A wet day in Venice

Recent peregrinations have meant that I've not been painting much lately. Today, though, it was back to the studio, so I thought you should have a chance to mock. There is a wild fauvist version of St Thomas' Lymington (which, unaccountably, our tutor seems to like) done in five minutes at the end of a class; a somewhat severe portrait from a photograph (fortunately I do not know the lady concerned, so am unlikely to be sued) and today's effort, a version of Venice (near the Madonna del'Orto) from a photo I took on our one and only visit to Venice, at Easter last year. Be warned; if you click on some of these you might get an even larger version.

Bishop's Briefing

Comper Window and Resurrection Plaque, St James' Milton

Today was a cheering occasion for thirty or so priests from Hampshire who met with Bishop Keith to hear his take on the Ordinariate. St James' Milton in the City of Portsmouth was the place. After Mass of Timothy & Titus, we listened to our Bishop and asked him questions for an hour, then had a very good lunch, courtesy of the Vicar's wife, Mrs (Marilyn) Alby.

Bishop Keith reminded us what it was we had always asked for; the capacity to be united with the Western Church not just as individuals, but as a body. That was exactly what we are being offered. Some have misgivings about ordination; but we are not being asked to deny the efficacy of our ministry up to now; simply to accept that the ministry of the Church of England is defective - and it clearly is, with such divisions between us already, divisions which can only deepen if and when women are consecrated as bishops. Being ordained in the Catholic priesthood leaves no shadow of doubt - and this is not just about "validity" (for there are episcopi vagantes whose orders are probably "valid"). Rather it is about Communion - and the catholic movement in the Church of England has always said it looks to Communion with the wider Church.

There are those around who seek to undermine Anglicanorum Coetibus. Commentators have said, for instance, that members of the Ordinariate will only be permitted to celebrate whatever 'Anglican' rite is provided for us. That is not so, and the document itself spells out quite plainly that the Rites of the Latin Church will be available to the Ordinariate as much as to the rest of the Catholic Church.

More damagingly still, some have claimed that the only married men to be ordained will be those already Anglican Priests or Bishops. Not so; the very fact that the documents spell out that there may be exceptions for other married men makes this quite clear.

We asked about buildings; no, there was no certainty whether we could continue to use any of our churches. This would depend on the ecumencial spirit, or otherwise, of the Church of England towards us. Because the churches in which we currently worship would be idfficult to dispose of, it must be at least a possibility that we could have some leasing arrangement which would mean we could continue to use them. If that were not possible, the Roman Catholic authorities would certainly help us find other places of worship.

More than what he said, though, was the great encouragement Bishop Keith gave us by his presence and up-beat assessment of our situation. Finally, he enjoined us to pray, and especially to make February 22 a Day of Prayer, wherever possible in conjunction with our Roman Catholic neighbours. That day was not a deadline for decisions - rather it is a step on the road of discernment, a seeking for God's guidance which must engage us all.

The Laity and the Ordinariate

Le Dorat is a wonderful and strange church, just a few miles north of Bellac. The pictures in this post are from there.

There have been some misgivings expressed concerning the place of the Laity in the Ordinariates. I raised this very particularly with Fr Allan Hawkins (see my last blog) and he reassures me in these terms:

"A Pastoral Council exists in every diocese. Its lay president, in the Diocese of Fort Worth, is currently a laymen from my Parish.

However, the Catholic Church is not a democracy, and it does not pretend to be so! The bishops alone, of course, determine matter of faith and morality.

Every parish is required by the 1982 Code of Canon Law (in which, by the way, the rights and duties of the laity are set out with precision and clarity) to have a parochial pastoral council and a parish finance council. These bodies are composed of laity, who care for the temporal and corporate life of the parish and advise the pastor on such things. Some parishes conduct elections, others have ways of reaching discernment as to the identity of these who should serve.

Laity are widely present and influential in a variety of diocesan commissions and departments. And dioceses do, from time to time, call together multi-session synods for particular purposes;and laity are fully involved. "

In view of the aberrations which have sprung from the General Synod of the Church of England, and comparable bodies in other Anglican churches, it comes as a great relief to be assured that the Catholic Church is not a democracy. Majorities in favour of women priests mean nothing when those voting have little understanding or knowledge of the history of the Church, nor of Holy Scripture.

Fr Hawkins is also most reassuring concerning the pastoral way in which he has been treated by Rome. I believe that perhaps in England there will be few of us at the beginning who ask for an Ordinariate; but once it is established and fears allayed, there will be many more asking to join it as time goes on.

