Requiem aeternam

Today to Hampshire to assist at the requiem mass of a long-standing member of the 'congregation' of the Benedictine Abbey of Our Lady and St John at Alton.

Anglican Benedictine communities are not supposed to have 'congregations'. 'They should be worshiping in their parish churches' as a newly-appointed bishop said to the Abbot before he discovered he had as much hope of stopping people coming to the Abbey as King Canute had of turning back the waves. Today there were 70 or so people in the little Abbey Church which normally seats 40. Half of them were such members of the regular congregation who could get away on a Wednesday afternoon and the other half friends and relatives of the deceased lady. Most of those in the latter category clearly seldom darkened the door of any church let alone one in which I am perfectly certain the Pope (and this Pope in particular) would have felt as liturgically comfortable as the Archbishop of Canterbury. Such things can happen in a monastery but the secret lies in Chapter 53 of the Rule of St Benedict which instructs that 'all guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ, for he himself will say: I was a stranger and you welcomed me.' Every single person who came to the Abbey this afternoon to mourn a much-loved friend or relative was welcomed as Christ whether they recognised their honoured status or not.

The picture is of the cemetary at Alton Abbey taken a month ago in Holy Week. Today it looked very different. A month's growth at this time of year is transformational. And it was raining. But they always say it's good if it rains at an interment. One can be sure the coffin is well bedded in.

Rest in peace, Paulene.

St John before the Latin Gate

This morning I took myself to St John’s College, Cambridge for a Solemn Eucharist for the Feast of St John before the Latin Gate. The what, I can hear you ask. There’s certainly no mention of such a feast in my 1962 missal but it’s there in the 1928 BCP and also in my copy of The Anglican Breviary which is based on the 1911 reform of the Latin Secular Breviary.

For those who need a memory refresher, the episode commemorated is the occasion when in AD 95 the Emperor Domitian convicted the Beloved Disciple St John of atheism and ordered him to be boiled in oil. He was immersed in the cauldron ante Portam Latinam but emerged completely unscathed He was exiled to Patmos and died a natural death as foretold in the final chapter of St John’s Gospel.

Anyhow St John’s College are keeping the Feast alive and long may they continue to do so. I’ve always thought Ss Stephen and John get a bit of a raw deal coming as they do immediately after Christmas – a bit like children whose December birthdays get subsumed within the generalised seasonal festivities – so for St John to get another go in the middle of the year is no bad thing.

Actually this was my second consecutive Sunday at St John’s. Last week I went on the spur of the moment without first checking only to find that the service was the College’s annual act of thanksgiving for its benefactors. Not exactly my cup of tea – a sort of BCP Matins but without the Benedictus – but it did provide me with an opportunity to remind myself just what a good choir St John’s has and to reflect that there’s now clear water, if you’ll forgive the rowing analogy, between the top half dozen or so English cathedral and collegiate choirs and ‘the rest’. It’s not that the rest are any worse than they used to be – indeed some of them are excellent – but that the front runners – St John’s, King’s, St Paul’s, Westminster Cathedral and a handful of others – are absolutely superb. Last week we heard Britten’s Te Deum and what in all honesty is probably the best performance I have ever heard of Parry’s I was glad. Hearing Sir Hubert’s coronation anthem for George V these days is a bit like hearing yet another performance of Beethoven’s Fifth. Everyone does it and it has become so familiar that for a performance to raise more than an appreciative eyebrow it has to be superb. This was, believe me, superb.

But even that paled when compared with what was on offer musically this morning. Frank Martin’s mass setting is no pot boiler. It’s difficult to perform and even harder to bring off. This morning the combined choirs of St John’s and Clare College blew our socks off. It would be difficult to imagine anything more thrilling.

And yet this was not a concert but a church service, a celebration of the holy mysteries. Self evidently there came to mind the old accusation that the worship of the Church of England represents the triumph of style over substance. And yet the substance was present this morning if only in the words of Common Worship which, like those of the ASB that preceded it, are so very close to those in the Roman Novus Ordo. The choreography had been meticulously rehearsed and was well done and the mood was prayerful. Perhaps the one criticism that could be levelled at the proceedings was the fact that because a solemn eucharist is a relative rarity in this chapel it had to be well rehearsed and it was this that showed up the artificiality of the occasion. Like a well-acted play, it was so well done that just for a moment one might be fooled into thinking it was the real thing. But it wasn’t. But in spite of that, I’m glad I was there.

Et unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam Ecclesiam

The current trials and tribulations within the Anglican Communion have understandably attracted a good deal of interest in and comment from the Catholic blogosphere and from those Anglicans on its fringes seen by the Romans as ripe conversion fruit. There's been a good deal of discussion on the Roman claims that it and it alone is 'the one holy catholic and apostolic Church' and I attempted to pull together some of the threads in one such discussion in my posting of 28 March entitled Roman Claims.

