Church’s mission remains what is has always been, the salvation of souls through the proclamation of what God is doing in Christ: this salvation is nothing less than the resolution of the dilemma expressed by St Paul (Romans 7:15) as our nature is returned to its rightful bias to choose what is good rather than evil.

I Once Was Blind

Friday's Solemnity was mentioned in advance on this blog.  It was such a wonderful day that we are going to have to mention it again.  It was a day of piercing clarity, yet also of mystery as to why we had not seen the clear truth before.

Some of us attended the 11am Extraordinary Form mass at St James's, others the 6pm Solemn Mass (Ordinary Form).  I could make neither, and ended up at the 12.30pm mass at St Mary Moorfields.  This small, beautiful and historic church is in the City of London, and has a packed schedule of masses. 

The 12.30 was part of a lunchtime set of masses.  There had been a 12 noon, and there was to be a 1.05pm.  The mass I attended was pretty well attended, with the church being around half full, perhaps a touch more, and as far as I could tell by the traffic flow of people leaving as I arrived, and arriving as I left, the other masses were quite busy too.  There were other masses during the day, not least of which was an evening Solemn Pontifical High Mass in the Extraordinary Form, being celebrated by Bishop Alan Hopes.

The history of the church is worth knowing, a reminder of the tough times that Catholics in this country have endured, and how their fidelity to the Catholic Faith and to the Church has survived some very severe tests.  This from the parish website :

The roots of the parish of St Mary Moorfields go back to several chapels that sprang up in the area in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Catholic worship in those days was illegal.

The chapels were known locally as ‘Penny Hotels’, as people had to pay a penny to a man behind a grill in the door before they were allowed in.

These were hard times for Catholics. In 1736, for example, the Gordon Rioters attacked the chapel in Ropemakers Alley, ripping out its altar, fittings and crucifixes. Following the Catholic Relief Act of 1791, Catholics were permitted to worship in public. And in 1820 the first church of St Mary Moorfields opened in Finsbury Circus. As the permanent seat of the Vicar Apostolic, it served as Cardinal Wiseman's pro-cathedral from 1850 to 1869.

The church was pulled down in 1899 and replaced by the present church in Eldon Street, which was opened on 25th March 1903. The architect was George Sherrin, who also designed the dome of the London Oratory as well as several Underground stations.

We were reminded of how much it has cost some Catholics to remain true to their faith on the recent feasts of St John Fisher and St Thomas More on 22 June.  In his introduction and homily that day, Fr Colven reminded us of the horrors of the protestant reformation, and of some of the important details of the lives of these two great saints.  While each of these men were known for different things, both were undoubtedly men of integrity and virtue, whose faith came before all else, before comfortable employment, social respectability and the trappings of office.

One of the moments that was particularly striking during that mass was the reading from II Maccabees, where Eleazar's friends try to persuade him to pretend to eat the sacrificial meat while actually eating 'clean' meat that they will provide. When he refuses "Those who a little before had acted toward him with goodwill now changed to ill will, because the words he had uttered were in their opinion sheer madness."

One of the side altars at St James's is the Martyrs' Altar.  The parish website has the following to say about it :

Originally the altar of St Michael, whose statue still remains on the wall above, this altar now honours fourteen of the English Martyrs canonised in 1970. The painting that forms the reredos is the work of Geoffrey Webb. To the left is a statue of St John Fisher whose memory will always be cherished in the University of Cambridge; on the right is a statue of his friend St Thomas More honoured and loved as perhaps the finest flower of Christian humanism produced by the Renaissance. Both were martyred near the Tower of London in the summer of 1535 .

Those of you with an interest in the fascinating history of St James's Spanish Place, surely among the most colourful and intriguing of parish histories, might wish to make yourselves free on Thursday 12th July, in order to attend a talk to be given by Fr Nicholas Schofield, a trained historian archivist, who will be describing the building of the current St James's, including the historical and social context.  Tickets are selling well, and cost £20 each.

Back to the Solemnity of St Peter and St Paul at St Mary Moorfields.  The parish priest, Fr Peter Newby, a former Catholic chaplain to the University of Oxford, preached a short homily that contained an essential, and very obvious truth.   On hearing the Gospel reading for the day, which of course relates Peter's Confession and contains the famous Tu es Petrus, as we discussed in this recent blogpost, one is reminded that serving Christ can only be done in its fullness within the Church, and by that we mean within the Catholic Church, the Church that Christ himself founded on the rock of Peter.  The Christ who founded this Church, the Christ whom we seek to serve, is the true Christ, the Christ who is the Son of God, the Christ of the Gospels, not the Christ of our imaginations, of our selfish preferences, of our wishlists.  Christ truly was on earth: Peter then, and his Successor now, defend and teach His Truth.

