Abbey Ruins and Altar Canopy
Glastonbury, one of the great places of our Christian past, reputedly visited by Joseph of Arimathaea and the infant Jesus, closely connected with Alfred the Great and with St Dunstan, site of the greatest of English Benedictine Houses. This was where a few hundred of us gathered today for our annual Pilgrimage.
St John Baptist: our Pilgrims not welcome
Once the great Abbey towered over the town and surrounding countryside. Now just fragements remain from the stones pillaged after the dissolution in 1539. Two parish churches survive, among a sea of New Ageism, Magic Crystals, and shops where you can get all the gear for your Coven — I think Mrs Schori might find it a positive Aladdin's cave, but for most of us it is a cave of Adullam.
Abbot Whiting was one of the few heads of religious communities who stood firm against Henry VIII and the Royal Supremacy; and paid for it with his life, on the Tor which rises above the town. With the Treasurer of the Abbey John Thorne and its Sacrist Roger James he was dragged on a hurdle to the hill-top and there cruelly executed. Their quartered bodies were distributed among local towns pour encourager les autres, their heads set up above the Abbey Gate of Glastonbury. In 1895 Pope Leo XIII beatified the Abbot and his two companions.
The Bishop of Plymouth & Deacons
Perhaps these English heroes of the faith can help steel our nerve for whatever comes in future. Surely anything we suffer will be trivial against their ordeal. Today, we were gathered mostly from Wales and South-West England. The Ordinariate was, of course, a topic of conversation during the lunchbreak between the Procession & Mass, and Benediction.
I was sad to hear the sort of excuses some were making. "The Ordinariate will be congregationalist." "We won't be able to keep our churches." "The people will not come with us." "It is different in Wales." Yet the truth of the matter is that it is 'catholics' remaining in the Church in Wales or the Church of England who will be the congregationalists. They will have no Bishop to whom they can look. And yet, as the Bishop of Richborough remarked today, these people who are ignoring the Pope's offer are still prepared to pray for "Benedict our Pope"!
Concelebrating Bishops: Richborough, Ebbsfleet, David Silk and David Thomas
+ Plymouth and Children's Banners
The Ordinariate will NOT be sectarian or congregationalist. It will be an authentic part of the Church Catholic. Its Ordinary will relate directly to the Holy Father. One of the Welsh contingent said to me that the Catholic Church in Wales is very foreign; Irish and Italian, not at all Welsh. Then why not join the Ordinariate to ensure that part of the Catholic Church in Wales is genuinely Welsh? Certainly things are different in Wales; they do not have so much as a Provincial Bishop to care for them any longer. On Bishop David Thomas's retirement all the promises previously made were forgotten. Oh yes, it is different in Wales.
View from Lady Chapel to Nave
And what about buildings? Abbot Whiting might have had a decent pension and gone on living in the Abbot's lodging if only he had complacently handed the rest of the Abbey over to the King. If he had done that, even the church itself might have been spared, as Tewkesbury Abbey was; and Gloucester had its monastic church kept as a Cathedral. But Abbot Whiting knew that the Church was not buildings, and that faithfulness to the truth was more important than keeping control of stone and mortar. May he and his companions pray for us all, that more English Christians might find the courage to leave the comfort of the establishment and be identified once more with the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ.
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Thanks for this, Bishop Barnes. When I was a student at Salisbury & Wells (more years ago than I care to remember), and then later as an assistant curate in the Diocese of Bristol, I used any excuse to go to Glastonbury. Although the New Ageism was crowding in even then, there always seemed to be a remnant of Catholic Glastonbury present, and I loved it.
"One of the Welsh contingent said to me that the Catholic Church in Wales is very foreign; Irish and Italian, not at all Welsh. "
Has the commenter ever considered how those Irish and Italian folks must feel if the Welsh regard them as still foreign? – since I assume she means they are of such descent, rather than just arrived off the aeroplane. By the same argument, I should regard myself as a foreigner in my own land, since my people came here less than two centuries back.
I'm sorry, but this is the sort of unthinkingly xenophobic comment that makes my blood boil. There is – even here in Australia – an unconscious assumption among Anglicans (forgive my candour) that they are, not merely the de facto Establishment (however unlikely that now is), but of superior race, are the authentic deal. One should have a healthy regard for one's people, but not at the expense of larger values – such as membership of the One Church of Christ.
One dear Anglican lady, then engrossed in some historical novel, innocently asked me, "Why do the Irish have such feelings toward the English?" I mean, honestly! (And I'm not Irish, by the way, but Anglo-Celtic as we say in Australia, meaning in my case of Scottish and English stock six generations back.)
A friend, having gone over to Rome, was told by an Anglican colleague, not yet aware of his Tiber swim, that "they're outbreeding us, you know" (truly? well, we know why). The same friend, standing in a Catholic church, was struck by her catholicity precisely by the list of names prayed for in the General Intercessions, since there was a great combination of, yes, Irish, Italian, and other-sourced names; there were even some odd English names (deceased relatives of our priest, himself having come over from Anglicanism).
Ever since he drew my attention to this, I have felt this congeries of monickers a badge of Catholic pride. It is what an elderly friend, an English Catholic, told me: having served in Burma, he was sent at the end of the War to Vietnam as part of Allied contingents receiving the Japanese surrender there; and he ever remembers Christmas Mass in Hanoi Cathedral, 1945, where the Vietnamese, French, Brits, Chinese, yes, and even some Japanese all sang together Credo in unum Deum.
