Why are they waiting?

Fr Hunwicke has an interesting post reflecting on those Anglicans who indicated they sought full communion with the Holy See, but who went very quiet and stayed put when Anglicanorum Coetibus actually appeared. It can be read at The Parting of Friends.

I m particularly interested by his seven diocesan bishops (Note the number - an Anglican phenomenon is such circumstances perhaps?) plus two others whi secretly indicated their desire for reconciliation. Whilst I appreciate Fr John's concern that those who do eventually join the Roman obedience should be made welcome with no public remarks of "What took you so long?" and the like, I am intrigued by these episcopal aspirants. Maybe Fr HUnwicke should name and shame them if they do not make the move after next month's General Synod vote on Women Bishops.

I can understand why people may have waited in the past. There were, or are, often good reasons - responsibility for a parish or church be you cleric or lay, the need for econonmic security for clergy and their families and such like. Some may wonder why I waited as long as I did. My answer is that I went when I was called to do so. I would add that having received the call I did move, but more on that in the next post.

 

Illumination from Fr Hunwicke

Continuing the theme of my previous post about learning more about the development of the liturgy I see from his blog that the ever erudite Fr Hunwicke has been casting light on a familiar prayer from Compline, and pointing out that it may have originated or, at least, been used at another time of day. His post can be read at Lighten our darkness ...

It occurs to me that the suggested origin of the prayer does indeed make sense at dawn in terms of temporal conditions, and as a prayer concerned with the whole of one's life is eminently suitable at any time, asking God to disperse the darkness that surrounds and menaces us on life's journey.

Fr Hunwicke's reflections on Pope Pius XII

My friend Fr John Hunwicke is blogging again, under a slightly new title at Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment , and he has an interesting post about Pope Pius XII and the revision of the liturgy. This seeks to understand that process not so much in the context of what Vatican II did or did not mandate or think butrather in what was already happeningby the early 1950s. It can be read here.

The idea that it was Pope Pius XII who laid the foundations for radical liturgical reform with the revised Easter liturgy is not, of course, new, but Fr Hunwicke gives a clear exposition of how he thinks the process came about and how it should be understood historically.

Pictures of Fr Hunwicke's Ordination and first EF Mass

Following on from my post yesterday about Fr Hunwicke's Ordination the New Liturgical Movement has two posts with photographs of , firstly, The Priestly Ordination of Fr. John Hunwicke and also from yesterday Fr. Hunwicke's EF Mass at the London Oratory .

Fr Tim Finigan's account of the Ordination, together with his reflections upon it, and also with photographs can be read at Laying hands on Fr Hunwicke.

Fr Hunwicke's Ordination

Yesterday evening I attended the Ordination to the priesthood in the Catholic Church of my good friend John Hunwicke from the Ordinariate. The service was held at the Oxford Oratory and the ordination itself conducted by Bishop William Kenney, who referred in his homily to Fr Hunwicke's many years of priestly experience.

In the crowded sanctuary there were diocesan and Ordinariate clergy, the Provost of the Oxford Oratory, the Prior of Blackfriars and Fr Aidan Nicols from the Dominicans, Fr Tim Finigan and two Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer from the Orkneys.

The congregation included an Orthodox priest, family and friends from Oxford, including Fr Hunwicke's former churchwardens from St Thomas', now both in the Ordinariate, members of the Ordinariate and old friends from his days at Lancing - one former pupil, living on the south coast and unable to attend himself had summoned his parents from Birmingham to represent him.

Afterwards as I knelt to receive his First Blessing in the courtyard it was a great joy to be able to congratulate Fr Hunwicke and to say that he was now where he should be in the wider unity of the Catholic priesthood. I think there was widespread sense of gratitude that this long-delayed ordination had now occurred.

The reception afterwards was in the garden of St Benet's Hall, and an opportunity to catch up with old friends and reflect upon the number of us who, either individually or through the Ordinariate, have entered into full peace and communion in recent years.

There will, I am sure, be pictures available soon of the evening, and I will link to them once they are available.

Priestly Ordination of John Hunwicke - June 27th

As many regular readers will no doubt be aware my good friend John Hunwicke of the Ordinariate will be ordained as a priest on Wednesday June 27th at 7 pm in the Oxford Oratory by Bishop William Kenney.

