Why the worship of the Ordinariate matters to everybody.

I reprint an old post of mine because Cardinal Sarah, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, has recently expressed a hope that the next edition of the (OF) Roman Missal will include, in the interests of Mutual Enrichment, the (EF) Praeparatio and Offertory Prayers. Just as I do in this piece. For the next few days, as well as my usual fresh post around 10.00 every morning, I shall reprint later in each day an old post on this same theme: Bring Back the Praeparatio and the Offertory Prayers as options in the OF!

Where now, I ask, are the sourpusses who were once so sure that our beloved Holy Father would appoint Piero Marini to CDW and thus usher in a new Dark Age of deteriorating Liturgy?

Tomorrow being the Anniversary of the Inauguration, by blessed Benedict XVI, of the British Ordinariate, I venture to repeat the warmest of invitations to Traditionalist Catholics to experience the Ordinariate Rite of Mass. You will know that this Use is authorised by the Holy See; and when we had our great Ordinariate celebration in Westminster last year, with Cardinal Nichols there to show his enthusiastic support, Mgr Keith Newton, our Ordinary, emphatically urged as many of his clergy as possible to use our own rite and thus to display our distinctiveness. 'Our' Mass can be accessed in London at the Assumption, Warwick Street; go there! But I invite you also, if you can get to Oxford, to visit this splendid Rite as celebrated by the Oxford Ordinariate group for the Sunday Vigil Mass on Saturday evenings at 6.00.Why not come? Why not book your flights from Rio or from Tasmania or from Samarkand?

For a Vigil Mass, you cry? I know what you mean. A Vigil Mass can (prescinding from the fact that the most blessed and august and holy Sacrifice of the Mass is always inherently a matter of joy to the entire Cosmos and to the Angels and to ourselves) seem, in its ritual and social expression, a rather sad event in which people are "getting it over with" as painlessly as possible so that they can "enjoy" their Sunday. Fine music and a 'traddy' atmosphere are not commonly evoked by the phrase "Vigil Mass". But with us, the music is of the best, and the heart of Archbishop Lefebvre himself would have been melted by the entire liturgical effect. I will stick out my neck by saying that the Oxford Ordinariate Vigil Mass is, as Vigil Masses go, unique.

And, as I hope you know, the Ordinariate Ordo Missae breathes new life into a venerable liturgical tradition. Until the majority of Anglo-Catholic clergy most unwisely decided, in many cases with great reluctance, that it was their duty to adopt the Novus Ordo in the 1960s and 1970s, Catholic Anglican worship in the Church of England was a marvel. Ignorant people sometimes used to say that "If one Sunday Fr Murphy down at the Sacred Heart happened to flick a fly from his shoulder, the gesture would instantly be mimicked in the local Anglo-Papalist church". Nothing could be more ridiculous, or further from the truth. It was Rome itself that we Anglo-Papalists "aped", not the church-down-the-road. O'Connell-Fortescue was, for us, the last and greatest book of the Bible, and sat comfortably on the Sacristy bookshelf. Heaven (really!) forgive our arrogance, we rather prided ourselves on being different from, and a distinct cut above, Fr Murphy at the Sacred Heart! High Mass, largely unknown among English Roman Catholics, was our Sunday norm.

The Ordinariate Mass gives us back a great deal of our lost ancient glories. The language is the Tudor English which Archbishop Cranmer and King James's Bible translators created to be the superb sacral dialect in which our worship commonly took place. It is a mirror image of the artificial hieratic Latin in which the Old Rite is written.  And, in the Ordinariate Use, we have recovered a vast amount of 'Tridentine' material which the Western Church so sadly lost when the Novus Ordo came marching in: most particularly, the Tridentine emphasis on the Mass as a true propitiatory Sacrifice, to be offered with awe and reverence rather than with folksy chumminess. We can start off humbling ourselves with the Praeparatio at the foot of the altar; we honour the Altar each time with a kiss before we turn away from it; we are able to use the Tridentine Offertory Prayers with their unambiguously sacrificial language; we genuflect both before after each Elevation and after touching the Most Holy; we are encouraged always to use the Roman Canon, and the Libera nos as it was before Archbishop Bugnini 'improved' it; we can end on the magnificently triumphal note of the Last Gospel to bridge that gap between the Incarnate Word and World He was incarnated to redeem. We all truly face God's East, and are not bullied by a laity which demands its rights to watch Father's thoroughly repulsive face at every moment in the Mass. There is a magnificent schola and much of what it sings is, as Vatican II encouraged, in Latin. Patrimonial early Tudor English Church music is one of our specialities. The Ordinariate Rite is an example to the whole of the Latin Rite Church.

