Francis makes key amendment giving Ordinariates important role in new evangelisation - Vatican Insider

Francis has added a new paragraph to the Complementary Norms which govern the life of the Personal Ordinariates, expanding membership even to non-Anglicans

ANDREA TORNIELLI vatican city
The news was announced on the official website of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, set up by Benedict XVI under the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus. The Apostolic Constitution was published in November 2009 to encourage Anglican clergy, faithful and parishes that were not in agreement with the liberal changes made over the past decades, to enter into communion with the Catholic Church once more. Damian Thompson, editor of Telegraph Blogs also published an article on the subject in his own blog.

Last 31 May, Pope Francis made an important modification to article 5 of the Complementary Norms, “to make clear the contribution of the Personal Ordinariates in the work of the New Evangelisation,” the website of the Personal Ordinariate of Our lady of Walshingham says. 

The text that was added reads: “A person who has been baptised in the Catholic Church but who has not completed the Sacraments of Initiation, and subsequently returns to the faith and practice of the Church as a result of the evangelising mission of the Ordinariate, may be admitted to membership in the Ordinariate and receive the Sacrament of Confirmation or the Sacrament of the Eucharist or both.”
          
The accompanying comment explains that the new paragraph “confirms the place of the Personal Ordinariates within the mission of the wider Catholic Church, not simply as a jurisdiction for those from the Anglican tradition, but as a contributor to the urgent work of the New Evangelisation.”

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - which prepared the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus under the guidance of Benedict XVI and the Congregation’s former Prefect William Levada – remarked that the criterion for admission to the Ordinariate was incomplete Christian initiation, meaning Catholics cannot become members “for purely subjective motives or personal preference.”

This shows a clear aim to increase commitment to the New Evangelisation, without altering the structure of the Apostolic Constitution and the Complementary Norms. From now on, whoever discovers their Christian faith again having not completed the Sacraments of Initiation as children, will be able to continue their experience alongside the people who helped them in the re-discovery of their faith. Even if someone was baptised in the Catholic Church and was therefore a member of it. But Ordinariates are not an alternative for Catholics who have certain liturgical and pastoral preferences: they were and still are a clearly-defined means for Anglican faithful to enter into communion with the Roman Catholic Church.

Pope Francis proposes a multipolar vision of Christianity - Vatican Insider

The Director, Fr Mark Woodruff, writes in our December Newsletter:

The Pope concluded, "Unity is on the one hand the fruit of faith and, on the other, a means - almost a prerequisite - for an increasingly credible proclamation of the faith to those who do not yet know the Saviour or who, while having received the proclamation of the Gospel, have almost forgotten this valuable gift. True ecumenism, recognising the primacy of divine action, demands above all patience, humility, and abandonment to the will of the Lord. In the final analysis, ecumenism and new evangelisation both require the dynamism of conversion, understood as the sincere desire to follow Christ and to fully adhere to the will of the Father".

The full text in English is here on the Vatican website.

Scott Anderson, for many years vicar of St Andrew's, Willesden Green, and now a member of the South London Ordinariate Group, has written a thoughtful piece in the Catholic Herald on the useful role the Ordinariate can play in the Pope's programme of a New Evangelisation.

Although a sub-editor has given his words the trouble-making title "Ex-Anglicans are eager to lead others across the Tiber," this is not what he is talking about. The provision of Ordinariates for groups of Anglicans is a pastoral response, not poaching. Poaching the members of other Christian churches and uniatism have been repeatedly repudiated by the Catholic Church for a century, especially in the light of the teaching of Vatican II, as not just an offence to charity but destructive to the trust and hope needed for reconciliation. Poaching is a tactic used by a small number of unrepresentative Pentecostalist and extreme Protestant churches that have more in common with extreme sects and a loose hold on orthodox Scriptural theology. No matter how hard people convince themselves that fishing in other churches' ponds is mission, it is lazy. It is a waste of energies that could have been devoted to those who had never before had any encounter with the living Christ in his people, or who had not realised that it was Christ they were encountering in their society and culture, or who had forgotten an encounter that had once meant something to them.

Scott Anderson makes a useful point. The size of the Ordinariate groups in England is small and here lies their present value. It would waste that value - as some commentators, including bishops and even some Ordinariate priests, hope - if they are constrained to "integrate" or "assimilate" with their host parishes and dioceses. For one thing, this is expressly deprecated in Anglicanorum Coetibus. Yet people are at liberty to go and particpate where they like; and by the same token diocesan Catholic lay faithful may find they gravitate to Ordinariate groups and feel a sense of belonging and collobaration there: the Spirit blows where it is inclined to. Only last week I met a Caribbean Latin Catholic who regularly attends the Divine Liturgy at the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral - a different rite in a different language, but a place and a community where instinctively she recognises her point of communion with the Church. Thus there is space in the Universal Church for everyone to follow the course by which they are drawn into the Kingdom. The Ordinariate, even in its embryonic state, is one of the vital new spaces like some of the new ecclesial movements that have emerged in our own times and conditions in society, for people to respond to as the "point of communion" when no others quite work. This is an evangelistic tool we would lose if the Ordinariate's groups were all assimilated with geographical parishes. All clergy know that there are faithful Catholics in our parishes who do not attend our church - they go to the Cathedral, or other churches in central London, or to a monastery or a religious house, or a chaplaincy, or somewhere other than where they live, or somewhere they can be anonymous. There is no reason why Ordinariate groups cannot serve, alongside the extensive variety of Catholic liturgical and pastoral life that is already there, as new places for people to belong to the Catholic Church in a way they could not before. Anderson likens the Ordinariate's groups to "church plants," small established bodies whose mission is to go where either there is no readily visible church, or there are rising new elements of society which do not identify with the existing church provision. They are meant to be supplementary to what the Church and its pastors are already doing, corroborating it, not compete against it. They are meant to reach the parts that others cannot reach.

