Welsh Festivities

Ancient Cross in the Church in Wales' Parish Church in Llantwit

Months ago, before I had the responsibility of caring for an Ordinariate Group, we arranged a Christmas break with family in South Wales. Thanks to Fr Gerry, our parish priest in Bournemouth, I was able to fulfil that commitment, and our Group worshipped with the parish on Christmas Day. So we shall again on January 1st, though this time I will be able to preach and concelebrate.


Llanmihangel Church
In Wales you are in the land of the Saints. It is even said that in the ancient Monastery attached to the Church of St Illtyd in Llantwit Major, both Patrick and David received their education. Our daughter lives a few miles away in a hamlet called Sigginstone, where there is only a pub and a handful of houses. The Church of St Michael (Llanmihangel) is a mile away down a lane, and very lovely it is, hidden in its dell from any Danish marauders.


Our Lady & St Illtyd Catholic Church
The Catholic Church is rather more modern, but greatly loved by its parishioners. Fr William Isaac, the Parish Priest, invited me to celebrate the midnight Mass - he was at one of the two other churches in the parish, in Bridgend. Later on Christmas morning Fr Tim, his assistant priest, celebrated and preached and I concelebrated with him. Then on St Stephen's day I said Mass once more in Our Lady & St Illtyd's - and told the congregation a little about St Stephen's House in Oxford, and how it continues to provide priests for the Catholic Church (as well as a few for the Church of England). Now our Ordinariate Group is laying plans for 2012, beginning with Solemn Evensong and Benediction at St James' Spanish Place in a fortnight, and continuing with several of us joining the Ordinariate pilgrimage to Rome at the beginning of Lent. Meanwhile Jane is cooking endlessly, ready for an invasion this Monday, January 2nd, when we are declaring Open House for our Ordinariate Group. Hope we are strong enough!

The Catholic Church in Wales is not a separate entity from the Church in England; [Scotland, of course, is another matter altogether]. I found it interesting to discover that the Province includes Herefordshire, over the border in England, with the Archbishop of Cardiff caring for them all. So when the Ordinariate grows in the Principality, it will simply be another part of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. May that development begin very soon!

Westward Ho!

On a day of foul weather we headed West to join in the Ordination of an old friend. It was some years since Paul Andrew left the Church of England. Now at last he is a Priest in the Catholic Church - not in the Ordinariate, but a Diocesan Priest of Plymouth Diocese. This means he is on home ground, being in origin a Cornishman.

The Parish Church of the Sacred Heart is a very grand Gothic Revival pile, a worthy neighbour to the Cathedral just a few hundred yards to the East.

I have posted another blog about the occasion at the "Anglo-Catholic" site,so this is just an opportunity to show a few more pictures from last evening.


Mercifully the gale had subsided and the rain ceased by the end of the Ordination Mass, and so many were able to make their way to the Pastoral Centre for splendid refreshments and barely any speeches. Good to catch up with old friends, some in the Ordinariate (Fr Robin Ellis is one of my longest-standing friends - we were undergraduates at Pembroke, Oxford, in the 1950s - and yesterday was his birthday, too). The diocese of Plymouth seems to be largely staffed by former Anglicans, some in the Ordinariate but many who made the journey some years ago.



Of forty priests present last evening I would certainly count fifteen, and probably more, who had once served in the Church of England. How will those numbers alter during the next year, as the CofE moves on its inexorable path towards 'ordaining' women as Bishops? Will many who said "a Code of Practice will not do" live up to their words and join the Ordinariate when no real Jurisdiction is afforded them?

A very pleasant surprise was the hotel where we stayed the night; an ancient coaching Inn which has retained much of its character. The sculpture is in white marble; it is a trick of the camera (perhaps reacting to pigeon guano) which has turned her pink - but she's a jolly image to conclude this blog.

Inculturation

The Ordinariates have to remain distinct: yet also they are a part of Catholic life in this country. So today I joined priests from the Bournemouth, Avon and Stour Pastoral District on their Advent day of Recollection.

It was a very happy experience. There was some input from one of the brethren, Fr Bill Wilson, and everyone seemed ready to contribute to the discussion which his talks provoked. It seemed a very good way to begin Advent, and we look forward to a similar occasion at the start of Lent.