Anglican Use in France

No blog for the last few days. We have been in France, staying not far from Limoges in the house of an old friend in Bellac (not as I previously blogged, Beziers!) It is a lovely old hill-top town, on the river Vincou.

Our friend is Fr Allan Hawkins, parish priest of St Mary the Virgin, Arlington, Texas, an Anglican Use Parish in the Roman Catholic Church. He is just one of many in the USA who is very excited at the prospect of the Ordinariate; and it was to get his take on that provision that Jane and I made the pilgrimage to the Limousin last Wednesday.

Of course, we sight-saw - and there are some great sights there. In the parish church of Bellac is this amazing crib (surviving until Candlemas). Press the light switch, and not only does it come to life in glorious technicolor, there is also a lively and surprising rendition of "O Tannenbaum".

Here is Fr Allan's wife, Jose, is the garden of their house - with another great prospect of the Collegiate Church of Bellac. Jose has found herself well accepted by Roman Catholics in Texas and beyond. Their daughter delights in having a photo of her father on her desk, and then getting her friends to puzzle out how she is the daughter of a Catholic priest.

We went to Mass in a neighbouring village, part of
the Bellac benefice whose several churches are all served by the same solo priest. This chaste Romanesque church was well attended last evening for the first Mass of Sunday - the organist is an Englishman who, in his spare time, writes for the Daily Telegraph. Here Fr Allan poses with my wife Jane just before we went in for Mass. Inside the church was another Crib, elbowing the altar into a slightly off-centre position.

Now I should be telling you all about the Anglican-Use view of the Ordinariate; but that will have to wait for another day. Just now, at close to midnight our time and nearly one a.m. French time, I shall break off; and so to bed.

Unity and Patrimony

After the thaw, Holy Trinity Winchester was back on form this morning. They even laughed at the right places in the sermon - so for better or worse, here it is:-



There is a variety of gifts, but always the same Spirit I Cor xii.4

One of the great men of Methodism was coming to Oxford to speak, and a friend of mine from college dragged me along. Well, it was unity week after all. The topic was to be ‘The Ethos of Methodism’. Little of what he said remains all these years later, but how I felt about the talk I have never forgotten. He had listed the particular emphases which he saw as being the special gifts of Methodism – and each of them seemed to me to belong equally to the Church of England.

It is a little like that over the recent proposals to welcome the special graces of Anglicanism (the Anglican Patrimony, they call it) into the Roman Catholic church. At a meeting about the proposals, held last week in Bournemouth, one Roman Catholic lady asked very pointedly just what we thought we were bringing to the Catholic Church. Did they not, after all, possess every possible gift and blessing already? My hackles began to rise; until I remembered that was just how I had thought about Methodism all those years ago.

We are beginning the week of Prayer for Christian Unity; so it is a good time to be asking about gifts; and especially so in view of today’s Epistle; ‘there is a variety of gifts, but always the same Spirit’, says S Paul. Perhaps it is because the Spirit is One that I recognised in Methodism things which I had always thought particularly Anglican.


The Holy Spirit, though, does measure his gifts according to the capacity and the needs of those who receive them. The gift of celibacy is just that; a gift, for those who are chosen to receive it. In the Roman Catholic church, that is seen as the special calling of all priests. Not so in the Church of England; and not so in the Orthodox churches, nor even in the Eastern Rite churches of the Roman Church. There is no doubt that a celibate priest can devote himself whole-heartedly to the needs of his parishioners; But there is also a vocation to Holy Matrimony, and the married Vicar, who must give attention to his wife and family, may also have them as his allies in ministry. How many clergy wives have enriched their husbands’ ministry? And how many clergy children, by humanising their father, have made him more useful to the parents and children in the parish? It is not that celibacy or the married state is better or worse than the other; as St Paul tells us, there is a variety of gifts, but the same Spirit, at work in all sorts of different ways in different people.

A very wise Roman Catholic priest told me that he never had any problem with people of other churches when they spoke positively about their belief; but when they said what they DID NOT, or COULD NOT, believe, that was where the trouble started. In the same way, it is no good looking at the Roman church and telling them “Your preaching isn’t as good as ours” or “your priests don’t give the same pastoral care as ours”. Such sweeping generalisations are necessarily wrong, and offensive too.

In fact we shall not know what is the Patrimony of the Church of England until it is working alongside other Catholics in a wider church. When that happens there may be some surprising things that we have always taken for granted, not even noticed, but which others find attractive. Equally, we shall learn just how inadequate we have always been in many ways when we compare ourselves with other Catholics.