'Nuff Said. 6.00 on Saturdays, at the Church of the Holy Rood just South of Folly Bridge in Oxford (jokes about this will be deleted). Angelus before Mass; Anthem of our Lady and wine afterwards.

The thread contains comments offered to a previous edition of this piece, with which I celebrated my return to blogging after a silence which I had deemed prudent because of the attempts that had been made to prevent me from being admitted to the Ordinariate priesthood, on account of my liturgical preferences.

"Anglicanism united not absorbed"

I remember having an entirely good-natured running dispute with the late Dean of Studies at Allen Hall, the totally admirable and affable and hospitable Dr Stephen Wang (Vescovo subito!).

My view was that we of the Ordinariate are Anglicans in full Communion with the See of S Peter. His was that we are Catholics with Anglican Previous.

My instinct is based on a lifetime of longing for the realisation of the vision set before us by Dom Lambert Beauduin and taken up by Cardinal Mercier in the Malines Conversations, of an Anglicanism united but not absorbed.

There is nothing purely abstract here; this is not about how many angels can dance on the head of a needle: it is a practical matter bearing upon the subject of just how distinctive the Ordinariates should be. And even upon the question that nags at some Ordinariate clergy: Keith's Chrism Mass or the Diocesan one? It seems to me that the whole grammar of what blessed Benedict XVI set up, with its culture of rapid admission to the priestly life of the Catholic Church upon the presentation of ones Letters of Orders from ones Anglican Ordinations, points to the duty of consolidating a strong group identity, even in the case of clergy who may be out on loan, full or partial, to diocesan bishops (the synchronic side of things).

Moreover, being in the Ordinariate carries with it the duty of a strong sense of identity with, and continuity from, our past (the diachronic). This is why I keep hammering on about our great 'Patrimony' teachers; not only Blessed John Henry Newman but also Pusey and Keble and Neale; Dix and Farrer and Mascall ... Lewis and Sayers ... separated Doctors of Catholic Truth. Not to mention blessed Charles Stuart and William Laud. Oh, and let's not forget Ken and the Non-Jurors. They are who we are ... transplanted!! Transplanted in coetibus! Patrimony is not just Choral Evensong. Patrimony is Pusey .... and ...... and ........

GOD'S FINAL WORD IS CALLED JESUS

                                        GOD'S FINAL WORD IS CALLED JESUS

 It seems that the Holy Father had Medjugorje and its so-called "seers" and their followers in mind when he said this, but what a wonderful and beautifully terse expression it is of Christian Orthodoxy. It puts down the errors of Islam; it is a rebuff to the neo-Gnostic convolutions of the Kaspers and Marxes. It is a superb expression of the function of the Roman Pontiff to act as a barrier, what Blessed John Henry Newman called a remora, against innovation, whether dogmatic or moral; and it could serve as a summary of the the decree Pastor aeternus of Vatican I. Four cheers for our beloved Holy Father!

To those who, like me, have sometimes rather missed the elegance and profundity of the teaching of Benedict XVI, I say: You can't wish for better than this!

