Jesse over at the Anglican Identity blog has sung parts of it here. Just beautiful!
BTW, how many lay people who read The Anglo-Catholic pray the daily offices, Book of Common Prayer style?
The Confederation of Oratorians of St. Philip Neri having received approval from the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, the proper texts for the memorial of soon-to-be Blessed John Henry Newman have been published. Here is the text of the collect in Latin and English:
Deus, qui beátum Ioánnem Henrícum, presbýterum, lumen benígnum tuum sequéntem pacem in Ecclésia tua inveníre contulísti, concéde propítius, ut, eius intercessióne et exémplo, ex umbris et imagínibus in plenitúdinem veritátis tuae perducámur. Per Dominum.
O God, who bestowed on the Priest Blessed John Henry Newman the grace to follow your kindly light and find peace in your Church; graciously grant that, through his intercession and example, we may be led out of shadows and images into the fulness of your truth. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
May we all be led out of shadows and images and into the fullness of truth!*
H/t to the New Liturgical Movement.
* "Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem" are the words of Cardinal Newman's own epitaph. In accordance with his wishes, Newman was buried in the grave of his lifelong friend, Ambrose St. John. Previously, they had shared a house. The pall over the coffin bore his cardinal's motto Cor ad cor loquitur ("Heart speaks to heart"). A joint memorial stone was erected for the two men; the inscription bore the words Newman had chosen.
Br. Stephen of the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Spring Bank has written an article about his recent experience of Whitsunday Evensong at St. Thomas, Huron Street. He gently reminds his fellow Roman Catholic traditionalists that they ought to be just as enthusiastic in their devotion to the daily and communal celebration of the Divine Office as they are for Solemn High Mass with all of the trimmings. Alas, this key aspect of our Patrimony is is something that far too many traditional Anglicans need to set about recovering (as I have noted in another post)!
* * *
The quintessence of Anglo-Catholicism is the ability to practice the most riotous liturgical excess and yet make it seem natural and even restrained. That was my experience of Whitsunday Evensong at St. Thomas, Huron Street. Let me assure you this was no Romish Second Vespers of Pentecost. It was the much-discussed and rarely seen full-on Prayer Book Evensong with all of the trimmings right down to apparelled amices on the servers’ albs and choral ululations by Britten. I knew not whether I was in Toronto or Primrose Hill.
Let me back up to where I come in. After wrapping up my twenty-six-hour-and-fifteen-minute adventure with the delayed baggage computer system and phone sirens at American Airlines, the afternoon was gone. I pinned my hopes of redeeming the day on one event: Evensong at St. Thomas, Toronto’s great Anglo-Catholic shrine, which is only a few minutes’ walk from the college.
Why, you may ask, was I scampering back to Anglicanism on one of the great days of the liturgical year? Well, who else would be having the celebration of the Divine Office on a feast day?
(And, for the hundredth time, shame, shame, shame on all of the Roman Catholic expositors of the Extraordinary Form and the Reform of the Reform who can rustle up a choir, servers, and a photographer for High Masses of Aida-like proportions but can’t seem to summon up any enthusiasm for putting on a cotta, unlocking the church doors, and reciting the office on Sunday afternoon, but I digress.)
I arrived about ten minutes before the 7:00 p.m. service. (I’ll skip a description of the Arts and Crafts building. Suffice it to say that the church is a gem of one of my favorite periods.) I got my service sheets and parked myself in a pew. The prelude was a big Durufle variation on the Veni Creator. I haven’t heard big blaring organ since entering Spring Bank and I found myself carried away as I knelt in prayer. I’m always conscious of what liturgical prose, incense, and architecture contribute to prayer in their stimulation of the senses, but this was a wonderful reminder of the raw power of an instrument in good hands.
By the time the service began there were around 40 people in the nave and another 30 or so choristers and members of the altar party processed in with the English-surpliced choristers following a crucifer in alb with apparelled amice. Next came torchbearers dressed as the first crucifer flanking a second in tunicle followed by the sacred ministers in varied red copes. Thirty-six candles burned on the High Altar in preparation for “Devotions,” the old school AC name used for Benediction or something Benediction-like to placate the sensibilities of Protestant bishops. This was Prayer Book mit schlag, but executed with that lack of self-consciousness that is the secret grace of good Anglican liturgics.
Blessed Adrian the Describer long ago pushed most of what I once knew of Prayer Book Catholic ceremonial out of my head, so I can’t tell you what bits came from which editions of the Parson’s Handbook and Ritual Notes. This is a school of churchmanship that allows for considerable creativity, much to the intellectual enjoyment of clergy and laity alike. What you may miss in the agreed-upon, objective standards is made up for in exuberance.
Not long after the announcement of Anglicanorum Coetibus, I wrote a piece called One Last Evensong, recounting what I presumed would be my farewell to Prayer Book liturgy at All Saints, Margaret Street during the summer before I entered Spring Bank. That was a deeply-moving but melancholy event. Whitsunday at St. Thomas was just good fun as I joined in while wondering what would happen next and how, enjoying it all as it unfolded and belting out some good hymns in the process.
