The recent events, centred upon the visit of the two 'other' Ordinaries, constituted an absolutely marvellous few days.Two brief points:
Mgr Harry Entwhistle is a very good bloke indeed. It was encouraging to hear from him about the Oz Ordinariate, with its bright future all the more bright because of the prospects of developments in the Torres Strait Islands and elsewhere in Asia. WASPery is our danger; but readers will remember the role played in our Anglo-Catholic movement by our unWASP missions in Africa and Oceania. "Colonial prelates from far-off Mission Stations" did his Confirmations for Eric Mascall's 'Ultra-Catholic'; the emeritus Bishop of Accra did the episcopal stuff for Fr Hope Patten at Walsingham. So ... onwards to the past, on this one! And Entwhistle Rules OK!
Mgr Mark Langham gave a fine paper which I encourage you to find and to read on the Ordinariate website. If you can persuade members of the CBCEW to read it as well, they will derive much benefit from it. But, in a sense, it is simply a partial outworking of the great vision which Fr Aidan Nichols described in The Panther and the Hind. The essential point is that the 'Anglican Patrimony' does not consist of a few traditions and practices which are not too harmful and which we in our frailty are graciously allowed to cling onto so as to make our transition into being 'real' Catholics a bit easier for us. Our Patrimony, certainly as much in terms of Theology and Spirituality as in Liturgy, is great gift to the whole Catholic Church, and one which is particularly opportune at this slightly wobbly moment in the life of the Catholic Church. Cometh the hour, cometh the Ordinariate! The whole Church needs what we have in our luggage. Read Langham! Reread Nichols!!
Regular readers will recognise that as the main point of this blog!!
17 February 2015
16 February 2015
footnote to the last
It is now a minute or two to six. I'll go and have a look at the News. Doubtless there will be footage from all the capitals of Europe showing the Concerned Classes and the Demonstrating Classes marching in unison and waving banners inscribed JE SUIS COPTE.
THE NEW MARTYRS
Would it be possible for there to be a votive Mass In Commemoratione Novorum Martyrum? It would not specify who precisely fell into this category, and thus the regulations concerning whom one can commemorate liturgically as a Saint or Beatus would not be disturbed; but it would fulfill a need which I, for one, feel.
Neoi Martyres is a term used in the Church of Greece for those who suffered under the Islamic occupation for their Christian faith.
S John Paul II remarked that the twentieth century had known more martyrs than any other period of the Church's history; and urged an ecumenical aspect to the commemoration by all Christians of the martyrs. If I were a pp, I would put into my church a photograph of those Egyptian peasants kneeling in the sand, with a candle stand in front of it.
Novi Martyres Coptici, orate pro nobis.
Neoi Martyres is a term used in the Church of Greece for those who suffered under the Islamic occupation for their Christian faith.
S John Paul II remarked that the twentieth century had known more martyrs than any other period of the Church's history; and urged an ecumenical aspect to the commemoration by all Christians of the martyrs. If I were a pp, I would put into my church a photograph of those Egyptian peasants kneeling in the sand, with a candle stand in front of it.
Novi Martyres Coptici, orate pro nobis.
10 February 2015
Fr Longenecker ...
... is a very fine writer with whom I nearly always agree. But it seems to me that he can be a trifle careless ... as, I am sure, I often am. Recently he wrote about how, since 1534, the Church of England has been Protestant.
Firstly: this appears to forget the Reign of Good Queen Mary. It would have been safer, surely, to write "Since 1559 ...". And the assertion that from 1534 until 1547 the Church of England was Protestant is only sustainable given a very narrow and unusual definition of what 'Protestant' means. Henry VIII was still, I believe, burning Protestants.
But more: did S Thomas More refuse the Sacraments before he died, on the grounds that he ought not to hold communicatio in sacris with heretical schismatics? (Roper tells us that it was his custom to go to Confession, to Mass, and to be houselled before major events; before, for example, his arrest.) If he did receive the Sacraments before execution from a priest who had followed Henry Tudor into schism, doesn't that fact make S Thomas himself, according to a rigorist viewpoint, a schismatic? And that is a conclusion which the Roman Magisterium implicitly denied when he was canonised. And there is the question of the 1549 'Prayer Book' rebels, about whom I wrote this back in 2008, before we entered the Ordinariate.
