Busy weekend

So after the Day of Recollection it was not home to the slippers, but rather a 6pm Vigil Mass in Lymington, filling in for our Parish Priest who is having a short breather. Then this morning off bright and early to Bournemouth for the Ordinariate Sunday Mass. In the course of it, the Confirmation of Teresa (who added the Christian Name Mary). For the first time we had all four parts in our singing group, so had the treat of the Communion Motet Hide not thou Thy face from me. It was particularly good to have friends of Teresa present - and also another new family seeking a spiritual home.

After Mass a short instruction on "The Doorway of Faith", and then a dash across town to the Anglican Church of St Francis, where the Priest in Charge laid to rest the ashes of Teresa Mary's father, Ray. Ray had been Head Server at St Francis' and Lord-high-everything-else for many years. His widow's ashes were already there, so it was fitting as his final resting place. Fr Wastie and many old friends from the parish greeted us warmly, which made up for the bitter cold of the morning.

 

The Priory Chapel

Somehow I had not expected retirement to be quite so busy; but it is very enjoyable. Oh, and at the end of today's Mass we had our three Rome pilgrims line up for a blessing. They set off  tomorrow morning together with dozens of other members of Ordinariate Groups on a journey which will take them to Pope Benedict's last General Audience in St Peter's Square (watch it on Zenit) and to Assisi.

I think you will see from these photos that yesterday was a pretty laid-back
occasion - not too much heavy theology, rather a consideration of where we are at present, where we have come from, and how we fit in the grand scheme of things. Best of all, it was enjoyable, and we all got to know others in our Group rather better. Our intention is to be welcoming, so that anyone coming to Mass with us, or to coffee after Mass, will soon feel at home. This seems to be our special calling in this Year of Faith, taking part in the New Evangelization.

My system was unable to cope with the pictures of St Dominic's yesterday. Today our Computer Wizard brought a memory stick with them on, so I am posting a few here for your interest.

Some but not all of the participants

 

 

A Day in the Unity Octave

 

 

Ray had been the first lay member of the Bournemouth Ordinariate Group: and today he was laid to rest, in our first Ordinariate funeral. He had been head server at St Francis' Bournemouth for many years before entering the Catholic Church, and he had trained generations of servers. Many of them were there today, in the congregation or serving at the Mass.

 

Fr Brian Copus had been given many anecdotes by the former Vicar of St Francis, now himself a priest of the Ordinariate near Oxford. One story that Fr Paul Berrett had not relayed, though, was told to me in the Church Hall after the Mass. It seems a bishop had come to St Francis' with the intention of celebrating and preaching wearing brown shoes. Ray produced for him a pair of black sanctuary slippers and instructed the prelate that if he was to appear in the sanctuary he had better be properly shod.

 

In recent years he has been in a nursing home, where we were able to take him the Blessed Sacrament week by week. He will be sorely missed by us all, especially by his daughter Teresa who is a mainstay of our music. She brought together a number of her friends to sing today - a lovely albeit sad occasion, which was a real time of reconciliation for many. Anglicans, Catholics and many others joined to pay tribute to a lovely man. May be rest in peace.

Newly Elected

The Rite of Election yesterday was a great event; I wrote about it on the Anglo-Catholic blog. But now, I have been sent such a marvellous picture taken by Barry Hudd, the Diocese's official photographer, that it seemed churlish not to share it. So above you will see Bishop Crispian addressing the new members of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, groups from Ryde and Portsmouth with their shepherd, Jonathan Redvers-Harris, from Reading with David Elliott, and from Bournemouth & Christchurch with Raymond Smith. It really did feel as though some of the wounds of the Reformation were being bound up, and a historical moment of the Ecumenical Journey was beginning. Now I must abandon blogging for a while to attend to an engagement in Texas: more of that in a week or so, I hope. Meanwhile, to pack.

All Saints Galore

St George had borrowed another's shield

We pushed Halloween aside this morning at St Francis' Bournemouth, and celebrated All Saints. Some of the children represented certain of the Company of Heaven; I was introduced to St Sebastian with a tennis racquet - patron saint of Sportmen, I was told - I suppose it was because he became a dartboard for his persecutors. Then we had Francis (of course) with a collection of furry animals, St Vitus (in tutu) as Patron of Dance, and a very regal St Adelaide. I'd had to google her; born 931, daughter of Rudolph of Burgundy, betrothed as a child to Lothair of Provence. When Lothair died, leaving her with a young daughter, she was imprisoned for refusing to marry the son of Beringarius who succeeded Lothair. It is all exciting stuff .. and she is also called Adelheid. But no doubt you knew that already.

We sought for Saints in the Congregation

Then we got down to the business of talking about who is and who is not a saint. The epistle teaches us that we are children of God; and it does not yet appear what we shall be, but when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. So we went through the congregation finding potential saints... since Saints is what we are all called to be. We wondered about John Henry Newman; had be been a Saint all the time? Surely he had; the Church simply reassures us about this when it Beatifies or Canonises its saints. And today is for all the thousands which no one can number, unbeatified, un-named, yet all part of that company which no man can number - the Company of Heaven who share the Bread of Immortality with us, at the Table of the Lord.