St. Thomas seems to be solidly university-orbit Prayer Book Catholic with, I would assume, a fair amount of theological diversity not unlike Boston’s Church of the Advent as I remember it from my student days. I doubt that anyone here will be going anywhere, as much as many of us might wish and pray that the case were different, but that also meant that there was sufficient distance for this to be a relaxed and cordial encounter. As an Anglo-Catholic of the Romish persuasion, I’m sure I would have had a snappy comment or two about St. Thomas’ British Museum Religion, but, as a Cistercian, I am honor bound to defend the alb for servers and, as a Roman Catholic, the intramural battles of Anglo-Catholic Churchmanship no longer send me to the barricades. I have finally reached the place where I can see, and hope for, the good of all my former coreligionists.
At the outdoor reception afterward, the curate told me that this wasn’t too far from an average-sized crowd for a Sunday Evensong, which impressed me as much as the service itself. Over punch, I met a combox acquaintance from The New Liturgical Movement, with whom I had a long exchange about Cistercian and Anglican liturgy, and I chatted with several others as well. (One piece of the Anglican patrimony no one has mentioned in discussions I have seen of Anglicanorum Coetibus is the high quality of coffee hour chit-chat.) Canadians are nice. Anglicans are nice. Canadian Anglicans seem to be doubly nice. I expect I’ll be back and will also drop by for the daily office.
(Yes, that was “daily office,” meaning daily Morning and Evening Prayer. Are you catching that priest readers on this side of the Tiber? Try it; your people may like it. I mean, you’re already doing it yourself anyway. Right?)
Personal Breviary of Mary, Queen of Scots.
In the Anglo-Catholic tradition there has long been a proliferation of options for the recitation of the Divine Office, some with the approbation of competent ecclesiastical authority, others less so. And recently in the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church, the legitimate choices have been multiplied by the Holy Father's motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, which, in addition to liberating the Traditional Latin Mass and the other sacramental rites of the usus antiquior, also permits clerics to celebrate the canonical hours according to the 1962 edition of the Breviarium Romanum, making it clear that the older form of the Roman Breviary (and perhaps, by extension, those of the other uses of the Roman Rite) is a legitimate expression of the public prayer of the Church.
I've noticed that the liturgical debates conducted here on The Anglo-Catholic tend to focus almost exclusively on eucharistic rites. Very little is ever written of the Liturgy of the Hours and this seems to me, at least, to be quite unfortunate. Anglo-Catholics have a strong tradition of commitment both to the regular celebration of both Holy Mass and the corporate — as well as private — recitation of the Divine Office. This "Mass-and-Office Catholicism" has shaped our identity. So much of our Anglican Patrimony — especially our musical tradition — is intimately connected to the solemn celebration of the daily offices. I'd like to bring this aspect of worship back into focus.
So I'd like to hear from our readers (both Anglican and Roman Catholic) and get a sense of what everyone is doing: What book(s) do you use for the recitation of the daily offices? How frequently do you pray the Divine Office? If you are clergy or religious, are you under obligation to recite the daily offices? Does your personal choice of office book reflect the public worship in your parish or community? If not, why not? How are the daily offices celebrated — or not celebrated — in your parish?
I must apologize to you all; no doubt some of you must have thought that I had sunk without trace. Partly it was simply the preoccupations of this time of year (Lent, Holy Week, Easter, and now Confirmations and First Communions) and the consequent tiredness, but for me the major problem was a kind of mental paralysis occasioned mostly by the storm surrounding the (nearly unmentionable) issue of child abuse.
For me, this issue has been going on a long time. In early 1998, having (for reasons I won’t bore you with) become suddenly available, I was appointed to Gatwick Airport as Catholic Chaplain. It wasn’t fun; the job itself I regarded as fairly pointless (travellers are dispensed from Sunday obligation, and staff all have their own local parishes), but the major issue was that my predecessor had recently been arrested for systematic child abuse. He was subsequently imprisoned. I had to deal with a lot of the fall-out in those early days when there were no helps of any kind (I hadn’t even been warned in advance of the problem). Most of the discussion of those days tended to circle around Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor, and his actions in appointing that priest to that job. In the UK, action was then taken to make sure that this would never occur again. We all had to have checks run on our backgrounds, and the draconian system of child protection rumbled into action, something that (necessarily, alas) has utterly changed the face of our youth ministry. When I was first ordained, the young people in my parish used to run amok in my study, playing games on my computer &c. That has all ended, and we have to find other ways of reaching out to young people, befriending them only in a distant way. That is a grief to me, a constant reminder of the tiny minority of priests who have so damaged the work of the Gospel.
In my current parish, I was again appointed to a very demoralized community; again I found myself in a position where accusations of abuse had been made against my predecessor; this man had been instantly removed and the parish left without a priest for two years. Yet again I felt I had to deal directly with this dreadful problem which was not of my making. In the event it took a further four years for my predecessor to have his name cleared (something which has now happened); his total period of suspension a divinis was six years; six crucifying years in which this gentle and good man was regarded as a monster. When he was at last declared innocent, the newspapers which had trumpeted his removal scarcely thought his vindication worth a mention.
