... has a charming little video on his admirable blog showing a lot of clips of Liturgy as it was before the Great [fill in here your own term of preference] of the 1960s. And it includes our wonderful Anglican Patrimony!! And it involves my own last Anglican church, S Thomas the Martyr in Oxford!!! And it even hints at our magnificent Ordinariate!!!!
At about 3.44 you will find a shot of the Translation of our Lady of Walsingham, October 15, 1931. The rather Protestant Bishop Pollock of Norwich had sniffily asked Fr Hope Patten to remove the statue of OLW from the Parish Church; so Father built a beautiful Shrine Church at the other end of the village, including within it a reconstruction of the Holy House of Nazareth (which had been the focal point of the medieval pilgrimage to Walsingham). Accordingly, on October 15, after the Bishop emeritus of Accra had sung Pontifical High Mass in the Parish Church, our Blessed Lady was carried in solemn procession to her new Shrine while the bells both of the Church and of the Shrine (baptised with the oils on the previous Saturday by the Bishop) rang out her praises. "In the midst of this throng, high and lifted up upon the shoulders of four clergy in dalmatics, and under a blue and gold canopy fixed to the feretory, sat the venerated figure of our Lady, crowned with the silver Oxford Crown, and robed in a mantle of cloth of gold" (the Oxford Crown had been given by the congregation of one of the daughter churches of S Thomas's). That is the moment captured in the video.
The Holy House had ... has ... a Latin foundation stone dating itself by the pontificate of Pius XI and the episcopate of Bishop Pollock. When he heard about this, the Bishop objected to being thus associated with the Bishop of Rome, so Fr Hope Patten duly obscured ... the name of the bishop! But fear not: after Dr Pollock's death, his name re-emerged. When you go to look at it, don't forget to say a prayer for him; and for Fr Hope Patten and Fr Fynes Clinton, the Latinist who composed the inscription. They were both mighty priests in what one might call the Pre-History or the Proto-Evangelium of the Ordinariate.
As Fr Ray says ... Oh, such happy days! But, in the Ordinariate of our Lady of Walsingham, Happy Days live again!!
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Play this through your stereo for Byrd's heavenly Ne irascaris (beautifully sung here by whom?) And what a suitable composer for this blog!
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