I am sure many of John Hunwicke's friends will be there to support him on this occasion and to wish him well for his continuing ministry as both pastor and scholar.

John Hunwicke at his recent deaconing in Westminster Cathedral

Image: Fr Blake blog

Liturgical Notes

In case readers are not aware of the fact the excellent Fr Hunwicke's Liturgical Notes has resumed posting. It is good to have him back online, as well as in full peace and communion.

St Leo the Great ... and his biographer

Today is the feast of St Leo the Great, Pope from 440 until 461, and by any standards one of the towering figures in the history of the Papacy. As a theologian, as a practical Bishop of Rome in troubled times and as a key exponent of Petrine claims he is central to the emergence and recognition of the Papacy as the central institution of the Church.

St Leo the Great

From an eighth century painting in Santa Maria Antiqua in Rome.
Although this is three centuries after Leo's time it appears to be the earliest picture that I can find of him. I do not know if it incorporates a tradition as to his appearance, but it conveys a convincing impression.

I always find great pleasure as well as instruction when the Breviary readings are from St Leo - his style is clear and conveys a great sense of spiritual and doctrinal authority.

My interest in him is enhanced by the fact that what still appears to be the standard book in English on him, The Life and Times of St Leo the Great
( SPCK 1941) was written by T.G.Jalland, sometime vicar of St Thomas here in Oxford, close to where I live and where I used to be churchwarden.

Dr Jalland lies buried in the churchyard there, with his wife and her parents - her father was the great historian of the English medieval church Alexander Hamilton Thompson. Trevor Jalland was vicar there from 1933 until 1947, and whilst at St Thomas also delivered the Bampton Lectures in 1942, published in 1946 as The Church and the Papacy, and also still a standard work. His book on St Leo can be read online here, if you subscribe to the virtual library.

Fr Hunwicke, the current p-i-c of St Thomas', wrote as follows about his predecessor on his blog on 11 September this year - I have added the odd comment myself in []:

" Inadequates; wet indequates, we are. Speak for yourself, I hear you say? Very well, I will. How can I compare myself with my distinguished predecessor, Fr Trevor Gervase Jalland? According to Oral Tradition, one Good Friday, at the Mass of the Presanctified (ah, those were the days), some unfortunate Altar boy presented himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. His Parish Priest brushed him aside with such decision that the child keeled over ... ah, those were the days. [When he was incumbent at St Mark's Swindon he is said to have thrown the sacring bell at a liturgically offending server...]

Jalland (Vicar 1933-1947) went on to found the Theology Faculty at Exeter University; he came back to S Thomas's to be buried, the Funeral Mass being said by the veteran and erudite (he's still going strong in his nineties) Prebendary Michael Moreton of Exeter (who was writing about the importance of versus Orientem decades before the papists rediscovered it). Fr Michael risked raised eyebrows at Jalland's very Establishment funeral by using the Canon Romanus. "Jalland was a Patristics scholar and I resolved that he should have a Patristic Eucharistic Prayer."

According to the same Oral Tradition, Fr Sweeney (Vicar 1979-2003, now enjoying his retirement), was not much less resolute. I have been told that he would kick an ill-placed Sacred Minister and, dissatisfied during Mass with the Music (he is a distinguished musician), would clap his hands and berate the organ loft ... you see what I mean about my own inadequacy and wetness? [I was present upon such occasions...]

Jalland had few qualms about facing lesser men down. He was at the heart of the process of liturgical revision in the Church of England back in the 1960s, fighting the battle for an oblatio in the anamnesis. Ultimately, this battle was lost; bigots, evangelical, in General Synod were able to vote down the proposed "We offer thee this bread and this cup". But most notorious of his audacities was Jalland's response to being asked, in 1942, to preach the Bampton Lectures in this University. This is probably the most prestigious series of lectures upon a theological topic in the Church of England ... and Jalland chose to devote his eight lectures to The Church and the Papacy. This was a time when Dom Gregory Dix had demonstrated the congruity of the Vatican I decrees on papal primacy and infallibility with the praxis of the anti-Nicene centuries; but Dix's audience tended to be mainly his fellow Anglican Catholics. Jalland's hearers would be Anglican theological specialists of every doctrinal school."

