(1) NLM describes a fine Flanders rood-screen in the V&A. My advice to prospective Catholic art-lovers visiting London would be to visit the building next door to the V&A, the Brompton Oratory. Its shell is a [very good] Victorian pastiche of Roman baroque, but nearly all the fittings are genuine baroque artefacts. Perhaps the loveliest thing is the fabulous pietra dura Lady Altar from Brescia, at which I was kindly permitted to offer my first Mass in Full Communion with the See of S Peter (incorporates a statue of S Pius V).
It is far better to enjoy such wonders in a proper, used, cultic, Catholic context than to see them reduced to the horrible status of Exhibits at the mercy of appallingly ignorant secular "Art Historians". (I am also unhappy about Exhibitions of Icons.)
(2) Lifesite has the full text of a good homily from Bishop Schneider, in which he holds up for admiration the devoted ministry, during a plague, of the Victorian Anglo-Catholic 'slum clergy' of London. This, rather than the ARCIC nonsense, is genuine Ecumenism! Perhaps his Excellency could invite himself to to the Ordinariate Church of the Assumption and S Gregory in Warwick Street, where he would find the very same Anglican tradition but now happily reconciled in Full Communion.
Not just London, father. Don't forget the priests of St. Saviour Leeds and many others throughout the land.
ReplyDeleteMay I add to your very proper opposition to the exhibition of icons in secular museums, that
ReplyDeleteI have always been disturbed at the exhibition of reliquaries in the same.