Fifty years ago, in a parish in Guildford diocese, we began in a very small way by sharing our parish church with the local Roman Catholic community. Their principal church was in town, a couple of miles away. Their priest wanted a mass centre our near us, and wondered if they might use our Church School. It seemed silly to use a school building when we had a purpose-built church. So, eventually, after a great campaign of persuasion, our Bishop and the Bishop of Arundel and Brighton agreed that we might begin this experiment in sharing.

It began rather tentatively. At first, the priest brought everything with him, his altar linen, an altar stone, vessels, vestments, bread and wine; within a very short time he seemed at home, so that he would ask “I’m a bit short on wafers; could we use some of yours?” Slowly, an atmosphere of trust replaced the suspicion with which we had viewed one another. The experiment. if that is what it still is, continues. Woe betide anyone who tried to stop it.

Now, with the proposals of “Anglicanorum Coetibus”, we have a chance to go much further in getting to trust and understand one another. Already suspicious natures are saying this is a case of sheep-stealing, that the Pope is trying to undermine the Anglican Communion. If we look for the best motives in others, though, instead of always trying to look for the worst, we might discover that this really is someone trying to help us; not just Anglican Catholics, who have asked for provision from our own church and not been given it. No, it is much more than that; if this new experiment works, even in a very small way, it might be the very thing the Holy Spirit is doing in answer to our prayers. Once SOME of us respond positively, it might become possible for others to do the same; not perhaps immediately, but many years from now. After, perhaps, some of the unrecognised gifts of Anglicanism, our hidden patrimony, has become accepted and welcomed by the whole Catholic Church.

I’ve often been dubious about Rabbie Burns, with his wish “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us, to see oursels as other see us!” Very uncomfortable, that might be. Yet in the Ordinariate that gift of insight might become ours, painful maybe to realise how irritating the effortless superiority of our Anglicanism must have been… but perhaps, too, we shall find some things in our Patrimony which really are worthwhile, which at present we do not see, but which others will help us to value.

One of those weeks

So, just two sermons, an address to the Church Union AGM, and an introduction to our Book Launch. Quite an easy couple of days for a retired PEV, really. In case you are in London with a little time to spare, the AGM of the Church Union is at Christ the King, Gordon Square, on Monday 18th at 2pm, and all paid up members of the Church Union are welcome. Among other things (such as the election of Officers) we shall be trying to deal with the question of the centenary fund set up in the time of Bishop Eric of happy memory, in the hope that we can use the money raised then wisely and well.

The first sermon is complete (for Holy Trinity Winchester, 10.30am), the second is well on the way (for a confirmation in Bournemouth in the evening .... since Winchester is still without two Suffragans. Fancy, not just Basingstoke gone, but also Southampton. As I reminded Bishop Michael at the time, to lose one Suffragan, my Lord, might be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.)

The address for the AGM is in embryo, the introduction for the book launch (at the Travellers' Club in Pall Mall, also on Monday) at 6p.m. is brewing. If you have not been invited and would like to be there, you will need to contact the Church Union Office - Stephen Parkinson at 2a the Cloisters, Gordon Square (secretary@churchunion.co.uk) is the man to speak to (tel 020 7388 3588). The book is 'Defend and Maintain', the newly produced history of the Church Union, by Frs Philip Corbett and William Davage.

After such excitements I can sit back and relax; except that on Wednesday we fly to Limoges for four nights, to meet Fr Allan Hawkins of the Anglican Use RC Church, to talk of Ordinariates and such .... but more of that later.

Meanwhile, prayers, of course, for Haiti.

What's in a name?

If there's one thing Englishmen can't do with, it's Latin. Call a church Corpus Christi, and there will be hackles raised ... it's those left-footers again! Half a century ago, when there was a theological college in a little village outside Oxford, some of the students tried to make the psalms more approachable. You may recall that the psalms had Latin names attached to them in the old BCP. So there were many helpful suggestions - from Psalm 119, for instance: "Lucerna Pedibus Meis" became "The kids have gone to Switzerland" and "Adhaesit Pavimento" was "Keep to the footpath". It whiled away many a tedious moment in the time given us for meditation. It is good that the Dominicans have done something similar by rendering their name 'Godzdogz' (for Domini Cani).

Now (pace Fr Hunwicke) I wonder if someone could come up with more English names for such things as 'Anglicanorum Coetibus' or 'Ordinariate' or 'Dicastery'? Good not to frighten the natives unneccessarily... all (clean) suggestions will be posted; no prizes, though.