Now another rather different take on this with which I fully concur emerges in Fr Anthony Chadwick's always thought provoking site, In medio stat virtus. The piece in question is entitled Divided yet but one in Christ draws on an equally thoughtful piece in Daniel Mitsui's fascinatingly eclectric blog site which he calls The Lion and the Cardinal and which is well worth visiting. However in the context of the present posting, please follow the link Divided but yet one in Christ and thence to Daniel Mitsui's piece entitled Permanent Scars.

Roman claims

In a post entitled Newman Hits the Bulls Eye, Fr Dwight Longenecker quotes from and then expounds on John Henry Newman's Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine which deals with, among other things, the unity of form versus unity of doctrine dichotomy so relevant to the current goings on in the Anglican Communion. (What follows is a digest of that post and resulting comments.)

Fr Dwight paraphrases Newman as follows:

If the faith is to be applied now and in all ages, then it needs to be adaptable, and for it to be adaptable you have to have someone (or some institution) who decides when and how far the adaptions can be made. This interpreter needs to be infallible. If you don't have this infallible authority you will argue and disagree and eventually fall into one of two errors. Latitudinarian error preserves unity of form, but sacrifices unity of doctrine. The Anglicans and other mainstream Protestant Churches are an example of this. You can believe anything as long as you don't break down into schism.

The other error is sectarian. Those who move into a sect maintain unity of doctrine, but lose unity of form. The multitude of Evangelical, independent denominations are an example of this error.

These are the only choices for non-Catholic Christians, and every individual or group falls into one camp of the other. The non-Catholic individual or group is either sectarian (and there are more and more sects as more and more divisions take place) or they are latitudinarian, and these groups (in their attempts to include everyone and allow everything) are now so far from historic Christianity that they will soon need to take a new name.

The only other option is the Catholic Church . . .

To which Brian Britton of Mandeville, Louisiana very reasonably asks, 'where do the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox fall in Newman's scheme?' Fr Longenecker replies, 'following Newman's logic, the Eastern churches not in full communion with the Holy See must fall into the sectarian error--they have maintained unity of doctrine, but sacrificed unity of form.'

Not, I would argue, if you look at the picture from the Orthodox perspective which holds (not without some merit, I think) that the Church of Rome was in error in the events leading up to 1054. And this surely illustrates the moral and intellectual absurdity of holding on to the defensive 'I'm right, you're wrong' school of argument. Sooner or later, if matters are to be resolved, people have to get off their high horses and engage in discourse withone another in a spirit of Christian humility.

And interestingly this is indeed what seems to be happening between (some) Catholics and (some) Orthodox, the starting point of whose dialogue is that both wings of 'the Church' made mistakes before the schism occurred and, among many errors, both were transparently guilty of the collective sin of pride.

Our Lord established 'the Church' on earth and left it in the hands of the all too fallible apostles (and by implication their successors.) From the outset theysquabbled about jusidiction and doctrine and have gone on doing so ever since. Of course that's not the complete picture and there's no doubt the Holy Spirit has guided 'the Church' but all too often such guidance has been in the face of the abject stupidity of His human instruments. (One can't help feeling sorry for the Holy Spirit: so often invoked, so rarely listened to.)

One has to look no further than the Holy Land to see this happening on an hourly basis. For a start one can see in action in one place the amazing and rich diversity of Christian practice. In Jerusalem alone there are eight, nine, ten (possibly more)institutionally-established ecclesial groupings which can reasonably claim apostolic origins going back to the first or second centuries AD. Their relations with one another cover the complete spectrum of full communion to mutual (even sometimes physical) antagonism. All claim that they either constitute or are at least part of 'the Church' established by Our Lord.

In a recent posting, Fr Dwight, wrote a piece entitled Size Matters in which likens the Roman Church to an ocean liner and the Anglican Communion to a sailing dinghy. I beg to differ not to defend the Anglican Communion but because I would contend that size of itself truly is not important. Again, I refer to the Holy Land which is nothing if not a great leveller. Alongside numerous examples of behaviour that I can only describe as fully justifying the contempt in which the Christian Church is held by much of the non-Christian world, there were little beacons of hope which amply fulfill Our Lord's promise 'that where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.'

If you want to be impressed by size, I commend standing almost anywhere in the Old City of Jerusalem at about 1pm on Friday - any Friday, I suspect - to see wave upon wave of Muslim Palestinian men and women returning to their homes and to their work after Friday prayers. (I am grateful to Michael Freilich for the photograph.) That was impressive.

If you can't laugh . . .

From The (London) Times Saturday 24 March 2007