Encyclicals

One of my own anxieties about the current ecclesiastical climate is the tendency for 'Traditionalists' to invent contradictions between 'Tradition' and 'Newchurch'. I think we have an example of this in the report about the imminent Encyclical by Eponymous Flower (a blog for which I have great respect). It describes Lodato si (if I have remembered the Medieval Italian correctly) as "the first Encyclical of history also to have a subtitle". I have problems with this. I have by chance before me the Vatican Press Latin original of S John Paul II's Ecclesia de Eucharistia, in which it is given a subtitle ("de Eucharistia eiusque necessitudine cum Ecclesia"). On the handy revolving bookcase just to my right, I have a collection of the old CTS English translations of Papal Encyclicals according to which, at the very least as far back as Pius XI, encyclicals did have subtitles.

Let us not get so excited about ruptures in the Tradition that we spot them where they don't exist.

Personally, I propose to refrain from comments upon the text of this Encyclical until I have read it. And I sha'n't read it until it appears in the authoritative Latin. And here I do have a bit of a problem about ruptures. I was uneasy about the 'rupture' implied by Cardinal Bergoglio's choice of the nomen assumptum Francis, which seemed to set him aside from all popes since the ninth century, as it was a name which had never before been born by a Roman Pontiff. And I have problems about the publication of allegedly Magisterial documents which are formally "presented" in Rome, and read and widely discussed, in vernacular translations before the actual text which invites our obsequium is available. Shall we have, as has happened before during this pontificate, savants learnedly comparing different and dissonant vernacular editions in order to try to suss out what a particular passage is trying to say? Are there not better ways for academics and journalists to spend their time than in such ultimately pointless philological contortions? How many languages are the Faithful, whether lay or cleric, simple or learned, supposed to have at their fingertips, in order to be able to appropriate the Church's teaching?

White Rose Day

Well, this side of the Ocean spring came early; and the white roses have long been out in the hedgerows. But that is no reason for failing to wish my readers a very Happy White Rose Day, on this Anniversary of the Birth Day of our late Sovereign liege Lord King James VIII and III ... our longest reigning monarch. And the last King of England to whom the Holy See accorded the right to nominate bishops ... so I suppose that all those admirable Vicars Apostolic, Petres and Talbots and Stonors, including Bishop Challoner, who were nominated before 1766 and look down at us from their portraits in their bands and wigs and 'Gallican' blue cassocks, were named by him. I am sure they all rejoice, and deem it mightily suitable, that the old Bavarian Embassy Chapel in Warwick Street is now in Ordinariate hands. And very appropriate that the Crowns of these Three Kingdoms are destined eventually to devolve de jure upon the princely House of Liechtenstein, where Vaduz Cathedral is reported to enjoy a very good level of Churchmanship under a quite Advanced Archbishop.

Then let us rejoice
With heart and voice
There doth one Stuart remain;
And all sing the tune
On the Tenth Day of June
That the King shall enjoy his own again.

A toast consueto more, this evening, to the Monarch? Go on! Unless there's a water shortage!

The Primatial See of Malines

Not so very long ago, the Tradisphere was pulsating with appehension that Mgr Pietro Marini would be put in charge of the Congregation for Worship. The apprehensions were, to a degree, understandable; Marini, in that job, would have been a very gravely divisive figure; moreover, a book which was ghost-written for him calls his liturgical competence most seriously into question. He never was appointed. I never thought he would be, even if simply because of his age. Instead, the Holy Father made a fine and most appropriate appointment.

Now there are similar apprehensions about the See of Malines. The fear-figure, tradispherically, is now Bishop Bonny, who, like Marini, is also, to an extreme degree, a divisive figure who has adopted for himself a high profile. What seems to me most radically problematic about him is the letter he wrote before the last Synod in which he called into question the letter Humanae vitae of Blessed Paul VI on the grounds that it did not emerge in the way Bishop Bonny thinks it should have done, from a collegial collaboration between the Pope and the Bishops. This seems to me tantamount to attacking the two basic roles the Bishop of Rome has in the Universal Church: of obstructing innovation and preserving the Tradition; and of being the principle of Unity in the visible Church Militant.

My trust in the good sense of our beloved Holy Father inclines me to be as suspicious of this rumour as I was of the Marini rumour.