Fr Hunwicke continued on September 13th:

"The 1942 Bampton Lectures of my distinguished predecessor at S Thomas's, Dr Trevor Jalland, are a tour de force demonstrating his sure-footed competence in discussing the relationship of Papacy to Church in every succeeding Christian era, from a decidedly favourable verdict ought to be given regarding not only the Petrine texts, but also the tradition of the Apostle's residence and death in Rome down to That the Roman episcopi, whether in plurality or as successive holders of a single office, were held to be and were in fact the heirs of the authority of St Peter and of his co-Apostle St Paul in the Roman See seems to be suggested, if not guaranteed, even by such limited evidence as we still possess, though it is equally clear that reflexion on the real implications of the original data was needed before their full significance was generally appreciated. The value of the papal office as the primary centre of unity, as the highest court of appeal, as a custodian of order and a corrector of aberrations from the original depositum fidei - all this and much more emerges ... only when the Church becomes aware of itself in a fuller sense as a world-wide organisation, and when a local and 'parochial' consciousness gives place to an oecumenical outlook. This papal ideal, in spite of the occasional distortion and falsification which it has undergone in the course of its long history, is to be viewed in its perfection not as an instrument for the suppression of liberty, but as a means under providence for the safeguarding of the ordered freedom of the `sons of God' ... it is a strange form of historical blindness which is unable to perceive in its long and remarkable history a supernatural grandeur which no merely secular institution has ever attained in equal measure. Its strange, almost mystical, faithfulness to type, its marked degree of changelessness, its steadfast clinging to tradition and precedent, above all its burning zeal for order and Justitia,compel us to acknowledge that the Papacy must always defy a categorisation which is purely of this world."

I rather think St Leo would have been quite approving of all this. I also sense that Trevor Jalland had certain Leonine qualities. One rather wonders how Attila the Hun would have fared if he had turned up on Hollybush Row or Becket Street in OX1 in the Jalland years.

I do not know if St Leo was a scatterer of servers or hurler of bells during liturgical celebrations in fifth century Rome.

I should add that Fr Jalland was not, it would appear, very popular with some at least of his parishioners at St Thomas', who, I am led to believe, in later years referred to him by his surname alone, and who had to rescue from a junk shop parish banners he had disposed of and restore them to the church after he left. He also made the mistake of selling off the parish hall given by the great Victorian vicar, Thomas Chamberlain. On the other hand he did commission Martin Travers to produce the handsome statue of Our Lady now in the church, as well as a parclose screen for the Lady Chapel, although that, alas, was never realised.

Anglican ructions - what would St Wilfrid say?

My friend and neighbour Fr Hunwicke is in fine fulminatory form on his blog about the proposed Society of St Wilfrid and St Hilda. You can read his post here.

He is not alone in his views - nothing surprising in that - and Bishop Edwin Barnes, Ancient Richborough, has had some good posts on the relevance of the `Sacred Synod' and related matters. The main points can be read in sequence here,here,and here. I am very pleased to see his citation of the work of the Bishop of Ebbsfleet.

Chichester Cathedral - photograph by St Wilfrid's Bognor Regis

I too have doubts as to there being a very positive response to the Society from St Hilda, and certainly not from St Wilfrid, who was, let's face it, a Romaniser. To invoke his aid in the cause of a society that is " well, sort of, but not really, well, no, really, not actually Roman" is an insult to him and his entire career and also to historical scholarship. If the Synod of Whitby is to be used as a precedent let it be cited for what it decided - the unity of the practice English church with that of Latin Christendom, and all that implied about ecclesial unity. Indeed St Wilfrid might well consider the Ordinariates a bit dubious, but would see their essential commitment to unity. This new, misnamed, society looks more like the Celtic party who insisted on their calendar calculations and practices - Non-Jurors or Old Believers of the seventh century - who left the synod of Whitby unreconciled.

Image from St Wilfrid's Catholic Primary School, Ripon

St Wilfrid and St Hilda pray for the Catholic faith in England.

Fr Hunwicke on Apostolicae Curae

Fr Hunwicke has started a series of posts on Apostolicae Curae which promises to be of more than passing interest. You can find them on Fr Hunwicke's Liturgical Notes. He gives a warning against commenting before he has completed the series, so read on, and reflect.