How right this is.   For many years, as Anglo-Catholics, each of us in the Marylebone Group felt that we practised and followed the Catholic Faith, and although we prayed for the Pope, although we prayed for Unity, and although we celebrated the 29th June, we failed sufficiently to recognise the importance of being part of that One Church.  In some ways, I suppose, we felt that we knew better.  We could keep ourselves outside until other people sorted out the arrangements for some kind of corporate reunion.  For all the excitement that arises whenever people criticise the Church for regarding X or Y as sinful, surely wilfully keeping yourself outside the Church (when you believe it to be the Church) is far worse, even more so if by doing so you encourage others in the same.

Well, we now know that such arrogance was wrong.  The Holy Father offered us the chance to join the fold, and we have done so with joy.  We have taken that step, we have played our part in bringing back together the gathered flock into one fold, under one shepherd.  We were blind, but now we see.

As ever, Fr Colven's parish notes for this week provide some inspiring reading.  We will leave the conclusion to him, after having allowed a little of last Friday night's 6pm Solemn Mass to find its way into this blogpost.  It is the custom at St James's that a hymn is sung after mass (there is no need for extra-liturgical hymns to intrude in mass itself, because we are lucky enough to have a choir that sings the appointed plainchant).  After the blessing on Friday, Fr Colven announced the last hymn, which was, of course, Full in the Panting Heart of Rome (what other reaction could there possibly be to the Solemnity?), as "The moment you've all been waiting for." 

How right he was, not just about the enthusiasm of the congregation to sing this great hymn, but also about how long we had waited to be in the Church, to be Catholics, to be in communion with the Successor of St Peter.



The Rector writes :

As many of you will know, I was not born a Roman Catholic and my reception took place only in middle age. When I am asked to explain this decision, my answer consists of  the two words SAINT PETER.  The Gospel passage which we heard at Fridays’ joint celebration of the apostles Peter and Paul  (Matthew 16:13-19) underlines the Petrine nature of the Church. Jesus judges that the moment has been reached when he can ask those he has chosen about their understanding of his true identity. He begins obliquely, asking who others are saying that he is. They come up with a variety of answers. “John the Baptist” – “Elijah” – “Jeremiah”: but then the question is made specific: “But you, who do you say that I am?” Peter assumes the role of  spokesman – he articulates the faith of the others: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”. A turning point has been reached. For the first time, there it is out in the open – Jesus is recognised as the One he truly is.

Jesus’ response  to Peter’s act of faith is the play on words with which we are so familiar. Peter means “rock” and he is to be the rock on which Christ’s Church will be built. The rock-man, rock hard. The keys of the kingdom are placed  firmly in this one apostle's  hands. Rightly the Catholic Church has always made much of these texts – for we believe they are not incidental – they are spoken by the Word of Truth, the one Peter recognises as God’s own Son: “It is not flesh and blood that revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven”.

Peter’s central role is part of God’s will for the salvation of his people. This is why Catholics have a special respect and loyalty for the successors of Saint Peter, the popes. Just as Peter acted as the centre of unity among the first group of disciples, so the pope down through the centuries has been the linchpin, holding together the communion of the Church as it spread into differing continents and cultures. The power of the keys, the authority to teach, to decide what is authentic, and what is not, in the transmission of belief and ethics, goes to the very heart of Christian witness in succeeding ages. It is a role which becomes increasingly crucial in a world of growing complexity.

Just as it fell to St Peter to make the first definitive statement about salvation through the person of  Christ, so it is the responsibility of his successors,  currently Pope Benedict XVI, to articulate a message of salvation for our own times. His, of course, cannot be a lone voice – each of the Baptised shares the responsibility to speak up and speak out, but the Pope, as it were, focuses the message and ensures that it is given expression: "It is not flesh and blood which has revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven”.

As a convert, perhaps I am allowed to say that many Catholic are not aware of the treasure that they have in St Peter and his successors – the gift is too often taken for granted! Those of us who have come late to the harvest do realise that “amidst the changes and chances of this fleeting world one firm anchor” does “hold fast”. In communion with Peter we have the guarantee that all things necessary for salvation are there within our grasp – that the truth will be proclaimed until the end of time: that evil will always be named for what it is and rebuked:  and that the tenderness of Christ will continue to be ministered sacramentally and pastorally. What more can we ask than that?

O Sacred Heart

For members of the Ordinariate, one verse from one hymn particularly suitable for today's Solemnity is especially relevant.