"We had a lovely fortnight in West Cornwall; and I was intrigued to see a monument on the outside wall of the RC church in St Ives commemorating those from the town who died in the genocidal massacres of the Tudor dictatorship after the rebellion of 1549; provoked by the parliamentary attempt to impose Protestant worship.
"I applaud such commemoration. Since History tends to be written by the Whiggish victors, events like 1549 are denied a place in the official memory. But the implication that these were RC martyrs seems to me to need explanation, at least on the part of those RCs who believe that you have to be in full visible canonical union with the See of Peter in order to count as a 'Catholic'. For those who died in the aftermath of the 1549 were not in that full communion. Indeed, in the Articles they produced they did not demand restitution of links with Rome; the rebels tended to emphasise - one can see why - that the status quo bequeathed by Henry VIII upon his death should not be varied during the minority of his son. What they rebelled for and what they died for was the traditional worship of their Parish Churches."
I have written several times about the ambiguities which make it difficult to be rigidly black and white about relationships between Latins and Byzantines in the second millennium. Things were more fluid .... more, if you like, messy. And with regard to Anglicanism, I do not see (happily, looking at it now from a perspective within Full Communion) how the sort of rigidity which says "They were Protestant after 1534" either fits snugly and logically into all the historical facts, or serves to improve relationships.
Benedict XVI made it clear that we were to bring into Full Communion within the Ordinariates what God did with us and through us and in us during the centuries of schism. (Not, of course, what the Devil did with us and through us and in us during those centuries.)
I think this inspired policy on the part of a great pontiff deserves a generous hermeneutic.
Firstly: this appears to forget the Reign of Good Queen Mary. It would have been safer, surely, to write "Since 1559 ...". And the assertion that from 1534 until 1547 the Church of England was Protestant is only sustainable given a very narrow and unusual definition of what 'Protestant' means. Henry VIII was still, I believe, burning Protestants.
But more: did S Thomas More refuse the Sacraments before he died, on the grounds that he ought not to hold communicatio in sacris with heretical schismatics? (Roper tells us that it was his custom to go to Confession, to Mass, and to be houselled before major events; before, for example, his arrest.) If he did receive the Sacraments before execution from a priest who had followed Henry Tudor into schism, doesn't that fact make S Thomas himself, according to a rigorist viewpoint, a schismatic? And that is a conclusion which the Roman Magisterium implicitly denied when he was canonised. And there is the question of the 1549 'Prayer Book' rebels, about whom I wrote this back in 2008, before we entered the Ordinariate.
"We had a lovely fortnight in West Cornwall; and I was intrigued to see a monument on the outside wall of the RC church in St Ives commemorating those from the town who died in the genocidal massacres of the Tudor dictatorship after the rebellion of 1549; provoked by the parliamentary attempt to impose Protestant worship.
"I applaud such commemoration. Since History tends to be written by the Whiggish victors, events like 1549 are denied a place in the official memory. But the implication that these were RC martyrs seems to me to need explanation, at least on the part of those RCs who believe that you have to be in full visible canonical union with the See of Peter in order to count as a 'Catholic'. For those who died in the aftermath of the 1549 were not in that full communion. Indeed, in the Articles they produced they did not demand restitution of links with Rome; the rebels tended to emphasise - one can see why - that the status quo bequeathed by Henry VIII upon his death should not be varied during the minority of his son. What they rebelled for and what they died for was the traditional worship of their Parish Churches."
I have written several times about the ambiguities which make it difficult to be rigidly black and white about relationships between Latins and Byzantines in the second millennium. Things were more fluid .... more, if you like, messy. And with regard to Anglicanism, I do not see (happily, looking at it now from a perspective within Full Communion) how the sort of rigidity which says "They were Protestant after 1534" either fits snugly and logically into all the historical facts, or serves to improve relationships.
Benedict XVI made it clear that we were to bring into Full Communion within the Ordinariates what God did with us and through us and in us during the centuries of schism. (Not, of course, what the Devil did with us and through us and in us during those centuries.)
I think this inspired policy on the part of a great pontiff deserves a generous hermeneutic.
