The High Altar, installed for the Millennium.
Lancing College is a splendid institution just outside my parish boundary. It was founded in the nineteenth century, not a hundred yards from where I sit typing this, by the (Anglican) curate in the parish of St Mary and St Nicolas, Shoreham-by-Sea, one Nathaniel Woodard. He was to go on to found a further ten schools, intended to educate the sons of the middle classes in knowledge and Anglo-Catholic piety. Eventually, when he died in 1891, he was entombed in a little chantry in the amazing chapel of Lancing College which had been begun in 1868. The college has continued to maintain a solid Anglo-Catholic spirit down to this day.
This week I was invited to preach to the whole college for the feast of the Ascension. I was very favourably impressed. In the past I have been a Catholic Chaplain at another not dissimilar establishment, Charterhouse, where the worship was considerably dryer. There we actually had to police the boys (at the school's request) to prevent non-catholics sneaking into Mass, because our Catholic Mass was considered much more interesting (also slightly shorter, it has to be admitted) than the official prayers in the chapel. I remember that the focus of the chapel (itself a war memorial) was a huge cenotaph showing a knight watching over a tomb, with the vast words engraved: 'Who dies if England lives?'
The Nave, looking west.
None of that at Lancing. The chapel is completely God-focussed, the architecture and art directing the worshipper towards heaven. The entire college participated in the Eucharist, and were required to approach the altar at communion time to receive Communion or a blessing. The music was very enjoyable; some good hymns, and Bruckner's Locus Iste with, bizzarely, Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord at the end. Another curiosity, which I can't quite get used to, is laymen taking the role of sacred ministers; there was no deacon at all, but a sixth-former dressed in a tunicle did a sort of subdeacon's role (and very creditably). There was incense, acolytes, banners carried in procession… all very impressive in a mighty and glorious setting.
Statue of Our Lady in the Narthex.
It leads me, however, to ask a question. What happens in the future to something like Lancing? There were girl altar servers and ladies giving Communion, but I don't imagine they would be happy with a lady celebrant. I didn't ask the charming Chaplain what his own plans for the future were to be—it would have been impertinent. I don't imagine for a minute that Lancing would go in with any ordinariate, because it is devoted precisely to Catholicism for the Anglicans, and, no doubt, it would find itself in short order simply another Catholic public school. And there would be all the complications about staff who would suddenly find themselves out of communion with each other, and so forth.
Woodard's Chantry.
If Catholicism is to be understood as many Anglicans understand it, as being a matter of ritual, liturgical style &c, then no doubt Lancing will carry on with its splendid celebrations, and one day appoint Father Mary as chaplain who will, perhaps, eschew the current Roman-style vestments in favour of rainbow chasubles, but otherwise continue to fill the place with incense. I don't see what else it can do.
But it would be wonderful if they could achieve a consensus for the Ordinariate… I just can't see how it would work out.
(Sorry the photos aren't great: they were taken with my iPhone.)
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