Oh, and to be fair, when Ben moved to Tasmania in the sixties, the local Irish Catholics weren't at all sure how to regard him: an Englishman, who was also a Catholic? They were torn! Luckily, even since then the expression of Catholicism here has broadened. Catholicism in the antipodes naturally began with and long self-consciously held to Irish nationality. But Australia's first saint, just about to be canonized, is Mary MacKillop, the daughter of Scottish Catholic migrants.
We have found that all nations at prayer is good. I fondly recall my parish in Perth, Western Australia, a true United Nations all worshipping and believing as one: and the variety of ethnic backgrounds made for delicious and exotic surprises on offer when the parish fete came round. Our priest was of part-Chinese descent; would that suspicious Welsh person find his ministrations unbecoming? There is a word for such attitudes.
Here in Australia, where the older British stock has been supplemented from all parts since the War ("populate or perish" was the slogan), and even the oldest, non-British stock survives, we are not quite so fussed about the niceness of the ethnic mix in our congregations.
This sort of attitude is hardly consonant with St Paul's preaching to sinners of the Gentiles, and even demeaning his erstwhile Pharisaic nature to dine with them and celebrate the Mysteries for them.
You have a good point here. I wonder if this is an indicator of a part of the reason why some Church of England clergy would have difficulties with the Ordinariate project – the fact that Catholicism is cosmopolitan and open to all races, cultures and peoples around the world. The Catholic Church may just be "too foreign" for some of my compatriots with inner nostalgia for the old days of Empire.
They say that travel broadens the mind. I would go further and say that the mind is only really broadened by living in other countries and realising that we English are not the centre of the world. I need say no more…
Indeed. My old pal, Ben, not only served the King-Emperor with the Gurkhas, he fought in the Malayan Emergency, and then did duty with the Colonial Police in Uganda. (As he put it, "Women could walk safely in the streets at night – we hanged rapists." All know what happened in Uganda after independence.) Being a Catholic in that part of Africa entailed attending Mass offered for the natives by missionaries – was his Englishness offended by this? No.
Just so; pharisaism is a very horrid thing. Just as once, in Oxford, a Catholic lady greeted a student of St Stephen's House saying, "You're not catholic; only we are. All the saints are ours. We kept the faith alive when your predecessors were burning catholics." Any sort of triumphalism – colonial superiority – or even inverted snobbery – are very horrid things. If we are to live together as Catholics we all of us need seek the grace to see ourselves as others see us; and repent. God bless (if a mere Anglican bishop is permitted to say such a thing). +E
Joshua, it is consonant with respect for that entity, willed by providence, known as "the nation".
I hope you're not silly enough to be a votary of the false (and irrational) cult of multiculturalism. Catholicism (kata = according to, holos = the whole) or universality, is a completely different thing from the nation-wrecking experiment in social engineering that multiculturalism is.
I have no trouble with Welshmen being happy to be Welsh – so long as they don't look down on people who live in Wales, yet aren't of Welsh extraction. (And I grant them an exception to this rule as regards the English, for obvious reasons!)
Beware philetism!
And, Mr McGregor, you will understand that any imputation that the Catholic Church in England and Wales is some body of foreigners to be scorned is deeply offensive to the memory of the Martyrs and Recusants, and indeed to all those Christian Englishmen and Welshmen who lived prior to the Reformation.
Of course I understand it, Joshua, I'm only half English myself.
But I still don't know whether you reject the golden calf of multiculturalism …
Oh, dear! At least this time it isn't because of my discussions of celibacy or the Use of Sarum! Can't you two Ozzies smoke um pipe of peace?
Well, I dunno what Mr McGregor's on about; and frankly have quite enough on my plate at the moment without having to explain my stance on whatever it is, I care not. Sorry. Too stressed.
Where any church is socially and historically dominant there is likely to be an ethnic dimension to the religious culture – especially true of Orthodox churches, of course. There are both strengths and weaknesses in that. The Ordinariates will add, or restore, another strand to the richness of Catholicism.
An afterthought: There is also strength and weakness in the internationalism of the Roman Catholic Church. It can keep its integrity in the face of regional tyranny, but has tended to become over-centralized and totalitarian in its government.
A curiosity I have sometimes noted: whereas many an Englishman (or woman) will announce with great pride that they have, say, a great-grandmother who was Welsh, or a great-great grandfather who was Irish, or French, or whatever- I have met some of other nationalities who appear ashamed to admit they have any English blood in their veins, though it may be a quarter or even a half. The English (and a fortiori the Americans) know that they will never win the Racial Purity stakes, and make a virtue of necessity!
Yep! We are sure going to have fun together, serving the same Lord and having to 'deal' with each others peculiarities in the Ordinariate. An Italian household with a German Holy Father. And this from a Puerto Rican living in the United States. You know, Puerto Rico, right next to the Dominican Republic, just west of St. Thomas, Virgen Islands. O.K. Just call me Catholic!
The good thing to remember is that back five centuries ago all Europeans did get along, well, more or less! in the one Church: hence, Christendom.
We could do with getting back together to save what's left of it.
Bishop Barnes, thank you for the blog post. I am a Catholic, but have a number of Anglican priest friends. A few months ago, one was complaining how 'class-ist' Anglicanism is, and I didn't quite know what he meant. This sheds a bit of light on that comment. In any event, as an American with Italian, English, and Irish ancestry, I am looking forward to my brethren from various Anglo communities re-gaining their full communion with the Holy Father.