9 February 2015
"Salvete atque valete"
Connoisseurs of really quality blogs will be delighted to know that Salvete atque valete has woken up after a quiet patch. And with a vengeance!! It's the Patrimony, you know!
The subject it deals with, in the first Post of its Resurrection Life, is important and won't go away: the centrality of the Priest's Wife and Family to the ethos of what we Anglicans built up in our centuries of isolation from Catholic Unity. Clerical Marriage, as we have known it, is not a rather pathetic Lesser Good than the normative Celibacy of Latin Christianity; some sort of concession to weakness. It is in itself a demanding and sacrificial model of sacerdotal life; a beautiful flower which the Lord tended in our part of the garden when the connecting gateway to the other parts of the garden was bricked up.
I suspect that few of us would want the tradition we have inherited to be used as, or in some way become, an engine for the demolition of the Western norm. In this sexually obsessed world, there has never been a greater need for the bright light of Celibacy as a Sign that Sex is not inevitable; not dominant.
And we must not over-romanticise the Married Priesthood. Somebody once sent me a page or two of the American Clergy List, which detailed the matrimonial history of PECUSA clergy ... and how very common divorce seemed to be; often, multiple divorce. Nor does a permission for clerical marriage guarantee that there will be no sexual hanky panky. On the contrary: priests' wives themselves are not ring-fenced from the snares of the World, the Flesh, and the Devil! And husbands, even clerical ones, can do wicked things in frustration because of problems in their marriages. We all need to be very careful indeed, and not clutch at facile 'solutions'.
SALVETE ATQUE VALETE!
The subject it deals with, in the first Post of its Resurrection Life, is important and won't go away: the centrality of the Priest's Wife and Family to the ethos of what we Anglicans built up in our centuries of isolation from Catholic Unity. Clerical Marriage, as we have known it, is not a rather pathetic Lesser Good than the normative Celibacy of Latin Christianity; some sort of concession to weakness. It is in itself a demanding and sacrificial model of sacerdotal life; a beautiful flower which the Lord tended in our part of the garden when the connecting gateway to the other parts of the garden was bricked up.
I suspect that few of us would want the tradition we have inherited to be used as, or in some way become, an engine for the demolition of the Western norm. In this sexually obsessed world, there has never been a greater need for the bright light of Celibacy as a Sign that Sex is not inevitable; not dominant.
And we must not over-romanticise the Married Priesthood. Somebody once sent me a page or two of the American Clergy List, which detailed the matrimonial history of PECUSA clergy ... and how very common divorce seemed to be; often, multiple divorce. Nor does a permission for clerical marriage guarantee that there will be no sexual hanky panky. On the contrary: priests' wives themselves are not ring-fenced from the snares of the World, the Flesh, and the Devil! And husbands, even clerical ones, can do wicked things in frustration because of problems in their marriages. We all need to be very careful indeed, and not clutch at facile 'solutions'.
SALVETE ATQUE VALETE!
7 February 2015
More Aldus
... and so, all over the world, from Venice to Dublin and even as far as America, ubicumque docti inveniri possunt, there were celebrations yesterday to celebrate the 500th Anniversary of the great Venetian printer Aldus Pius Manutius. We had a lecture about him last evening in the Convocation House, followed by wine in the Divinity School, and then out into the Schools Quadrangle as Oxford's bells rang.
As well as the Exhibition of which I wrote yesterday, there was a special little extra case of exhibits containing yet more goodies, only out for the Day itself. Two items struck me.
The Editio Aldina of Ovid's Metamorphoses, with William Shakespeare's signature on the title page. But apparently the authenticity of the signature is doubted. Rightly? I dunno. They say he had Small Latin and Less Greek. But I suspect that Small Latin in those days didn't mean quite as little Latin as the same phrase would nowadays. And Ovid's hexameters are very accessible. When I was coming round from my metal shoulder implant, Pam read the Metamorphoses to me. It's not as though Ovid is exactly Pindar.
Secondly, the Hours of our Lady, secundum usum Romanae Curiae ... Oops! What it actually says is kat'ethos tes Romaikes aules!! Our Western Hours, but in Greek! Aldus plotted to lure Latin clerks further into Greek by giving them in Greek what they would pretty well know off by heart in Latin. Wily. And good for business?