As so often mentioned on this blog and elsewhere, the Ordinariate is about a call to Unity, to unity in the Truth. We offer a prayer there that all, not least in this country, might find and recognise that Truth and be united in it.

O Sacred Heart,
Bless our dear native land;
May England's sons in truth e'er stand
With faith's bright banner still in hand,
O Sacred Heart.



June is the month of the Sacred Heart, and while most would know that the Solemnity falls in June, many fewer know why that is.  The Sacred Heart always falls 19 days after Pentecost, and is therefore always on a Friday, the day of the week most associated with the visible and unarguable outpouring of the Saviour's unbounded love for his people.

The timing of the Solemnity means that it always falls shortly after Corpus Christi (indeed on the Friday after the Octave of Corpus Christi), which, as Fr Colven pointed out in last week's St James's parish notes (reproduced below) is utterly appropriate. 

The Rector writes ...

The heart is a universal symbol of love and as such transcends all barriers of language, culture and ethnicity. For the Christian, the fact that the heart of Jesus was broken open after the crucifixion has enormous significance: many early writers in the Christian tradition drew an analogy between the blood and water recorded by St John as flowing from the damaged heart of Jesus and the two fundamental sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist. Devotion to the heart of Jesus, as symbolic centre of the divine love, has its scriptural basis in the writings of both St John and St Paul: it reached a high point in the late Middle Ages, and was associated with such figures as St Gertrude and St Bonaventure, but the shape of modern devotion to the Sacred Heart comes from the 17th century and the revelations to St Margaret Mary Alacoque, a Visitation nun of Paray le Monial a town almost (appropriately) in the centre and heart of France. There is an English connection here in that St Margaret Mary’s confessor and great supporter was St Claude de la Colombiere a Jesuit who in 1676 was appointed preacher to the then Duchess of York at St James’s Palace. For two years he laboured to provide spiritual direction, and succeeded in reconciling many to the Catholic Church, but his high profile meant that in the light of the Titus Oates plot he was arrested, and eventually deported.

St Margaret Mary’s body is preserved in the chapel of the Visitation convent in Paray: to those who go there today it is probably not the saint's body which most attracts the eye but (as she would have wished) a remarkable tabernacle - free standing, on a pillar, the modern ceramic safe containing the Blessed Sacrament is surrounded by a large metal heart in deep red – it is a striking piece of art, but also a statement of theological truth. For Catholic Christians, the loving nature of the Father, as uniquely revealed in the life, death and resurrect ion of his Son, is an on-going reality in the Eucharistic Presence - which we believe to be nothing less than the continuation in time of the great mystery of the Incarnation.

This weekend in the celebration of CORPUS CHRISTI we express our gratitude for all that the Mass(“the source and summit of the Church’s life”) means to Christ’s mystical body as we seek to establish God’s Kingdom on this earth. St John Vianney (the Cure d’Ars) says famously: “My God, what joy for a Christian who has faith! On rising from the holy table he goes away with all heaven in his heart”.

Fittingly, this coming Friday we observe as the Solemnity of the SACRED HEART of JESUS. Blessed John Henry Newman identifies the parallel nature of this week’s two celebrations: “Most sacred, most loving heart of Jesus, hidden in the Holy Eucharist, you beat for us still. You say, as you said when you lived on our earth, ‘my delight is to be with the children of men’”. In a world which is increasingly inured to violence and harshness, where voices are raised so frequently to confront and abuse, there is such a profound need for the proclamation of God’s love – “when you come to live within me, make my heart beat with your Heart: make my soul free from all that is hard and cruel, all that is proud and disordered” (Newman). This challenge cannot be better expressed than in terms of what the Father has revealed to us through the Heart of his Son (the Second Vatican Council teaches that Jesus “loves with a fully human heart”) and continues to manifest itself in the Mass – “the authentic sense of the Eucharist becomes of itself the school of active love for our neighbour” (John Paul II).

The Sacred Heart was marked in the form of a High Mass at Bourne St in my early days there, but it was one of those devotions which had begun to lose a little popularity in Anglo-Catholicism, and therefore did not attract large numbers, despite the fact that St Mary's has a rather fine shrine to the Sacred Heart and a relic of St Margaret Mary Alacocque.  For many years thereafter, the day was marked as a Low or a Sung Mass, but it is heartening to note that for the past couple of years, the occasion has been upgraded once again.  May this be a sign of increasing devotion to the Sacred Heart among our separated brethren.

At St James's, the usual round of daily masses today will be of the Solemnity, including the 6pm Mass tonight, which some of us hope to attend.