We met in very comfortable surroundings, Wisdom House in Romsey. This occupies part of the site of a one-time French Convent. It was good to be at home so quickly with fellow priests, only a few of whom I'd met before today. One though, my namesake Fr Bruce Barnes, worked in the Anglican Diocese of Portsmouth soon after I served my Title there, and it was very good to catch up with him again.
It is a stone's throw from another former Monastic building, Romsey Abbey. That church, one of the loveliest in Hampshire, is now the Anglican parish church of the town. The famous local family is the Mountbattens and Lord Louis, cousin of the Royal Family, was laid to rest here.


Portsmouth Catholic Diocese has created a great facility in Wisdom House, and I look forward to coming here again in the future.

I can't leave Romsey without showing you its greatest jewel, the Rood which though much damaged is still magnificent. This early representation of the crucifixion pre-dates the distorted suffering figures of the Middle Ages. This Christ is not victim but Victor, his arms apread out to embrace the world, his feet side by side as though he stands erect. It was the inspiration for the silversmith who created the pectoral cross which I wore as Bishop of Richborough. To have an opportunity to continue in Ministry in old age is a great privilege - to Christ be the glory!


Saxon Rood by the Northeast Cloister Door into the Abbey

Busy Day

Introducing Fr John Hemer MHM
A busy day in London Town began at Our Lady of the Angels, Bayswater, where members of the Confraternity of Catholic Clergy met to hear Fr Hemer on Catholic Scriptural Studies in the light of the teaching of Benedict XVI. It was so good to be reminded that the Scriptures are written "that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life through his name". So much Biblical scholarship in the past Century and more has been undertaken by non-believers. They purport to take an unbiased approach; in fact, theirs is a post-Enlightenment stance which fails to acknowledge the whole purpose of Sacred Scripture. It is written "from faith to faith", not just meant to be dissected as a mere exercise in linguistics. To treat it as such an exercise is rather as though medical studies stopped short with anatomy, and never considered living patients; or as though misicologists studied scores, but never listened to music.


Our Lady of the Angels is a very grand neo-Gothic edifice, with a history going back to that famous one-time married Anglican, Cadinal Manning.


It dominates its corner of Bayswater and makes a grand foil to the Victorian villas facing it across Sutherland Place. We met in the Father Michael Hollings Centre, where we shared a meal and good company - for of course fraternity is one of the purposes of the CCC. We spent half an hour before the Blessed Sacrament, so between those devotions and our Biblical lecture we managed to show something of the two other elements of the Confraternity, Fidelity and Formation.


After lunch, rather than rushing back to Waterloo, I diverted to Two Temple Place. I had read about it in the press last week, and thought I should get to see this, one of the last works of the great gothic revival architect, J.L.Pearson.


He was commissioned by William Waldorf Astor to build the house, and what an extraordinary piece of work it is - a little Renaissance Palace quite unlike any of Pearson's famous churches. At present it is filled with an exhibition about William Morris, "Story, Memory, Myth". Check with the website (www.twotempleplace.org) before setting out, since occasionally the House in closed for Private events. But if you can get there before January 29th, it is well worth the journey - and what's more, it is free!

Where's that Patrimony, then? Part 2.

Oh dear: I thought the first half of my address to SVP [yesterday's blog] listed some of the things commonly thought to be the essence of 'The Patrimony' - ancient language, beautiful liturgy, rich hymnody &c - and then added BUT THESE ARE NOT OF THE ESSENCE because they are, or should be, the common concern of all Catholics, not just former Anglicans. Clearly I was misunderstood, since some have asserted that I was giving these priority. I don't; and I hope I said in the second part of my talk just what I DID think was at the heart of our Patrimony. It was about our concern for those beyond the walls of our churches... but judge for yourself, here is how the talk concluded:-

And here we do begin to get to a distinctive element in our Patrimony. Whereas Catholic Parishes count hundreds, even thousands, at Mass, Anglican Parish churches have been used to congregations of seldom more than a hundred. At its best, that has meant that the Vicar has a better chance of knowing his people. It does not mean, though, that he necessarily has an easier time than his Catholic counterpart. When an Anglican clergyman is appointed to his parish, he is inducted to his living. His parish is a geographical area, and until recently all marriages, baptisms and burials in that area were his concern. All the people in that parish were his to look after - and until recently many Anglican clergy tried to visit across the whole of the parish, not simply caring for nominal Anglicans. It is this sense of responsibility beyond a congregation which is, I believe, at the heart of our mission.

