A happy Oak Apple Day to readers throughout the world! A glass with you to the Glorious Memory of our last de facto King to die within this Kingdom in the full Communion of Catholic Christendom.
And prior notice of an important London liturgical event.
On Sunday, June 11, the Sunday in the Octave of Corpus Christi, there will be a public celebration of the Universal Kingship of Christ, in the Most Holy Sacrament of His love.
About 3.00 the Procession of the Blessed Sacrament will set off from the former Portuguese [later Bavarian] Embassy Chapel, the Church of the Assumption in Warwick Street (think Ordinariate), concluding just before 6.00 with Benediction in the formerly Spanish Embassy Chapel of S James, Spanish Place.
Such formerly Embassy chapels were, of course, the only places in London during the penal days where with impunity Catholics could enjoy superb public Catholic worship. Of the three strands out of which English Catholicism was mainly composed ... the Converts, the Irish, and the old Recusant families ... the Embassy Chapels embody rich and holy memories of this last; of the Age of the Vicars Apostolic and and of angry Protestant mobs. S John Henry Newman once thus sketched this community: "There, perhaps an elderly person, seen walking in the streets, grave and solitary, though noble in bearing, and said to be of good family, and a Roman Catholic."
How very gratifying it is that both of these churches are, today, so liturgically exemplary and richly furnished.
They deserve warm and enthusiastic support ... after all, the resident Catholic population of central London is smaller than it once was.
These things matter. And "Canonise Challoner" sez I.
And Christ is King, Universorum Rex.
5 comments:
The Warwick street chapel is really uplifting, so thoughtfully and beautifully ordered yet not overwhelming. When I am staying at St Patrick’s, I love to spend time there. I must ask though Father, where is the Ordinariate heading? An elderly laity, few in number, good clergy but outside the mainstream and increasingly marginalised? One senses a fin de siècle feel about the whole project…?
El Codo: I read this post just after the (online) Catholic Herald's report of last weekend's Chartres Pilgrimage. The average age of its numerous participants was said to be 20, with liturgy in the so-called "extraordinary form". Pope Benedict had the idea of combining elements of "Extraordinary" and "Ordinary"; perhaps an alternative possibility might be to revise the Ordinariate use to closer conformity with the English Missal (i.e. the TLM in trad Anglican language, with the option of the Canon in Latin), and to try and interest the Latin Mass Society in adopting it. That way the Ordinariate would receive an infusion of young blood, and there would be no difficulty about advertising TLM/neo-Ordinariate liturgies in parish newsletters or conducting them in public churches.
What a great suggestion! There is so much good about the Ordinariate and so many able priests that it would be a sadness to let it wither on the branch. People are asking now about the next Ordinary…will it be a celibate so there can be a Bishop?
Matthew: I was told of this initiative, maybe 25 years ago, by a priest, home to visit family, who was assigned to the Vatican, but he was not working on it himself. I think I recall that this was halted at a certain juncture, and never completed.
My guess is that it wouldn't have much support from any quarter. The question that comes to mind is: would the resulting liturgy be suitably "evolutionary" for those who believe that the Sacramentary should develop slowly, with the notes in the margin, or would it be "one-upping" the mad trattoria scribblers, or a la Goldilocks, would it be just right?
And what about the effect on the liturgical calendars? Would it not be something of a planetary collision? The only way for it to work in my simple mind would be to suppress the "ordinary and extraordinary forms", and go with the novus novus... I'm not saying it's a bad idea, because those much more intelligent and holy than me thought it was worth a try.
In my view, differences in the Calendars do by no means stand in the way of loving one's fellow Catholics, worshipping alongside them, etc.
I am not in principle against any change in the traditional liturgy, and I don't think many trads really are - they just don't trust the present Church authority to do them (the "freeze-to-1962", a thing in principle foreign to the Roman Rite, was an emergency measure); including perhaps some changes that have been done in the Novus Ordo. (After all, the Novus Ordo, at least as an option, restored some of the Easter Vigil lessons cut by Pope Ven. Pius XII.) But first of all it needs to be understood on all sides that uniformity of liturgy is not a requirement to have unity of hearts; Ukrainian Catholics celebrated Palm Sunday when we celebrated Easter this year.
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