Happy Birthday!

Just a year old, but we had a very busy day celebrating the first year of the life of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. It began early, with a beautiful dawn. We had to drive over to Bournemouth in good time, for the car was laden with new goodies. First, the very handsome Lectionary, provided for us by the parish of St Mary the Virgin, Arlington, Texas. The Lectionaries had been awaiting collection at Allen Hall, and I fetched ours on Thursday when we met there with Msgr Keith.



Then with the Lectionaries were some new hymnals - well, new to us. They are copies of English Hymnal which the Anglican Parish of Holy Trinity Millbrook in Southampton has kindly let us have. They had to be offloaded before Mass could begin.

We also had visitors; Ronald Crane and Jackie Ottaway, editors of the Portal (now the OFFICIAL on-line publication of the Ordinariate in England and Wales) came to interview some of us, and take photographs after Mass.


It is too tedious to make another home trip to Lymington, so we stayed in the Church Hall of Our Lady, Queen of Peace, for an hour or so, then had a picnic lunch before setting off in our mini-coach.


One of our Ordinariate priests expressed surprise that we were coming all the way from Hampshire for the Ordinariate's birthday celebration. His group is based within twenty miles of Central London, but it was too far for them. Very strange thing, that when you are in or near London distances appear to multiply.
We left Bournemouth at 1pm and arrived at St James' Spanish Place in Marylebone (just north of Oxford Street) by about 4.30, and no-one thought the journey too long. Certainly everyone thought the worship well worth the effort. Others will no doubt blog about that, so I may save one or two pictures for the Anglo-Catholic.After Mass, a very jolly reception where we caught up with old frinds from Maidstone and Folkestone, Deal and Faversham, Essex and even a few from London.

The pictures here are just to encourage others to make the effort to get to any events commended by Msgr Keith. The next one, I believe, will be a Chrism Mass at 11am on April 2nd, also at St James' Spanish Place; details subject to alteration, but you could make a pencilled note in your diary now. See you there!

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

Singing in the Rain (2)

"Come, ye thankful people, Come!" we sang this morning in St Anne's Brockenhurst. On hearing the tune I was a little perturbed. First, it is a very long hymn - but I need not have worried, this was a Catholic congregation so we only sang two verses (is long-winded hymn-singing part of the Anglican Patrimony?) Then, it is a harvest hymn and are there not yet two months and then the harvest? Certainly we saw them reaping some of the early barley in Norfolk on Friday, but all is not yet safely gathered in... I look forward to my figs and apples in a couple of weeks or months, even though the currants and berries are mostly in the freezer. But of course, it was tied to today's Gospel - "Wheat and tares together sown"; somehow "wheat and Darnel together sown" just not does not work, though I daresay Estell M White would have thought it scanned perfectly.

Enough of this. Sufficient to say we were in Norfolk on Friday and yesterday because of the Ordinariate pilgrimage to Walsingham. And though they could get the Combine Harvesters going on Friday, yesterday they certainly could not. Walsingham was wet, very wet; that did not daunt the three or four hundred of the Ordinariate who attended the Mass in the Catholic Shrine, or those who joined the prooession to the Village from the Slipper Chapel, as thousands upon thousands had done from the eleventh Century until the desecration of Holy Places under Henry VIII of unhappy memory in the mid sixteenth Century. Msgr Keith Newton, our Ordinary, had announced that he was to celebrate the Mass of Reconciliation in Walsingham this weekend, so we came together from all parts of his Ordinariate. I know there was a Yorkshire priest there, and so was a Devon priest with his nine progeny - a couple of them were leading the procession - in the photo at the top of this page.


If you want to know about the weather, you can read more about that in my other blog at the Anglo-Catholic. And if you want pictures of the Mass, then the place to go is the Sevenoaks Ordinariate site. Some of the participants turned up a little late; the pair on the left said they were stuck in traffic; I think behind a muck-spreader. No comment is necessary. Here I shall just add a few maundering thoughts, and some pictures from what was a most memorable and happy day.



There were happy meetings with old friends.


Here my wife and Fr Mark Elliott-Smith were catching up on the news. Forgive the sickly yellow cast; that is thanks to the sodium lighting in the Catholic Shrine Church. And here is part of our Hants and Dorest contingent waiting for Mass to begin (similarly jaundiced).



They look a little more healthy in the open air; this [below] is at the Anglican Shrine, where the pilgrimage ended with sprinkling from the holy well, and a joint blessing by Msgr Keith and the Shrine Administrator, Bishop Lindsay Urwin.