The parish, thanks be to God, has slowly recovered, but as with our Lord’s risen body, the scars are still there. The recent feeding frenzy of the media against the Church has been utterly horrible, and it has horrified and demoralized me. The crimes we are now accused of as a body were not even committed in this country; our house has been fairly well in order (insofar as it can ever be) for years now, and very good safeguards operate in most places. And even at its worst, I am informed, the rate of (mere) accusations (not convictions) against priests and religious stood at less than 0.4%—this is less than half the national average. I am, and my parishioners are, so sick of being made to feel guilty for something we didn’t do, of having our noses rubbed in it again and again. Any attempt to defend ourselves simply led to accusations of lack of compassion for the victims of abuse.
In the dying days of Lent, my bishop was contacted by several gleeful media types, asking whether Catholic Churches were going to be very empty this Easter, or extremely empty. What happened was that more than ever came to the Easter services. In the streets, ordinary people, so far from treating me with disgust, as was expected, have actually gone out of their way to smile, or say ‘good morning’. I suppose it’s a gesture of sympathy, and I am very grateful for it. Unlike some of my colleagues I have continued to wear clerical dress—often my cassock if I am on the way to Mass—and the gesture seems to be appreciated. And, incredibly, the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, the man who has been so opposed to so much that we stand for, has described Catholics as ‘the conscience of the nation’. Our own Church has pulled together; in this country we are fairly accustomed to anti-Catholicism (the only acceptable prejudice, it has been said), and so people have felt more inclined, not less, to identify themselves as Catholics. Where sin has abounded, there grace has superabounded.
One thing that has greatly saddened me in all this is the complete lack of support from other Christian communions. We enjoy good ecumenical relations here, but I never heard a word of sympathy, through all the crisis, from any of them, publically or privately. On the national scene, the only words we heard were those off-the-cuff remarks from Rowan Williams about the credibility-free Irish Catholic Church. Finally, at a meeting last week, the chair of our local Ecumenical committee addressed some kind words and said that his prayers had been with us. I appreciated that but it would have been nice to have heard it some weeks ago when we felt so alone. I know very well that all denominations are scared of similar treatment, and don’t want to draw attention to themselves, but those words of Martin Niemoller are no doubt in your minds as well as my own.
First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.
And maybe were our positions reversed, I, too, might have said nothing. But I hope not.
Well, we all know why the schadenfreude, don’t we? For two thousand years, we have been preaching chastity and honesty, and here are some of our own clergy behaving badly. It is really an example of the ad hominem argument: if priests sin, then what they say must be wrong. ‘Look, Catholics and everyone: these priests who tell you how to behave are no better than you; in fact, they’re worse!’
As for having to suffer opprobrium while innocent, well, someone else innocent suffered for the guilty too, didn’t he? ‘If they hate you, remember that they hated me before you. The servant is not greater than his master’. ‘Woe to you when the world thinks well of you!’.
My final remarks concern today’s Divine Office. It is usually my custom to celebrate the Office according to the Extraordinary Form, but for the last few days I have been using the Ordinary Form—the first time in three or four years that I have done so in private recitation. This morning I read that extraordinary Epistle to Diognetus (probably 2nd century) at the Office of Readings, and it was like drawing a cork out of a bottle. It really helped me, and I hope that it might help you if you have felt as I have. And it expresses perfectly the status of a Christian in the world, and why a Church works better when it is not Established.
Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign.
And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives. They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law.
Christians love all men, but all men persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an abundance of everything. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory. They are defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference their response to insult. For the good they do they receive the punishment of malefactors, but even then they rejoice, as though receiving the gift of life. They are attacked by the Jews as aliens, they are persecuted by the Greeks, yet no one can explain the reason for this hatred.
To speak in general terms, we may say that the Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body. As the soul is present in every part of the body, while remaining distinct from it, so Christians are found in all the cities of the world, but cannot be identified with the world. As the visible body contains the invisible soul, so Christians are seen living in the world, but their religious life remains unseen. The body hates the soul and wars against it, not because of any injury the soul has done it, but because of the restriction the soul places on its pleasures. Similarly, the world hates the Christians, not because they have done it any wrong, but because they are opposed to its enjoyments.
Christians love those who hate them just as the soul loves the body and all its members despite the body’s hatred. It is by the soul, enclosed within the body, that the body is held together, and similarly, it is by the Christians, detained in the world as in a prison, that the world is held together. The soul, though immortal, has a mortal dwelling place; and Christians also live for a time amidst perishable things, while awaiting the freedom from change and decay that will be theirs in heaven. As the soul benefits from the deprivation of food and drink, so Christians flourish under persecution. Such is the Christian’s lofty and divinely appointed function, from which he is not permitted to excuse himself.
(Nn. 5-6; Funk, 397-401)
I apologize for my rambling, but I felt that I owed you and Christian (‘Mr Patience’) Campbell an explanation.