Celebrating Bl.John Henry Newman in Oxford

This past weekend has, of course, been the first time the feast of Bl. John Henry Newman has been observed. As I am in Oxford and with all the interest surrounding the Beatification the celebration has been quite extensive.

For me it started with showing a party from St Bede's Hall and some seminarians from the North American College in Rome around Oriel on Friday afternoon, and looking at places Newman must have known on adaily basis from 1822 until 1845.

That evening the Oxford Oratory had its annual Night Walk pilgrimage to Littlemore. Hardly surprisingly the numbers were up on previous years and we followe dthe established route through Newman's Oxford, with pauses for reading and prayers at sites associated with him before walking out via the houses his mother and sisters inhabited at Rose Hill to Littlemore. There we had devotions with readings before the Blessed Sacrament in Bl. Dominic Barberi church, before processing to the College and cocluding the pilgrimage in the restored chapel. If you are ever in Oxford on the evening of October 8th I would urge you to join this devotional and very enjoyable walk.

On Saturday there was Mass for the Feast celebrated in Bl. Dominic Barberi by Fr Byrne, Provost of the Oxford Oratory. and then at 5 a joint Anglican- Catholic service in St Mary the Virgin in The High with the reading of one of Newman's sermons - the Cross the measure of the world from 1841 - from the pulpit where it was first delivered, by Nigel Cooke of the RSC. On display were pictures of Bl. John Henry and a chalice, or perhaps a ciborium given in 1837 to the church whilst he was still Vicar. It is a handsome piece, with a relief copied from Leonardo's Last Supper on one side. We were invited to handle it, and indeed venerate it as a relic of the new Beatus. Following that I was at a reception in Oriel SCR for many of those who had attended the service. Quite what Provosts Coplestone and Hawkins, whose portraits in D.D. robes looked down upon us from the walls, would have made of their younger colleague's latest achievement is amatter for a little speculation. I rounded off the day with dinner with the very distinguished scholar of Newman and the Oxford Movement, Peter Nockles, whom I have got to know through his participation in the new, collaborative, history of Oriel which is currently being written.

Yesterday the Oxford Oratory transferred the new Feast to the Sunday and at the Sung Mass the celebrant was Bishop John Arnold from the Westminster diocese. The preacher was Fr Robert Byrne, who drew out the Oratorian nature of Newman's spirituality and how it provided the context within which Bl. John Henry fulfilled his vocation. In the evening the Oratory celebrated Solemn Vespers of the Feast in the traditional form.

That excellent photographer Br Lawrence Lew, O.P. published on the New Liturgical Movement site this splendid view of the new shrine in the Oxford Oratory, together with the accompanying note, and I have no compunction in reproducing it here:

Stay with me, and then I shall begin to shine as you shine: so to shine as to be a light to others.

The light, O Jesus, will be all from you. None of it will be mine. No merit to me. It will be you who shines through me upon others. O let me thus praise you, in the way which you do love best, by shining on all those around me. Give light to them as well as to me; light them with me, through me. Teach me to show forth your praise, your truth, your will.

Make me preach you without preaching- not by words, but by my example and by the catching force, the sympathetic influence, of what I do - by my visible resemblance to your saints, and the evident fullness of the love which my heart bears to you. Amen.

- Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman.

The photo above is of the shrine to Blessed John Henry Newman in the Oxford Oratory taken on 9 October 2010, the first feast day of this new beatus. According to the Oratory's website, the painting of Newman is by William Ouless, the aedicule and altarino by Timothy Newbery, and the achievement of arms by Tom Meek.

Carthusian thoughts

Today being the feast of St Bruno is an opportunity to reflect upon the Carthusian order and its history. I was very struck when I read John Cassian by the way in which his description of early Egyptian monasticism is like the Carthusian model. This point is one that I had not seen brought out properly in more general books on medieval monasticism, and shows the influence of Cassian in the eleventh century - indeed is a reminder of his importance as a writer on monastic life for over a millenium.