I wonder if anybody else entertained the same thought as I did as we sipped our wine in the Divinity School, Oxford's sumptuously magnificent and unspoiled Perpendicular masterpiece. It was completed by 1490. So, while Aldus and his Venetians were drowning themselves in the honey of the Renaissance, Oxford was still bewitched by what 'Bauhaus' Pevsner, not One of Us, called "the dry repetitive logic of English Perpendicular". Indeed, commenting on the drapery of the statue of our blessed Lady in this very building, Professor P commented "Europeanly speaking - curiously reactionary".
But we never quite stopped hankering after the Perpendicular and the Reactionary, did we? Hawkesmoor's Gothical detailing at All Souls is just across the road; and the fan-vault in the Convocation House is 1758-9. By which time the torch was being passed on to Strawberry Hill and the exquisite little Recusant Chapel at Milton Manor and Kent's tentative 'Picturesque' Gothick at Rousham.
As well as the Exhibition of which I wrote yesterday, there was a special little extra case of exhibits containing yet more goodies, only out for the Day itself. Two items struck me.
The Editio Aldina of Ovid's Metamorphoses, with William Shakespeare's signature on the title page. But apparently the authenticity of the signature is doubted. Rightly? I dunno. They say he had Small Latin and Less Greek. But I suspect that Small Latin in those days didn't mean quite as little Latin as the same phrase would nowadays. And Ovid's hexameters are very accessible. When I was coming round from my metal shoulder implant, Pam read the Metamorphoses to me. It's not as though Ovid is exactly Pindar.
Secondly, the Hours of our Lady, secundum usum Romanae Curiae ... Oops! What it actually says is kat'ethos tes Romaikes aules!! Our Western Hours, but in Greek! Aldus plotted to lure Latin clerks further into Greek by giving them in Greek what they would pretty well know off by heart in Latin. Wily. And good for business?
I wonder if anybody else entertained the same thought as I did as we sipped our wine in the Divinity School, Oxford's sumptuously magnificent and unspoiled Perpendicular masterpiece. It was completed by 1490. So, while Aldus and his Venetians were drowning themselves in the honey of the Renaissance, Oxford was still bewitched by what 'Bauhaus' Pevsner, not One of Us, called "the dry repetitive logic of English Perpendicular". Indeed, commenting on the drapery of the statue of our blessed Lady in this very building, Professor P commented "Europeanly speaking - curiously reactionary".
But we never quite stopped hankering after the Perpendicular and the Reactionary, did we? Hawkesmoor's Gothical detailing at All Souls is just across the road; and the fan-vault in the Convocation House is 1758-9. By which time the torch was being passed on to Strawberry Hill and the exquisite little Recusant Chapel at Milton Manor and Kent's tentative 'Picturesque' Gothick at Rousham.
6 February 2015
Paranoia??
A pseudonymous individual who likes anonymously to emit abuse and has a thing about the Ordinariate and my Ordinary and me and Joseph Ratzinger and heaven knows who else has sent me yet another bit of abuse. He/she is preoccupied with sex and has a ferocious manner fueled by anger and frustration ... and, curiously, a wish that I should enable his/her "comments".
If you really want to persuade me, Thingummy, to enable your "comments", send your name, address, email, marital status, size of family, Curriculum Vitae, etc.. (I won't enable it onto the blog if you don't want me to.) After all, I don't hide my identity. Omnia fiant ex aequo. Go on! Don't be shy!
Chicken! Bore!
I received a very gracious and Christian apology from a person who, sadly, got himself involved in all this; I accept it and, in return, express my regret if my manner drove him to it! I know I am not everybody's cup of tea. I assure him of my prayers; I will say Mass for him and his family later this week, asking God to bless his ministry.
I also accept his assurance, which confirms the conclusion I had come to on stylistic grounds, that he is not the person alluded to in my original Post, above. I'm pretty sure (again, on stylistic grounds) that I know who that person is. Indeed, he is a chicken and a bore.
I have deleted most of the thread. I thank the authors of some very kind and moving comments.
