Triumphalism, Anger, Sadness & Celebration

Posted on January 17, 2011 by actuosaparticipatio

In my post on Saturday’s Ordination of the first three priests of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, I wrote that Archbishop Vincent Nichols had in his homily avoided ‘triumphalism’, and I thought was right he was right to do so. I realised later that I appeared to be echoing Elena Curti, who put his eirenicism down to embarrassed ecumenical sensitivity, she being rather less then enthusiastic about the Ordinariate and keen to portray everyone she can as being similarly minded – which was somewhat disconcerting. As a critique of Curti, I would recommend Hugh Somerville-Knapman’s post on his blog; one might wonder whether Curti might be as concerned about the tone of comments such as the piece that Tina Beattie has on her blog online pharmacy viagra.

What I mean by triumphalism and what Curti means are somewhat different – the distinction being for whose feelings we are concerned. Curti would read any positive support for the Ordinariate as triumphalism that would be undesirable because it might offend the liberal great and good viagra online. I was thinking rather of those Anglicans who are currently wondering whether they are called to the Ordinariate but have yet to resolve their confusion at considering departing the CofE cialis online. They need to know that they will be welcomed home, which they will be, not made to feel that they have surrendered or, in the vocabulary overused by The Daily Telegraph, ‘defected’, or done nothing more than become ‘disaffected’ Anglicans. This is not those who are already committed to being in the first wave of clergy and faithful to join the Ordinariate, but those who are hovering just out of sight and will respond best to gentle encouragement from the Roman side of the Tiber, just as many converts – including me – have done down through the decades.

There are those who are very cross about the Ordinariate, because to them it feels that ecclesiastical politics – Anglican and Catholic – are not going their way. I sympathise. I spent too much of the last few years angry about the losing – in fact lost before it ever started – battle I was part of in the CofE. I now look at the CofE and am sad rather than angry – sad for its members rather than angry about its politics – but, ooops, that is roughly what Tina Beattie seems to be saying from her rather different perspective about the Ordinariate viagra.

What however is different between me and Elena Curti or Tina Beattie is celebration – celebration that is shared by many current and former Anglicans, and convert and cradle Catholics. Celebration that in the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, groups of Anglicans and their pastors who have heard the call into the Church from the Holy Spirit will soon be finding their way Home to the one true fold of the Redeemer .

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Fr Andrew Burnham’s First Mass as a Catholic Priest

Posted on January 16, 2011 by actuosaparticipatio

Fr Andrew Burnham celebrated his First Mass as a Catholic Priest today at the Oxford Oratory. It was one of those occasions which seems very familiar but not quite – as Fr Burnham said, he gave Communion to the people he was used to blessing and blessed the people to whom he was accustomed to give Communion, a symptom of this time of transition.

After the excitement of the Ordination, there is – and should be – something quieter and more sober about the new Priest’s First Mass. The liturgical choices for the Mass are always interesting, and the liturgy of the First Mass of the man who is working on the liturgical forms of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham will not have had any accidental elements – not the silent Canon, nor its fairly extensive use of Latin. But it should not be a showcase, and today was not. 

In his homily, Aidan Nichols OP described Fr Burnham, accidentally-on-purpose, as ‘Bishop Andrew’, noting his long experience and the liturgical competence that has encouraged the Holy See to place in his hands development of the liturgical forms intended for use in the Ordinariate, and to this First Mass taking place on the cusp of what he described as the reconfiguration of Anglicanism and its restoration to the Petrine centre. He quoted Newman extensively, ending with a quote so short and pithy it was gone before I could take it in. I hope it will be available on-line sometime soon.

This has been quite a weekend.

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The Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham

Posted on January 16, 2011 by actuosaparticipatio

Today was a remarkable Catholic day. I arrived at Westminster Cathedral just after 9.30 this morning – an hour early – and yet, despite admittedly wandering around for a bit catching up with various friends and former colleagues, had to sit 3/4 of the way to the back and didn’t get an order of service. Were the cathedral authorities perhaps a bit overwhelmed by the strength of support for former flying bishops of the CofE, John Broadhurst, Andrew Burnham and Keith Newton as they were ordained to Catholic priesthood and the English & Welsh Personal Ordinariate was established as the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, under the patronage of Blessed John Henry Newman?

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The Mass was two and a half hours long; a fitting length of time for a Mass the ongoing significance of which will tell for those who are received into the Church in the newly established Ordinariate, but also for the whole of the Church – cradle Catholics and converts alike. It will also I think be significant for ecumenism per se – marking, I sincerely hope, a sign of contradiction to talking-shop ecumaniacs. To any Anglican who now wants to say the Nicene Creed with integrity it says this: if you say you believe in the one holy catholic and apostolic Church, why do you remain outside of it by choice, there being individual and corporate routes home to its full Communion, the latter specifically provided for you?

Former Anglican  clergy already Received were present in shirt and tie – how else, as were many currently Anglican clergy who one supposes will make up the courageous first wave of the Ordinariate, to be ordained as Catholic priests at Pentecost. Many other current Anglican Clergy were present in deepest black clericals – and one might conclude they were sending a different signal.

Mass began with the reading of a letter from Cardinal Levada, apologizing for his absence and declaring the establishment of the Ordinariate into which the three new priests would be incardinated and of which Keith Newton was to be the first Ordinary. The reason for his absence was ‘a long standing commitment of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to meet with the Bishops and theologians of India in Bangalore’. For all of Anglicanism’s claims to global reach through the Anglican Communion, that Cardinal Levada could not be present for this reason emphasized for me that the Catholic Church is the Church of all place and all time.