By being part of the ‘established church’, whatever that means now, the Anglican cleric has had the time to be a pastor to a whole community. At its best, that has meant that he would visit anyone in hospital - not just Anglicans, certainly not just his own flock - and from those encounters there would occasionally be a real conversion. So too with funerals. If in doubt, a person would be put down as ‘C of E’ – and that too gave, and gives still, great opportunities for genuine evangelisation, when bereaved families are visited before and after the funeral.

When we moved to our retirement house ten years ago there was still a hospital over the road. They built a new hospital, and gradually houses were built on the site opposite us, forty-one of them in the end. It gave me a conscience that I had no right to visit them. In my parishes I would have seen those newcomers as both responsibility and opportunity. If I’d not called myself, someone from our visiting team would have been there while the boxes were still being upacked, with a parish magazine to leave so that they knew when we met for worship. We had people keep en eye out for removal vans across the parish. The first few days after arrival were the best time. No one wanted you to stay very long, but you could answer questions about the neighbourhood – the doctors, the schools, the bus service – and your visit was often remembered many years after. A young couple were in my study preparing for marriage. ‘I used to be in the police’, she said. ‘I remember you visiting the Station soon after you arrived. We did not know why you had come, but we were glad you had’. It was as though being part of the Church of England gave us a right – and a duty – to do such things. I hope when eventually we get our Catholic parishes we shall continue in this way. I am sure some of the Ordinariate priests already are doing so. It is second nature to them.

Being part of "The Church of England by Law Established" gave us confidence to do this. Now if we believe that the Catholic Church really is meant to be the Church of this land, perhaps we can all rediscover this attitude, this sense of responsibility for entire communities - not just for those who happen to come to mass, or who had an Irish grandmother. It may be there are Catholic parishes where this happens; I hope so, and it would be good to hear your experience of this, and whether I am being quite unrealistic.

Last week they showed something of the funeral of Jimmy Saville. Typically, the BBC said nothing about how his fund-raising for Hospitals was inspired by his faith - and that is annoying. Then, when it showed the Procession coming out of Leeds Catholic Cathedral the commentator said something about it being “the City’s Cathedral” – once again I began to be annoyed. Then it occurred to me that perhaps this was of a piece with the way in which Archbishop Vincent is often asked for a religious slant on a news item when in the past it might have been the Archbishop of Canterbury. They say the Queen used to refer to Basil Hume as “My Cardinal”. It may be that gradually the Catholic Church is filling the space which was once claimed by the Church of England as the National Church. The Anglican Church is finding it ever harder to address the nation, and when it does, as in the St Paul’s affair, it does so with confusion. We should be getting bolder in using the media, expecting Catholic voices to be heard. I think there is a group of laypeople who are doing just that nationally. Perhaps we need to have more people locally making frequent contact with the local press and radio and TV; and if you are already doing it, hurrah, and let us know about it.

If, after all this, you say “But that is nothing different from what Catholics have always done”, that’s fine. It simply means our so-called Patrimony is less distinctive than I thought. But I believe it is an attitude to the outside world which the Holy Father wants us to develop - "The Church in the market place" - and something for which our Anglican experience has particularly qualified us.

Yet the truth is, we are Catholics. This week I have celebrated two masses for the Ordinariate – both of them straight from the new missal – and three masses in local catholic churches, where our parish priest is very hard-pressed. Our Group Council has decided that we should only have two masses each week which are billed as being ‘ours’, on Sunday at 9.30am and on Wednesday at 10.30am. The only difference between them and other masses celebrated in the parish is that we name our Ordinary, Keith, in the Canon, besides Crispian our Bishop. If we go to Mass on other days, we join our local Catholic parishes.

It is a delicate balancing act we are engaged in. We try to be as supportive as possible to our local churches, while keeping a distinct place for Anglicanorum Coetibus, groups of Anglicans. In our Ordinariate worship we are often joined by others, friends from St Joseph’s in Christchurch where the priest prepared our people for reception into the Church, from Our Lady Queen of Peace itself, and from other parishes – people who want to discover what we are about. What we are hoping to do, little by little, is invite current Anglicans to come and see for themselves what is going on. So many good members of the Church of England are very confused just now, especially those who would call themselves Anglo-Catholics. They were promised that they would always have an “honoured place” in the church of their baptism, but that promise is being ever more frequently broken. As they get more and more marginalised, and as the consecration of women as bishops draws nearer, we are trying to create a place of welcome for them.