____________________________________________________________________________
Apologies to those who feel they've better things to do with their time than read this sort of stuff. I won't return to this matter.
If you really want to persuade me, Thingummy, to enable your "comments", send your name, address, email, marital status, size of family, Curriculum Vitae, etc.. (I won't enable it onto the blog if you don't want me to.) After all, I don't hide my identity. Omnia fiant ex aequo. Go on! Don't be shy!
Chicken! Bore!
I received a very gracious and Christian apology from a person who, sadly, got himself involved in all this; I accept it and, in return, express my regret if my manner drove him to it! I know I am not everybody's cup of tea. I assure him of my prayers; I will say Mass for him and his family later this week, asking God to bless his ministry.
I also accept his assurance, which confirms the conclusion I had come to on stylistic grounds, that he is not the person alluded to in my original Post, above. I'm pretty sure (again, on stylistic grounds) that I know who that person is. Indeed, he is a chicken and a bore.
I have deleted most of the thread. I thank the authors of some very kind and moving comments.
____________________________________________________________________________
Apologies to those who feel they've better things to do with their time than read this sort of stuff. I won't return to this matter.
HYPNEROTOMACHIA
A very small, but perfectly formed, Exhibition, gathered from the treasures of Bodley, commemorating Aldus Pius Manutius, who died on February 6 1515. Just one case, on your right as you go into the Proscholium. (Ends on February 22.)
The decades covered by Aldus' working life were, surely, feverishly exciting: Venice full of Greek refugees (Aldus insisted that only Greek was spoken in his workshop!); loads of Greek manuscripts saved from Constantinople swilling around; Aldus and all the others experimenting with the new technology of printing. There must have been sensation after sensation: "Did you hear? So-and-so has just come across a manuscript of such-and-such!!" You only have to look at the apparatus beneath any page of Catullus to be reminded how much we owe, in the recovery of that poet a textu corruptissimo, to the emendations that were whizzing round Venice and the Veneto in a society where the distinction between Scholar and Printer must often have been blurred. (Dirk Obbink would have been in his element, not to mention the Anonymous London Collector who is not a German Officer!!)
It was Aldus who invented punctuation as we know it today, and italic for the smaller, handier, octavo volumes, exemplified in this Exhibition, which he produced for the convenience of the docti. But the most spectacular thing on show is his edition of the Hypnerotomachia of Poliphili, open (not at the God of Lampsacus but) at the engraving of the Monster Hollow Elephant (or should I say Olyphant?).
One tiny oddity. The Exhibition's master caption laudably refers to Aldus' association with the great humanist scholar Pietro Bembo. It doesn't mention that Bembo was a Cardinal. And, a few months ago, an exhibition in the same case about the foundation of Exeter College (in 1314) failed to mention that its founder was a bishop. Is there a plot in this secularised University to let the Catholic Church's centrality in European cultural history fade from the public memory?
The decades covered by Aldus' working life were, surely, feverishly exciting: Venice full of Greek refugees (Aldus insisted that only Greek was spoken in his workshop!); loads of Greek manuscripts saved from Constantinople swilling around; Aldus and all the others experimenting with the new technology of printing. There must have been sensation after sensation: "Did you hear? So-and-so has just come across a manuscript of such-and-such!!" You only have to look at the apparatus beneath any page of Catullus to be reminded how much we owe, in the recovery of that poet a textu corruptissimo, to the emendations that were whizzing round Venice and the Veneto in a society where the distinction between Scholar and Printer must often have been blurred. (Dirk Obbink would have been in his element, not to mention the Anonymous London Collector who is not a German Officer!!)
It was Aldus who invented punctuation as we know it today, and italic for the smaller, handier, octavo volumes, exemplified in this Exhibition, which he produced for the convenience of the docti. But the most spectacular thing on show is his edition of the Hypnerotomachia of Poliphili, open (not at the God of Lampsacus but) at the engraving of the Monster Hollow Elephant (or should I say Olyphant?).
One tiny oddity. The Exhibition's master caption laudably refers to Aldus' association with the great humanist scholar Pietro Bembo. It doesn't mention that Bembo was a Cardinal. And, a few months ago, an exhibition in the same case about the foundation of Exeter College (in 1314) failed to mention that its founder was a bishop. Is there a plot in this secularised University to let the Catholic Church's centrality in European cultural history fade from the public memory?