What has Malines to do with me? Bonds of affection. Memories of dear Cardinal Mercier, of the 'Malines Conversations' which he sponsored; Mercier, the saintly godfather of the great dream of an 'Anglican Church united but not absorbed'. This was the principle which so magnificently was given reality when Benedict XVI founded the Ordinariates.

I cannot convince myself that Bishop Bonny, with his clearly markered desire to be divisive, would be a proper person to wear the mitre of as great a man as Cardinal Mercier, who devoted so much effort to bringing divided Christians into unity.

First Blessings

What lovelier and more joyful occasions are there than Weddings, Ordinations, Professions?!

And what more striking a sight is there than that at the end of the Ordination, when the Pontiff kneels to receive the blessing of the man he has just ordained.

When a newly ordained priest "gives New Blessings" during the first six months after his Ordination, I do not believe that any particular form of words is prescribed. But the following is by widespread custom often used.

Per impositionem manuum mearum sacerdotalium et per intercessionem beatae Mariae semper Virginis, Sancti N et omnium Sanctorum, omni benedictione caelesti atque terrestri benedicat te Omnipotens Deus, Pater, et Filius, et Spiritus Sanctus. Amen.

[By the imposition of my priestly hands and by the intercession of Blessed Mary ever Virgin, S N and all the Saints, may God Almighty bless you with every blessing both heavenly and earthly, the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen.]

Here, in English, are the words which the Bishop had said during the Ordination as he anointed the hands of the Newly Ordained:
"Be pleased, O Lord, to consecrate and to sanctify these hands through this Anointing and our benediction ... that whatsoever they shall have blessed may be blessed, and whatsoever they shall have consecrated, may be consecrated and sanctified, in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ."

Notice that this prayer is made in the Name of the Incarnate Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. It can be instructive to read the Gospels and to notice the many occasions when our Lord's hands are referred to, either explicitly or implicitly. They are, Holy Mass twice reminds us, sanctae et venerabiles manus. The enfleshed Word did not heal and bless with the Word alone of His tongue, but also with Words of His hands; and at the Table, and upon the Altar of the Cross, He stretched out His hands to suffer and to offer; and displayed them, shot through with Resurrection glory, to His doubting followers.

A Penance for Frivolity

Rose Marie, wisely, corrected me recently for referring to the elect Vice-Chancellor of this University, a lady of Irish origin, as a "girl from the County Waterford". Would I have desribed a man as "a boy"?

What can I do but plead guilty and throw myself upon the mercy of the court? But convicts are, in some jurisdictions, allowed to make pleas in mitigation.

The vision that had floated before my mind was that of a wild Irish colleen, bare-footed, brought up in a smokey cabin somewhere on the backside of  the Knock-me-down Mountains, skilled in the cultivation of potatoes, adept at strumming the udders of a cow, striding suddenly into the pomposities of faux-sophisticated Oxford.

You see, my mind, in its very great weakness, does tend to dwell on visions of frivolous incongruity. When I wrote recently about the Master of Benets, who appears to have worked with immense distinction in pretty well every university in the known world, I had a picture of him sitting on the Hebdomadal Council in his native peasant lederhosen. (Or am I confusing Saarland with the Tyrol?). The other day, walking past the Salvation Army Citadel in Oxford, which is built on the site of the mediaeval Dominican house, I had a sudden fantasy of knocking on the door and advising them of the appropriateness of adopting the Dominican Rite in their Conventual Chapel. The temptation was so powerful that I very nearly did it. You are right: I am well past my sell-by date.

Sometimes, when I hear of the pontifications of self-obsessed prelates, I like to imagine them as married men, listening to their wives' accurately balloon-pricking assessments. I suffer from this sort of over-vivid and radically disordered imagination.

Megaweird, I know, but we all have our own mental eccentricities. I wonder, Rose Marie, if mine entitle me to any remission of sentence?