Archbishop Nichols’ homily made a certain amount of reading the establishment of the Ordinariate as an experiment in how Anglicans and Catholics can learn from each other’s patrimonies. His line on this has been lampooned elsewhere – surely the Ordinariate is nothing less than one firmly in the eye of the CofE? The Ordinariate is I think certainly a sign of contradiction to Anglicanism, but the Catholic Church in England & Wales does seem to seek, correctly I think, to avoid triumphalism, especially now, when to say ‘Ha! There’s one back for the 40 Martyrs’ could seem so tempting.

The three new priests’ chasubles were brought forward by their wives. Robert Piggott of the BBC, who I do think tried today to be balanced, said this was rare. Across all Catholic Ordinations, true, but when married men are Ordained as Catholic priests, this is the norm – the Church signalling that such Ordinations and the wives of those Ordained are not embarrassments to be hidden, even if they require a dispensation from the rule of the Latin Rite.

The Ordinations were greeted, as in St Peter’s, with applause. We applauded again at the end of Mass at Archbishop Nichols’ invitation, and as Frs John, Andrew and Keith processed out. It was an emotional occasion. I saw one Anglican priest in clericals weep as the final hymn began, for joy or because he had realised that the Anglo-Catholic game is up in the CofE, who knows.

Andrew Burnham ordained me as an Anglican deacon and priest and to see him prostrate before the Altar and to hear him at the Altar in Westminster Cathedral were profoundly moving. I hope that at some stage in the next few years I will join him in the Catholic priesthood – but that is not for me or him to decide.

Like many others, I saw in today’s Mass of Ordination the accomplishment of what many of us worked for a long time in the CofE. Truth be told, we could never have accomplished it in the CofE for all the sincerity of our then efforts. The CofE is and always has been liberal and protestant. The Holy Spirit has called to those within it, and some over its four centuries have responded to His call and journeyed to the Church. It should be the sincere prayer of us all who are already Catholics that the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham brings to the Church as many Anglicans as is possible in the short term, and in the long term brings the whole of Anglicanism home, relieved of its liberal and protestant burdens and restored to Truth.

Mass was followed by more meetings on the plaza and then lunch with Jeffrey Steel, the Farrow family and three seminarians, two of whom are former Anglicans. We began our meal with a toast to ‘The Ordinariate’.

Tomorrow to Oxford for Fr Andrew Burnham’s first Mass as a Catholic priest.

God is good.

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First Educators

Posted on January 8, 2011 by actuosaparticipatio

At a recent Angelus address, the Holy Father said (full text):

‘Dear brothers and sisters, I ask you to be strong in love and to contemplate with humility the mystery of Christmas that continues to speak to the heart and to become a school of family and fraternal life. The motherly gaze of the Virgin Mary, the loving protection of St. Joseph and the sweet presence of the Baby Jesus are a clear image of what every Christian family must be: an authentic sanctuary of fidelity, respect and understanding in which faith is passed on, hope is strengthened and love is kindled.’

He encouraged families to live their Christian vocations with ‘renewed enthusiasm, as genuine servants of the love that welcomes, accompanies and protects life,’ and to:

‘Make your home a real nursery of virtues and a serene and luminous place of trust, in which, guided by God’s grace, it is possible to discern wisely the call of the Lord who continues to invite people to follow him.’

How great – and truth be told – horrific is the contrast with the present campaign by the US Planned Parenthood organization to recruit parents in the sexualization of their very young children, as part of which it states: ‘We need to give babies a sense of themselves, their sexuality, and their bodies from birth.’

Whatever the extent has been of abuse of children by individual Catholics – and no single case can be excused, the Catholic Church herself has never sought to promote the context for abuse, as Planned Parenthood seems intent to do.

In all but exceptional circumstances, parents are the first and best educators of their children in matters of sex and relationships, not schools or other public / secular bodies. Whenever an attempt is made to alienate parents and children in this foundational relationship, or an attempt is made to pervert that relationship – as in the case of Planned Parenthood’s campaign and in the former British New Labour government’s Children Schools and Families legislation – parents and the Church must be active in their opposition.

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actuosa participatio

Posted on January 7, 2011 by actuosaparticipatio

My name is Giles Pinnock. I am a former Anglican clergyman and a recent (November 2010) Convert to the Catholic Church. As an Anglican, and for a short time as a Catholic, I blogged as onetimothyfour. That blog became the journal of my journey home to the Catholic Church; there is nothing (or very little) about what I wrote there that I would regret, except where I on occasion became overly personalized, a little bitter and fixated on the politics of the Anglicanism from which I was departing.

The title of this blog – actuosa participatio - is deliberately chosen, and not just because it is a bit of nice-sounding ecclesiastical Latin. On what the Second Vatican Council meant by being  ‘actively participant’, liturgically and otherwise, turns much that is very significant – and even if I were to try to avoid the discussion, even dispute, that surrounds it, I would fail.

Secular and ecclesiastical politics will be here, as will a bit of art and culture, because the Catholic Faith must be lived in the public square and cannot be a mere intellectual exercise constrained within the limits of human reason, but I will try to ensure that they don’t predominate. Liturgy will be here because what we do liturgically should express what Catholics believe as members of the Church. Commitment to the sanctity of all human life, especially at its most defenceless – and at its apparently most useless – will certainly be here.

But I have chosen actuosa participatio specifically because this blog, for whatever else appears here, is intended to be a journal of how I come to be actively participant in the business of my Salvation as a Catholic husband and father.

A cradle-Catholic friend said to me some time ago when I told him I was thinking of becoming a Catholic: ‘Giles, I shall be becoming a Catholic at least until the day I die.’ Like him, I am very conscious of being work in progress, and I pray I shall never lose the sense that the point of becoming Catholic is a gradual and incremental progress towards perfection in Christ, conscious always that however far I have got, there is far further to go than can be achieved by my own efforts.

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