Tomorrow it is All Saints again, this time in the approaches to Canterbury... a confirmation at Harbledown.

A Parish Sermon

'The need to pray continuously and never lose heart' : from today's Gospel

We were secluded in Walsingham this week, and only heard second-hand about the rescue of the Chilean miners. One report though that came to us said that one of the men, on being released, knelt to thank God; and the crowd fell silent. How heaven must have been battered with prayers for those trapped men, not just with prayers from their families but from all over the world; and those prayers were heard and answered.

We don’t seem terribly good in the Church of England – or maybe not terribly good in England at all – at calling on people to pray. It happened during the war, the second world war; and even more during the first war, the Great War. But I don’t recall much of a public response in prayer even during the Falklands, and the nearest thing to prayer with the present conflict in Afghanistan is the crowds who gather to welcome home the bodies of the dead as they arrive at Compton Bassett. Perhaps we no longer have Church leaders who believe they have the authority to call the nation to prayer. So there have to be spontaneous events, like Wootton Bassett – or the national outpouring when Diana died.

Just occasionally, though the call is not to the nation at large, our bishops and archbishops ask the churches to pray. We took the week of Prayer for Christian Unity very seriously back in the sixties; Portsmouth Guildhall would be filled with Christians of every denomination back in those days. That praying continued for a long while; certainly all through my student days, and well into my early years as a priest. It seemed as though the answer was being given us; it came in a series of reports by the Church of England and the Methodists; and by the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion. Somehow, when the Anglican-Methodist report produced no results, we gave up on praying for Unity. Our schemes had come to nothing, and we were in no mood to go on asking.

Well, someone must have continued to ask; for suddenly there came an answer that none of us had expected. It is only a year since that time-bomb with the strange name was planted among us. Anglicanorum Coetibus it is called, in that peculiar Latin way that the Catholics use when they are being serious. It is just the Latin version of the first words of the Pope’s document, which in English is “Groups of Anglicans”. That is who it is for – groups of Anglicans.

As we saw during his visit to England, the Pope is very straight-forward. He had been heavily involved in those earlier conversations, the ARCIC conversations as they are called, the Anglican Roman Catholic International Conversations. They seemed to be getting somewhere, in all sorts of previously difficult areas. They reached agreement on paper over the Eucharist, the Ministry, even the role of the Pope in a unified church. But what was also clear was that though there might be agreements on paper, it made no difference to the way the Church of England behaved. You would think that since we were agreeing on the ministry, we would not alter that ministry.

There were pressures, though, to change the ministry quite dramatically. For twenty centuries, following the example of Jesus in appointing his apostles, the ordained ministry was always male. The Archbishop of Canterbury consulted with the leaders of the Orthodox and Catholic churches. They made it clear that if our church altered the unvarying practice of all the Episcopal churches up to that time, it would be erecting great obstacles to Christian Unity. The Pope even sent a Cardinal to the Anglican Bishops to tell them this. Well, we all know that the Bishops, and the General Synod, ignored this advice, and ploughed on regardless.

Actions have consequences; and the consequence was that the Catholic Church felt it could no longer deal with the Anglican Communion as a whole. Instead it would be prepared to deal with Groups of Anglicans - (Anglicanorum Coetibus, you remember) – who asked for help. Some of us, who would call ourselves catholic Anglicans, had been dismayed at our church’s action. It was not just a matter of ordaining women as priests or bishops; it was, rather, the question of where our Church thought its authority lay. Were we a Church founded by Jesus Christ on the Apostles, continuing their teaching; or were we a body which could make up its own doctrine, change the unbroken tradition of the Universal Church? How could our little fragment of a church dare say that we knew better than the overwhelming majority of all Christians?

But the prayers we had made for unity were not wasted; it is just that they were answered in a surprising way. No one supposed that an octogenarian Pope would be a great innovator. Well, we reckoned without God’s sense of humour. He answered our prayers, unexpectedly, not by giving success to any of our schemes for reunion, but with a generous offer from an aged Pope – an offer which had no precedent in history.

It has taken a year from the time of that offer for many of us to get our act together. It is beginning to happen now, and within a year, possibly even within six months, both the Catholic Church and the Church of England will look very different. Some of you here at St Francis are taking the Pope’s offer very seriously indeed. No amount of planning, though, will produce results. Only prayer will resolve things. Today’s gospel tells us how even an unjust judge will give in if an old lady goes on battering at his door; God is not unjust, quite the contrary; and he wants to answer our prayer. But we must make that prayer, and go on making it. This is a crucial time, not just for the churches, but for England, and indeed for the whole of Britain. We must pray and pray and go on praying, and be ready to be surprised by God’s answer. As Jesus taught his disciples, pray continually, never lose heart. Then it will be better for us, and more overwhelming, than we can imagine. Nothing less than the start of the re-Christianisation of our Nation.

[A Sermon preached at St Francis' Bournemouth, 17th October 2010]