More particularly my thoughts turn to that great flowering of Carthusian life in late medieval England and Europe. On several occasions I have visited the remains of Mount Grace Priory - or to give it its proper title that of the Assumption of Our Lady and St Nicholas of Mount Grace of Ingelby - and it is a moving and fascinating place to experience. Recent scholarship has shown how important it was in disseminating devotional texts in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

Mount Grace Priory

There is a good introduction to the priory here. After the dissolution the little chapel on the hill above the ruins remained as a recusant centre and has now been restored as a place of pilgrimage.

Mount Grace is the best preserved of the houses, but Beauvale in Nottinghamshire is an interesting ruin. The remains are now part of a farm and there are plans announced in 2009, to open it to the public. When I visited it in 1999 we had to view it from the road, but even from several hundred yards it is striking. There is an account of the priory here,and a series of articles from 1908 with other illustrations here, which is also well worth looking at. Both St John Houghton and St Robert Lawrence, two of the Carthusian martyrs of 1535, had served as Priors of Beauvale.

My particular interest in visiting the site, over and beyond my usual historical curiosity, was the fact that Bishop Fleming made at least two viists to stay at the Priory in the 1420s. He seems to have acted as an unofficial protector of the Carthusian order in England - perhaps inspired by the fact of being the latest sucessor of the Carthusian Saint Hugh (d.1200) at Lincoln. In 1428 Fleming is recorded as having consecrated the new bell of the London Charterhouse, where some parts of the monastic buildings survive in the current complex.

The ruins of Beauvale Priory in 2007

Portuguese postscript

In the light of my previous post you will not be surprised to learn that last night, to mark the anniversary, a friend and I went off and drank to to the health of Dom Duarte III and the cause of the Portuguese monarchy.

TRH the Duke and Duchess of Bragança,
D. Duarte and D. Isabel,
the de jure King and Queen of Portugal

The website of the Royal house can be found at Portuguese Monarchy

Nothing to celebrate

October 4th-5th is the centenary of the 1910 revolution in Portuga1 which led to the exile of the monarchy and established a republican regime. Doubtless there will be celebrations as October 5th "Republic Day" is the current national day in Portugal.

I would venture to suggest that there is nothing for the Portuguese to celebrate and a great deal for them to regret in this anniversary, when the nation repudiated the institution that had created it eight centuries earlier.

There is a biography of King Manuel II, who was forced into exile, here.

King Manuel II in robes of state with the crown of King John VI

A colour version of the above portrait. The King is wearing the riband of the Three Orders - the three ancient crusading Orders of of Aviz (green), Christ (red) and Santiago (purple) - and the collar of the Order of the Tower and the Sword, founded by King Afonso V in the fifteenth century

He lived in exile in England at Fulwell at Twickenham. The Catholic Church of St James there now has a memorial to the King who was a regular worshipper and benefactor - there is an article about it here.

No one could deny that Portugal at the beginning of the twentieth century faced serious problems as a nation. Overthrowing the monarchy and the traditional order appealed to some as a solution; they appear to have been influenced by the example of the French Third Republic. This was, of course, patently wrong as a solution, and not the answer to the issues facing the country. In 1908 King Carlos I and the Prince Royal Luis Felipe were assassinated in Lisbon and King Manuel narrowly escaped the death in the same attack. There is a good account of the background and the murders here.There are also online biographies of the King and the Prince Royal. This was a clear example of that terrible tendency to resort to violence to attack and destroy the established order that culminated in the Sarajevo assassination in 1914.

In 2008, when the Lisbon government forbade participation in commemorations of those terrible events of representitives of the state and the armed forces, it was left to the Royal House to recall the King and Prince. Incidentally on the anniversary I arranged a Requiem Mass in the Extraordinary Form for them here at the Oratory in Oxford.