5 February 2015
You read it here first!
According to the English Version of the Bollettino, the Holy Father addressed the Catholic bishops of Greece as "Dear Brothers and Sisters in the Episcopate"!!
P.Scr. The Catholic Byzantine Rite Bishop in Greece is called by the Bollettino an "Esarch"! Eparchs and Exarchs I am, of course, familiar with; but Esarch ...
English readers will know of the incident back in the nineteenth century when a typesetter at the Times newspaper introduced the F-word into a parliamentary report. They never did discover his identity.
In the College Mag at Lancing, where at one point the Common Room included a Sensitive and Animal-loving young woman, some malefactor once interpolated, into a piece listing what she did in her vacations, the phrase "seal-clubbing". He (I think it was a He), also, was never tracked down.
Looks as though Fr Lombardi's office also has a ****** in the woodpile! Long may she flourish!
P.Scr. The Catholic Byzantine Rite Bishop in Greece is called by the Bollettino an "Esarch"! Eparchs and Exarchs I am, of course, familiar with; but Esarch ...
English readers will know of the incident back in the nineteenth century when a typesetter at the Times newspaper introduced the F-word into a parliamentary report. They never did discover his identity.
In the College Mag at Lancing, where at one point the Common Room included a Sensitive and Animal-loving young woman, some malefactor once interpolated, into a piece listing what she did in her vacations, the phrase "seal-clubbing". He (I think it was a He), also, was never tracked down.
Looks as though Fr Lombardi's office also has a ****** in the woodpile! Long may she flourish!
4 February 2015
More than sherds
I'm afraid I just declined a very amusing comment simply because it was typed in with so many bits of carelessness. Never forget that I am really just an usher.
I've also declined one or two recently, purely on account of my own whimsy. In one case it was because of the condescending manner in which, with no reference to facts I thought I was working with, it advised me that Common Sense knew better. In another case, the writer seemed to want to make it clear that popes are gods-on-earth and everyone knows that they can do anything ... again, without deigning to comment on magisterial texts I had cited.
I don't have to enable anything. Many blogs nowadays have given up accepting comments.
I've also declined one or two recently, purely on account of my own whimsy. In one case it was because of the condescending manner in which, with no reference to facts I thought I was working with, it advised me that Common Sense knew better. In another case, the writer seemed to want to make it clear that popes are gods-on-earth and everyone knows that they can do anything ... again, without deigning to comment on magisterial texts I had cited.
I don't have to enable anything. Many blogs nowadays have given up accepting comments.
3 February 2015
NEXTAGESIMA SUNDAY
I expect you've all seen the Notice of Evensong in the Assumption, Warwick street, at 6.30 on February 8, next Sunday. An occasion not to miss! The place to be seen!
The old High Churchmen made much of their (theologically unviable) 'Branch Theory' of the Church. But, culturally, Sunday's Evensong will be a demonstration of the three 'branches', Roman and Eastern and Anglican, which they chattered so much about.
Joining Keith our Ordinary, the other two Ordinaries are due to be there, hotfoot from the colonial fastnesses of North America and Australia, so that the gathering will represent the three main groups of us Anglicans United But Not Absorbed (what is the collective noun for a gathering of Ordinaries?). His Eminence Vincent Cardinal Nichols will be in choro; I recall those moving words of B John Henry Newman, in his Second Spring Sermon, about the presence of "a Prince of the Church, in the royal dye of empire and of martyrdom, a pledge to us from Rome of Rome's unwearied love, a token that that goodly company is firm in Apostolic faith and hope". The warmth with which Cardinal Vincent supports us means a lot to us.
