I have before me, beautifully bound in black leather, with the edges of the pages in gold, a small book, with these words written inside:
Fratri in Christo dilecto
Johanni Richards
Diacono
dono dedit
+Robertus Exoniensis
Die Dominica Sanctissimae Trinitatis MCMLIX
It is a precious memento of Bishop John Richards; of his Ordination to the Diaconate in 1959, on May 24.
Today is his Year's Mind.
I wonder how many Anglican bishops think and write naturally in Latin today ... or, for that matter, how many Catholic Bishops can do so. Bishop Robert Mortimer was a distinguished Moral Theologian (he had held the Oxford Chair); a close friend of the Prebendary John Hooper who was my spiritual director half a century ago whose guidance led me to the Sacred Priesthood. My own friendship with Bishop John Richards dates from the turn of this century, when I was approaching retirement, and he prevailed upon me to accept a 'House for Duty' in the same Devon village where he was spending his own working retirement. Once we had moved in, he saw to it that I got to know the Society of S Boniface, which met monthly to study the Greek Testament together and to read Papers to each other. It was run by Prebendary Michael Moreton, from whom I learned a great deal.
It was he who had read a paper, at one of Betsy Livingstone's Oxford Patristic Conferences, in which he demonstrated, long before this became a commonplace in Catholic scholarship, how totally spurious was the universal assumption that in 'the Primitive Church', the celebrant of the Eucharist faced the people. The other mighty truth I learned from him concerned the dogmatic status of the Roman Canon.
My own background in the Church of England before the mid-sixties had indeed left me with a profound love for the Roman Canon. When I was ordained to the Sacred Priesthood in 1968, and we neopresbyteri concelebrated the Ordination Mass with our ordaining Pontiff, it was the Roman Canon that I murmured secreto! But Michael was to teach me an even more weighty truth.
Just as the early Christian centuries are normative in as far as they conveyed to us the Apostolic Faith and Order through structures such as the Creeds and the Old and New Testament Canons of Scripture and the threefold Sacred Ministry, so also they conveyed to us that Apostolic depositum in and through the Roman Canon of the Mass. Which, therefore, stood and stands amid the wreckage of Time as an unalterable part of the givenness of the Faith.
This perception stood me in good stead when finally I entered into Full Communion, because I did so fortified in my adherence to that great Prayer. By then, of course, it had been miserably tampered with in the Latin Church and, soon, was all but eliminated de facto from most Catholic parochial worship. What a wickedness all that was! What a success for the Enemy: that the Prayer for which the English Catholic Martyrs died and the clergy of the Catholic Revival in the Church of England suffered such persecution, should be killed off in the 1960s with crooked Roman connivance!
Like S John Henry Newman, I can say that it was within the Church of England that I learned the Catholic Faith: how merciful the Lord's dispositions are. And that little Greek Testament which Robert Mortimer gave to John Richards was ... let me reveal ... the Edition done by Professor George Kilpatrick, who taught me NT textcrit. In his editorial activity, his textcrit eclecticism had led him to respect the textus receptus. I have conducted no statistical survey, but I suspect that George's NT could be shown to be more Tradition-friendly than the proddy 'United Bible Societies' NT which, under S John Paul II, was made the basis of the Neovulgate NT.
What magnificent use God made of the Church of England, back in the days when it was still a plausible organisation! Joseph Ratzinger's Ordinariate Initiative was a recognition of that truth. And so is the fine Altar picture Fr Maunder has put into S Agatha's Church in Portsmouth, showing our blessed Lady handing Anglicanorum coetibus to Pope Benedict!
There is a story, I believe American, of somebody asking a liberal Jesuit why he wasn't very keen about the influx of Anglicans under Anglicanorum coetibus. Twitching his elderly and ragged jeans, the poor old gentleman squealed "But they're the wrong kind of Anglicans!".
The old question is: "What did they bring into the Catholic Church?"
Here is my reply: "We brought in the 'Wrong' kind of Anglicanism"!!!
Although I was baptized Catholic, I also learned the Catholic Faith and especially the importance of the Eucharist through 10 years in an Anglo Catholic Episcopal Church. When I finally reverted to the One True Church it was at first a step down to the banality of the Novus Ordo, until a few years later Summorum Pontificum happened and the glorious Mass of the Ages was made available again. But I never forgot that foundation that had been laid in the Anglican Communion.
ReplyDeleteI am unable to find the altar painting you refer to. Is there an image online anywhere? I'd love to see it.
ReplyDeleteIs it legitimate to say that perhaps 90% of Jesuits are " the wrong kind of Jesuits?"
ReplyDeleteWas Fr Moreland's paper on the direction in which the priest faced published? I tried searching for papers by him in Studia Patristica, but could find references only to a paper on the origins of the Roman Canon.
ReplyDeleteHis name was Moreton, not Moreland; the bibliographical reference is "Eis anatolas blepsate: Orientation as a Liturgical Principle," by M. J. Moreton, Studia Patriatica: Volume XVIII in Three Parts by Elizabeth A. Livingstone (Oxford and New York, 1982: Pergamon Press), pp. 575-590.
ReplyDeleteThank you. 'Moreland' must have been a Freudian slip for someone I knew.
DeleteAre you sure, Father, that the Roman Canon was killed in the sixties? Wasn't it killed finally when you Priests surrendered and gave up the celebration according to the English Missal with its implementation of the original Latin Roman Canon silently?Why don't you simply return to the English Missal practice of including the ancient Roman Canon in Latin with mentioning the current Bishop of Rome, ignoring the semi-modernist, commission-fabricated Divine Worship liturgy?
ReplyDelete