Now clearly one can ask who would want to be ruled by regicides or their allies. After the 1910 revolution - more a coup by disaffected members of the military and their radical allies - there were a series of left wing, radical, anti-clerical governments, political instability and coups, and attempts to restore the King. This is the backbround to the apparitions at Fatima in 1917, when the Portuguese church was under attack. From 1928, and certainly from 1932 until 1974 there was Salazar's Estado Novo. Now I can see that the underlying cobncept of applying Catholic social teaching as a basis for government has much to commend it, but as an actual system it became unresponsive to a world that was changing, and lacked the mechanism to achieve peaceful change and development. The result was that change with the 1974 revolution led to a return to political radicalism and instability in the period 1974-6 indeed the real fear of a communist takeover. Post 1976 the country has become part of the EU and followed the contemporary European paths of relativism and pseudo liberalism.

The obvious contract is with its immediate neighbour Spain. There the rstoration of the monarchy in the constitution in 1947 meant that after 1975 it could as an institution articulate the national mood, and achieve a successful transition and development. That is not to say I agree with all that has been done in terms of social policy in Spain in recent years; it is to say that Spain has managed successfully to blend its historic institutions and nature with a world that continues to change.

The failure to reinstate the monarchy underlies many of the instabilities of Portuguese politics. Thus even in 1910 the arms of the state remained oin a new nationalflag of conciously partisan, republican design as here. Since the 1920s the country has, whilst remaining a republic, displayed an ambivalent attitude to the Monarchy. Thus King Manuel's body was returne din 1932 with full honours and buried in the family vault, and in the following years the then President had two ADCs - one republican, the other monarchist. Several of the chivalric orders of the monarchy were restablished (with slightly changed insignia). There was talk of a restoration under Salazar, and the law of exile revoked. In that era the Monarchist party was the only political novement that was permitted other than the government party. This ambivalence has continued since 1974 - thus when the Duke of Braganza and claimant to the throne, D. Duarte Pio married in 1995, the guest of honour was the President of the Republic and the ceremony was carried live in television - despite attempts to disrupt coverage by leftists. Today Dom Duarte acts and can be seen as a representitive of the country.

A hundred years on from the events of 1908-10 I am firmly of the opinion that the loss of the monarchy was a loss, a catastrophic loss for Portugal. As a nation it needs to return to the roots whence it is sprung. Rather than celebrating the revolution of 1910 it should undo the damage and restore the Monarchy.

The Mad Monarchist has a pair of linked articles on the events of 1910 and their aftermath here.

The Pope at the Birmingham Oratory

There are some excellent photographs of the Pope's visit to the Birmingham Oratory on the New Liturgical Movement. If you have not aleady seen them they can be found here. They are a fine record of what was clearly a joyful and historic visit.

I understand that the Oratory presented to the Pope a rosary which had belonged to Bl. John Henry. The gift delighted the Holy Father, who said it meant more to him than the other gifts he had received on his visit.

Bl John Henry Newman's room has been preserved intact since his death - it has not been tidied of the proliferation of photographs and other objects in the way that Queen Vistoria's apartments at Osborne House - fascinating as they are - have been.

Here is a photograph of Cardinal Newman at his desk in 1889:

...and here is Pope Benedict XVI at the same desk in the same room in 2010:

Archbishop's clarion call

Following on from the Papal visit the Archbishop of Westminster sent a pastoral letter to his diocese last Sunday urging Catholics to give greater public signs of their belief and practice. Given the position of the See of Westminster this can be seen as addressed to all the Catholics of England and Wales.

Fr Sean at Valle Adurni gives a link to the text of the Archbishop's letter and adds some excellent comments of his own here.

This seems a very appropriate and timely response to the tremendous success of the Papal visit. I felt renewed in my sense of being a Catholic and in the wish to be a more active and devout Catholic. We should not as a community be afraid to make our faith known and understood. Of course that does not mean frantic proseletysing but rather a firm, quiet confidence in saying and doing what we believe to be right and true.

Masses in the Extraordinary Form in Oxford and the West Midlands

There will, according to the Oxford LMS blog, be Masses in the Extraordinary Form in the period from October to December in the Oxford area as follows:

Every Sunday
8am (Low Mass) Oxford Oratory

Every Wednesday
6pm (Low Mass) SS Gregory & Augustine

Every Thursday
9am (Low Mass) St Anthony of Padua

Every Saturday
9.30am (Low Mass) St Birinus, Dorchester on Thames

Every First Friday
6pm (usually Sung) SS Gregory & Augustine

Mass times given below are now complete and confirmed.