But .... Hooray! Another splendid thing! The Eparch himself will be present, Bishop Hlib, the Ukrainian Bishop for Great Britain and Ireland, representing the Byzantine Rite, the Eastern Lung of the Catholic Church (it was in 2013 that Benedict XVI elevated the Exarchate to an Eparchate). I say 'splendid' because his gracious presence will be a tremendous witness to the importance of diversity in the Catholic Church. There are still people who sometimes wonder why we Anglicans in Full Communion with Rome can't be content just to be 'mainstream' 'diocesan' 'ordinary' 'run of the mill' Catholics. Why these very obvious differences of ethos? Why these varieties of style? Why these liturgical diversities? Why the irritating little idiosyncrasies of manner? Why the unusual preferences? Bishop Hlib is one of a number of answers to these naive questions. Eis polla ete Despota! And may the Lord's blessing rest upon the heroic Greek Catholic Church of the Ukraine, the Church of the Martyrs! You are a most welcome guest. From you, we have so much to learn!
It's what 'Catholicism', the gathering of all nations, of all Christian cultures, of all Christian traditions, into the One Catholic Church, cum Petro et sub Petro, is all about.
__________________________________________________________________________________
Those bound to the Divine Office fulfil their obligation by being present at any celebration of the Office according to any Catholic Rite. And the Anglican Use is a Catholic Rite sanctioned by Rome, and our Evensong represents both Vespers and Compline (Evening Prayer and Night Prayer) according to the the Roman Breviary and the Liturgy of the Hours.
I wrote "the three main groups" because, of course, the good old Anglican Use Provision is still very much alive and flourishing, with its large academy and its vast congregations and its superb liturgy, down there in San Antonio. Never to be forgotten! And unforgettable to those of us fortunate enough to have been there!! The tinkle of the bells on the thurible!!!
The old High Churchmen made much of their (theologically unviable) 'Branch Theory' of the Church. But, culturally, Sunday's Evensong will be a demonstration of the three 'branches', Roman and Eastern and Anglican, which they chattered so much about.
Joining Keith our Ordinary, the other two Ordinaries are due to be there, hotfoot from the colonial fastnesses of North America and Australia, so that the gathering will represent the three main groups of us Anglicans United But Not Absorbed (what is the collective noun for a gathering of Ordinaries?). His Eminence Vincent Cardinal Nichols will be in choro; I recall those moving words of B John Henry Newman, in his Second Spring Sermon, about the presence of "a Prince of the Church, in the royal dye of empire and of martyrdom, a pledge to us from Rome of Rome's unwearied love, a token that that goodly company is firm in Apostolic faith and hope". The warmth with which Cardinal Vincent supports us means a lot to us.
But .... Hooray! Another splendid thing! The Eparch himself will be present, Bishop Hlib, the Ukrainian Bishop for Great Britain and Ireland, representing the Byzantine Rite, the Eastern Lung of the Catholic Church (it was in 2013 that Benedict XVI elevated the Exarchate to an Eparchate). I say 'splendid' because his gracious presence will be a tremendous witness to the importance of diversity in the Catholic Church. There are still people who sometimes wonder why we Anglicans in Full Communion with Rome can't be content just to be 'mainstream' 'diocesan' 'ordinary' 'run of the mill' Catholics. Why these very obvious differences of ethos? Why these varieties of style? Why these liturgical diversities? Why the irritating little idiosyncrasies of manner? Why the unusual preferences? Bishop Hlib is one of a number of answers to these naive questions. Eis polla ete Despota! And may the Lord's blessing rest upon the heroic Greek Catholic Church of the Ukraine, the Church of the Martyrs! You are a most welcome guest. From you, we have so much to learn!
It's what 'Catholicism', the gathering of all nations, of all Christian cultures, of all Christian traditions, into the One Catholic Church, cum Petro et sub Petro, is all about.
__________________________________________________________________________________
Those bound to the Divine Office fulfil their obligation by being present at any celebration of the Office according to any Catholic Rite. And the Anglican Use is a Catholic Rite sanctioned by Rome, and our Evensong represents both Vespers and Compline (Evening Prayer and Night Prayer) according to the the Roman Breviary and the Liturgy of the Hours.
I wrote "the three main groups" because, of course, the good old Anglican Use Provision is still very much alive and flourishing, with its large academy and its vast congregations and its superb liturgy, down there in San Antonio. Never to be forgotten! And unforgettable to those of us fortunate enough to have been there!! The tinkle of the bells on the thurible!!!
2 February 2015
Query
Does anybody have chapter and verse for the claim that Pio Nono declined to add S Joseph to the Canon on the grounds that "I am only the pope"?
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