In all the Churches and Shrines there were flowers; it is the 950th anniversary of Richeldis' vision, and the 50th of the fire in the parish church. Here [below] is the seven sacraments font, duly enflamed with flowers.



So good, to get the Ordinariate together, in company with other Catholics. We must do this more often - but perhaps for Msgr Keith's sake not in the same week that he flies home from Texas.

Across the Pond

Isn't technology wonderful? We can watch our Ordinary addressing a conference in Texas as he is doing it, and we can listen to John Hunwicke's humour (not 'humor' surely) direct from that same Anglican Use/Ordinariate gathering. You can go there via the Ordinariate website, or directly at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/anglicanorum

There were one or two little glitches (I believe that is the technical term) - people asking questions without using a microphone, so that we could not hear them though plainly those in the hall could. Or my pressing the wrong button and hearing Msgr Newton and an organ recital at the same time. Still, it is worth persisting. Nor is it just present members of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham who should listen to John Hunwicke, or see what Texan locals such as Fr Chuck Hough have to say. Anyone remotely interested in relations between the Catholic Church and the Church of England should tune in. The Anglican Use has flourished in the States for a couple of decades now, and we in England can learn from them, whether we belong to the Ordinariate or to the Church of England. So some of our groups in England are small? They were small in Arlington or San Antonio at the outset; now their congregations are numbered in the hundreds, even the thousands.

Of course, our situation is different; we have left a Church by Law Established, and at present there is little chance that we shall have the use of any of our former church buildings - but that might not always be the case. There will come a time when the Church of England may have to share what it inherited from our common Catholic past. Today the papers report that General Synod has been debating how to check the decline in worshippers - some even predicted the total demise of the Anglican Church. This is not just a problem for the Church of England. In our secularised society, all faith groups have similar battles. We can learn a great deal from the Churches in the USA.

Our Ordinary was very well received in Arlington. He gave his hearers advice that we must all keep in touch with one another, not just with Ordinariate groups around the world, but also with our former colleagues at present remaining in the Anglican Church. The link with the Arlington Conference is one more way of doing just that.

(The picture at the top of this blog is of Fr Allan Hawkins, Convenor and Host of the Arlington Conference, at his lectern during a visit I made there earlier this year)

Plymouth Ordinations

What will replace these Ordinariate ordinations once they are concluded in a week or so? They have been terrific social occasions as well as hugely important ecclesiastical ones - great for catching up with old friends and meeting new ones. It is a 300mile plus round trip from here to Plymouth - yet even people in London seem to suppose that Plymouth and Portsmouth are next door to one another, and both equally far from London. When eventually we persuade them to make the journey to Lymington they are amazed to get here in about 90 minutes. To Plymouth by road from Lymington is over 3 hours - or it was in the downpours yesterday, and back again today.




Waiting for the Kick-Off

Vaut le voyage, though, as the Michelin guides say. Particularly since about a third of the Catholic clergy of the diocese seem to be former Anglicans - including the Administrator of the Cathedral. Now they have a further seven who, while belonging to the Ordinariate, will also be available to lend a hand in the diocese. With them, too, was one genuine Plymouth candidate.


Seeing the congregation out

It was good, too, so see a number of Anglican priests from the dioceses of Exeter and Truro in the Congregation, and to hear their plans for being in second or subsequent waves. Good, also, to catch up with other old friends. Robbie Low (heading for Ordination at last, by the 'ordinary' route) and Sara his wife were there, as were others I've known even longer. Peter Glazebrook and Robin Ellis read Law at Pembroke, Oxford more than half a century ago - I was an exact contemporary of Peter's, reading theology. Now Peter is retired, though still keeping a finger in the pie at Jesus College Cambridge where he was Law fellow for many years, and last night Robin (formerly Archdeacon of Plymouth) was ordained a Catholic Priest. His son Simon is among the candidates in Nottingham this evening.


Two Lawyers and a Theologian from Pembroke in the 1950s


Msgr Keith was in good form - though he is facing even longer journeys, with an Ordination this evening in Nottingham. Next week he will be back down here in Portsmouth for three more priestly ordinations. It was very good of Keith Haydon and his wife Kathy to put me up overnight in Plymouth. We have been good friends from way back when he was Vicar of Cowley and I was down the road at St Stephen's House. Now he is running a Plymouth parish with four churches while being, in theory, a retired house-for-duty priest. Very sadly his Vicar died shortly before Easter, and Keith has been shouldering the burden ever since.

I hope others will publish photographs from the actual Ordination. As a concelebrant I was only able to get a few before and after the event ... (and apologies for the blurry picture of my overnight host)