Reminder

I remind readers that I do not accept gross abuse of the Sovereign Pontiff nor, indeed, of any other fellow-Catholic. With much regret, I have had to deline a particular Comment although it made a number of interesting points. But the words "What a foolish old man!" and, very much more so, the sentence which followed that, are beyond the boundaries which I feel compelled to enforce. I would be very happy to accept the Comment without those two sentences.

I was born in 1941 and am rather a "1968" sort of person, so my preference would naturally be to do without any censorship (except with regard to what may be libellous), as I did in the early years of this blog. But, as I have explained three times before, it has been represented to me that bloggers are deemed to be, to a degree, responsible for what they enable. Hence I decline that sort of remark. To maintain a symmetry of censorship, I also decline remarks from one or two sources at the other end of the spectrum, as well as those from a repetitively Feeneyite source.

Another point I have made before: I also occasionally decline comments which contain multiple typos and bad grammar. This is because I feel that, if somebody is too busy to check through the two or three lines they have dashed off, and to emend them, then they are too busy.

You may wonder why I do not exclude all comments, as numbers of other bloggers do on their blogs. That is because I do this blog partly as an extension of my own curiosity: in the hope of finding out things from those more knowledgeable in particular areas than I am. And sometimes, to test a hypothesis ..."Will this stand up to the examination and criticism of others?"

The new Evangelisation

Some splendid photos on the Transalpine Redemptorist blog.

AVANTI!

I don't know that I much liked Mgr Fisichella's reference to our Holy Father having a "programme". I rather approved of the somewhat unenthusiastic words about papal 'programmes' in Pope Benedict's Inauguration Homily. I don't actually think that a Bishop of Rome, who is not a secular politician, really needs much of a "programme", except the intention, with the assistance of the Holy Spirit, to guard piously and expound faithfully the Apostolic Tradition, the Deposit of Faith, handed down through the Apostles; and to act as what Blessed John Henry Newman called a 'remora' against innovation; which amounts to much the same thing. That's his job and, given a World, and a Church, not completely free of errors and corruptions, I'd have thought that it was quite a big enough job-description without curialists trying to make him add 'programmes' to it. Our beloved Holy Father only has 24 hours in his day, and only seven days in his week. Members of the Curia should try to remember this. They should keep their 'programmes' to themselves.

But I got keener when I read on: the second Sunday in October next year is to be dedicated to our Blessed Lady, the Mother of Mercy. (I could have done without the very slight hint, though, that this is only for the sort of people who like that sort of Marian stuff.) This is a most intriguing return to the high baroque Renaissance encrustation of the Sanctorale which lasted until S Pius X (a bit of a sourpuss?) motored like a combine harvester through the Calendar. Until then, 'Green Sundays' barely existed, especially in October, when Holy Rosary Sunday was followed by Maternity of our Lady Sunday, and then Patronage of our Lady Sunday. That admirable pope Benedict XIV was one of the practitioners of this liturgical goodyism: Progress! Moving on! Bring on Benedict XIV!! Tally Ho!!! Lambertini rules OK!

But then things got even better: I recalled that our Lady's title Mother of Mercy was very dear to my old friend, John De Grandisson (pronounced Grahns'n), Bishop of Exeter in the fourteenth century. Even more progress! Back to John XXII!! Vive d'Euse!

Yet stay! Was not this title of our Lady on the dying lips of the much loved S Richard of Chichester, Chancellor of this University, in the century before? Faster still!! Ahead to the thirteenth century!

[The Missae pro aliquibus locis include a Mass for our Lady of Mercy. I expect we shall all be using it a lot during the Jubilee year. Will the Ecclesia Dei people give it an enhanced status so that it trumps ordinary double ... I mean, III class ... feasts?]

All the way from Waterford

So this University's next Vice-Chancellor is a girl from the Co Waterford; a TCD MA.

I hope her installation will include a ceremony we see all to rarely in modern Oxford: Incorporation ad eundem.

As a seasoned hibernophile, I would view this appointment with enthusiasm but for the fact that she took a year out from Trinity to go to America and describes the experience as 'liberating'.

Oh dear.

She'll probably end up as president of her home country.