We still have a great deal to learn. Our clergy are engaged in an ongoing course of instruction based on teaching at Allen Hall in Chelsea, at Maryvale in Birmingham, and at Buckfast Abbey. Young men with families are adapting to living on less than they were used to, and money is a constant concern for our Ordinary. But none of us regrets the step he has taken, and we are very grateful for the warm welcome and practical help given us by the Catholic Church in England and Wales. Somehow, together, we have to get on with the evangelisation of our nation.



Members of SVP beginning to gather in the Milner Hall

Where's that Patrimony, then?

The Society of St Vincent de Paul{SVP}in Winchester invited me to speak to them about the Ordinariate and how we see it from the inside. My address to them was rather long, so it had better make up two posts, Here is Part I - and I'd be grateful for comments, especially from fellow Ordinarians. It is the first time in six months that I have really tried to wrestle with the notion of Patrimony. We met in the Milner Hall, which began life as the first Catholic Church in England to be consecrated after the Reformation. Now this splendid church (below) is its replacement, standing almost next door to its predecessor.



The Ordinariate and Anglican Patrimony

There is a little group of former Anglicans who worship in the Church of Our Lady Queen of Peace and Blessed Margaret Pole. As with all such Groups, and there are now dozens up and down the country, there is a constant struggle to maintain our identity, and yet be clearly a true part of the Catholic Church. When the Holy Father, only two years since, produced “Anglicanorum Coetibus”, and startled the ecumenical world, there were two things the documents stressed.

One was that this was for GROUPS of Anglicans; that is what Anglicanorum Coetibus means. Some of us were meeting this week at Allen Hall, as part of our ongoing formation as Catholic priests. We spoke about the different situations from which we came; and found that no two were exactly similar. At one extreme was a strong Group in Kent, which represented almost the entire congregation of a local Anglican church. They and their Vicar had sought admission to the Church in one body, and the Catholic diocese had offered them the use of a small building a few miles out of town which had been no more than a Mass Centre for a larger town church. This group has become so established, and has built up such good relations with the Catholics they were joining, that it is likely the former Anglican Vicar will become the Parish Priest of a new parish based on that little mission building.

At the other end of the spectrum was a priest who had joined the Catholic Church with only a handful of parishioners. Another local Vicar had brought more of his people with him, so all the former Anglicans were put into one Group, and the priest with the handful was left without any. He was asked to go to a Catholic church a few miles away to minister to the existing congregation. To his delight, though, he has begun to find there are local ex-Anglicans worshipping with him. They had been travelling many miles to an Ordinariate Group – though only eight or ten at present, they look forward to building their numbers and so gaining some group identity.

Our three Groups in this diocese also differ from each other. On the Isle of Wight the core members came from one Anglican Church with their Vicar, and gradually others in the Island are joining them. There are, though, a few Ordinariate Catholics on the Portsmouth mainland. They are worshipping with existing Catholic parishes, and only occasionally does the priest come over from the Island, with a number of his people, and celebrate with them. In Reading, it is a former Vicar with a small number who join him for Mass at a local Catholic Church; and he is earning his keep by teaching at the Oratory School. In Bournemouth, no Vicar has yet relinquished his living. There have been, though, three of us who were retired, and between us we have gathered a group from a number of different parishes around the area. We worship on Sunday and Wednesday at Our Lady Queen of Peace. One of the priests has lately moved on, and another is awaiting his Catholic ordination, so I am holding the fort in the meanwhile, though I retired as an Anglican Bishop ten years ago.

The second thing the Holy Father was seeking was an injection of some of the best of Anglicanism, what he called our Patrimony, into the Catholic Church. But what are the distinctive marks of our Anglican heritage that we bring with us, that Patrimony of which the Holy Father spoke? Some Catholics, I know, have been a little suspicious of us. They had heard other Anglicans call us backwoodsmen, old fashioned Christians who were frightened of women and wanted nothing but the security of the language of the 17th Century Prayer Book. If that had described us you would have been right to be worried. We opposed the Ordination of women to the priesthood, certainly, but that was on ecumenical grounds. It was putting up an insuperable barrier between Anglicans and both the Catholic and Orthodox churches, without any basis for it in Scripture or the Tradition. We believed it was not a matter to be resolved by just one tiny fragment of the Universal Church. What’s more, for most of us the old Prayer Book with its THEEs and THOUs is more a historic document than a source of current worship – though it must be said that Thomas Cranmer translated Latin Collects far better than the authors of the now superseded English Version of the Latin Missal.