Friday October 1st, 6pm Low Mass: SS Gregory & Augustine (First Friday)

Thursday October 7th, 6pm Low Mass: SS Gregory & Augustine (First Thursday)

Friday October 22nd, 6pm: Solemn Mass, Oxford Oratory

Opening Mass of 40 Hours Devotion

Oxford Pilgrimage, Saturday October 23rd
Solemn Mass in the presence of His Grace the Archbishop of Birmingham
11.30am Blackfriars
2pm Procession from Cornmarket to the site of the execution of Bl George Napier at Oxford Castle, where Archbishop Longley will bless a plaque
3pm: Benediction, Blackfriars

Saturday October 30th, 4pm (note unusual time): Sung Requiem,
St Birinus, Dorchester on Thames

Monday November 1st, All Saints: 12.15pm Low Mass Oxford Oratory

Tuesday November 2nd, All Souls
12.15pm Low Mass Oxford Oratory
6pm Sung Mass SS Gregory & Augustine

Thursday November 4th, 6pm Low Mass (First Thursday): SS Gregory & Augustine

Friday November 5th, Solemn Requiem, Oxford Oratory
Feast of the Holy Relics: 6pm Low Mass SS Gregory & Augustine

Saturday November 13th, 11.30, Sung Mass: St Didacus
Church of St Anthony of Padua, Headington

Saturday November 20th, 11.30am, Sung Mass, St Felix of Valois
Chapel of Mapledurham House, near Reading, RG4 7TR

Thursday December 2nd, 6pm Low Mass (First Thursday): SS Gregory & Augustine

Friday December 3rd, 6pm Low Mass SS Gregory & Augustine (First Friday)

Saturday December 4th, 11.30am Votive Mass of the Immaculate Heart of Mary
Milton Manor House, near Abingdon, OX 14 4EN

Milton Manor was the last home of Bishop Challoner, who died there, and the house has a fine chapel in the Gothick style.

Masses in the West Midlands from November to January are listed on Matthew Doyle's Birmingham LMS blog here.

Meanwhile in Oriel Square

Once again we had a film crew in Oriel Square today. I am not sure what they were filming, but they were catching the autumn sun. Three weeks ago, in damper conditions, there was another crew there filming for, as I understood it, the latest Inspector Lewis series. Normally one passes such things with the disdain of the Oxford resident who has seen it all before, but on this occasion there was rather more to see. There, in the middle of the Square, was what purported to be a religious procession, which eventually moved off towards Merton Street. Later on it returned from Merton. Several times knowing what filming is like. They were there all afternoon in fact.

Now what really caught my eye was not that it was a religious procession, but how wrong virtually everything was. Thus the "Procession" appeared to be led by a man in an all-purpose costumier's monastic habit - dark brown, Franciscan girdle, sandals - but a bit short - almost worthy of the fraticelli. He was holding, it appeared, but without a humeral veil and without wearing a stole, a monstrance at waist height. Behind him were a group in similar habits with some dark red involved somewhere, and beating side drums rather in the manner of the Sealed Knot. The effect was slightly Bhuddist*. Behind, under a splendid, stiffened and rigid canopy, came a figure in a white cope, but not carrying the monstrance or reliquary that preceded him. Behind were upwards of twenty more all-purpose monastics in their all-purpose habits, all bearing identical dark green banners. Behind them were a series of figures in academic dress, including at the rear, a D.D., but, of course, they were all too young to have attained such degrees in real-life. There was the whiff of incense in the air.

All very atmospheric no doubt, but woefully inacurrate. You would not get away with the equivalent mistakes with historic military, police, railway or any other uniform you care to think of.

But then, it is Oxford, and it is television.

* Remember the story about the automatic text added to televised coverage of Pope John Paul II's funeral which rendered "Karma lite nuns " for Carmelite nuns...