So if those are not the matters that we want to preserve, what is this mysterious Patrimony? The Holy Father seems to have great admiration for the English Tradition of church music, especially Choral Evensong. Some of our Groups are trying to maintain a little of that with a sung service once a month or so. That service, though, is usually Solemn Evensong and Benediction.

To understand this, you need to know a little Church History. After the first founders of the Oxford Movement, Newman and Pusey and Keble, there came another generation very concerned with improving the liturgical practice of the Church of England. Choral Services had survived in many Cathedrals, but now parish churches began introducing robed choirs, and they spiced up Choral Evensong with incense, and ceremonial taken directly from Rome. They were also engaged in making a sung Eucharist their central act of worship. Since vestments and ceremonial had all but disappeared from the Church of England’s worship, many of the leaders in this Ritual movement looked to Catholicism, and especially to continental Catholicism.

For this they were persecuted. Some of them went to prison for their activities. A Bishop of Lincoln was put on trial for lighting candles on the holy table in his chapel, and for mixing a little water in the wine of the Chalice. In particular, bishops were infuriated by the practice of reserving the Blessed Sacrament, and there were court cases to try to get it banned. Equally, they were opposed to other so-called Popish Practices, especially Confession, which its opponents thought would be a way for priests to seduce the women of England.

Because of the persecution, for Anglo-Catholics these became the touchstones of authenticity; confession, the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament, and a Sung Eucharist as the centre of their worship. Imagine our surprise on finding that in the Catholic Church these things were less valued than in our part of the Church of England! I caused some little stir in a local Catholic Church when I preached about confession. I told people that when I was asked in retirement to care for a little Anglican congregation I announced times for confession before Christmas and was delighted and not a little surprised to find a queue for the confessional. Equally surprising to me was the Catholic congregation which, on coming into Church after an Ordinariate Mass, flung open all the doors and windows to get rid of the incense! We had thought it was only Protestants who developed an aversion to holy smoke.

So is it our vocation to remind cradle Catholics of the value of some of the things you have lost? I don’t think so. That would smack of a terrible superior attitude; the very thing we wanted to leave behind with Anglicanism. It may be that the care with which we conduct worship is a mark of a former Anglican; but it is also surely the mark of any good Catholic. We enjoy singing hymns, and generally we have not gone for the vacuous little ditties which you would find in many Evangelical Anglican Churches – and also, I fear, in some Catholic ones. But that surely is something which the Church is tackling, in the wake of the new Translation of the Missal. It’s said our preaching is longer – I wouldn’t say better – than in Catholic Parishes. But that is maybe a function of being less rushed than most Catholic priests.

And here we do begin to get to an element in our Patrimony. [To Be Continued....]

Is it Autumn?

There has been, we are told, snow in the Eastern United States; yet here on the South Coast of England we still wait for our first frost. The picture above is of a rose in our garden - the Yellow Banksian Rose - which usually flowers in May. Then this afternoon we went to the Coast (Barton on Sea is just six miles from home) and saw these escapees from cliff-top gardens; I believe they known as Cape Fig, usually blooming in Summer - yet here are one or two precocious yellow blossoms.



For all that, the sun is very low in the sky, and there is not much warmth left. We reached not much more than 12 degress C today, though without a breeze it felt quite balmly.



Still, winter approaches. In the Bournemouth Ordinariate Group (some of them seen below after Mass this morning) we are making plans for Advent and Christmas. We shall be joining the Parish for Midnight Mass and on Christmas Morning. Our Servers are very pleased to have been asked to assist at Midnight. We were a bit unsettled a couple of weeks back, with the announcement that our Pastor, Fr Graham Smith, felt he must move on. Msgr Keith reluctantly agreed, and has asked me to look after the Group as a temporary measure until such time as we have another former Anglican priest ordained. We have resolved to have fewer Masses (just Wednesday at 10.30 and the Sung Mass on Sunday at 9.30) but most of the Group seem to think this is a good arrangement, giving them the chance to worship in their local churches on other days.



Click on the pictures for a larger view