To be honest, "church plants" in Anglican dioceses have a mixed record. Some faithful congregations (often High Church ones) with decades of solid pastoral efforts and a valued presence in their local communities, even when this does not translate into numbers on Sundays, have felt their struggles undermined and the effectiveness of their witness openly criticised by the arrival of a young, lively and often well-funded new worshipping church on their doorstep. They complain that their fortunes may have been different if the same investment and confidence had been placed in them as in the new ventures. They also say that the new arrivals do not seem interested in collaborating and sharing resources. Doubtless people thought the same of the old Anglo-Catholic mission churches of a century ago and more. On the other hand, parishes which no longer fulfil their earlier mission, because the local population has changed or even disappeared, have been revived by the planting of "Fresh Expressions" of the Church of Christ. Thus new groups have come in and transformed a church otherwise in decline. In the Catholic world, one can cite the entrusting of St Charles Borromeo, on Ogle Street, to meet the needs of the Neo-Catechumenal Way; the exciting restoration of St Patrick's, in Soho Square, as a centre for evangelisation in central London; and the devotion of SS. Gervais and Protais in Paris to the Jerusalem Community. Is the Ordinariate also a "fresh expression", able to respond to new needs, opportunities and gaps in the Church's mission?

If it is not, I cannot see what other purpose it serves, beyond a merely temporary means of transitioning numbers of Anglican clergy and faithful into the Catholic Church. Everyone agrees that this is not ecumenism, neither mission, nor respectful of the unique heritage and identity that God has given his Church through the Anglican tradition. That is why the Apostolic Constitution notes the enduring significance of Anglican patrimony as needed by and for the Catholic Church as a whole. For ecclesiological purposes, the Catholic Church desires the Anglicans' patrimony for being better at realising the Universal Church in all its bearings (cf the Decree on Ecumenism, Vatican II). For practical and ecumenical purposes, it seeks it for relating better to the Anglican Communion in the search for complete restoration of unity (inevitable, because it is the prayer of Christ). For evangelistic purposes, it wants it for extending the way it can relate to the multi-faceted cultures, shapes of society and networks through which people live and belong in the present age - and win them for Christ and his Kingdom. Clearly we need as many different evangelisations, structures that attract people's capacity for belonging, and spiritualities for this very new "old Europe" as the Church has inventively developed in the past.

Anderson cites the example of his own South London Ordinariate Group. It seems to have found a home in the parish of the Precious Blood, once a hive of local pastoral and missionary activity in the hands of the Salvatorians, and now depopulated with a very different cultural and social milieu grown up around it. The group has been welcomed alongside the existing parishioners as an invigorating new presence. Can Precious Blood, which might otherwise have faced amalgamation or closure liek many other inner-city churches, serve as a beacon of the distinctive mission that the Ordinariate alone can add to that of the wider Catholic community, and that the Catholic Church as a whole can thus bring to society in a new phase? Can it be a place where we can find the eagerly awaited Anglican Use of the Roman Rite, as a fresh liturgical expression of our Catholic Church's dialogue with the culture, public life and society in which we find ourselves? Can it be a place where, like the Salvatorians up until the present, the Ordinariate priests and people can consolidate their mission to draw people to an encounter with "Christ in his Mysteries" and his people? After all, such sacramental and liturgical evangelism was a driving impulse in classic Anglo-Catholicism at its finest.

One of the appealing perspectives shared by Monseigneur Keith Newton at various ordinations has been the hope shared by him and his clergy to be of service to the priests and people in the dioceses and parishes alongside which they serve. 120 new priests and deacons in 18 months are a considerable gift that God has called into the Catholic Church, on top of the 500 or more new Catholic priests who have trodden a similar path in the two decades before, to say nothing of many thousands of the lay faithful. It would be a shame, however, to use this gift in a short term way that plugs holes for which dioceses need to form a longer term strategy, or that solves the immediate problem of where to house younger clergy with families and give them jobs and sustainable incomes. Both are important; but in the medium to long terms, if the mission of the Ordinariate as a God-given and vital component in our efforts at the New Evangelisation is to play its full part, we need to be able to locate the Ordinariate in worshipping communities, not just as an also-ran or a chaplaincy provision, but as a reality in its own right, where we can tune into its religious and cultural language, allow its distinctive liturgical voice to be heard, and appreciate the special orientation of its proclamation of the Catholic Faith that other Catholics may lack, but which can strengthen ours, as much as ours strengthens theirs.

Scott Anderson calls for dioceses and religious orders to take the brave step of looking at their parishes where there is either a pattern of declining use or under-use, or else an obvious turning point a change in mission and direction has arrived. Could it be, he wonders, that such churches be entrusted to the priests and people of the Ordinariate for a "fresh expression" towards the New Evangelisation of Old Europe, like parishes and mission churches were earlier entrusted to religious orders? Doubtless this is more easily said than done. It is not obvious that such places exist near where the present batch of groups are, or vice versa. And there will be communities of Catholics less disposed to embracing an Ordinariate identity, or an Anglican patrimony that is not their own. All that we are saying is that there is common cause to be made here - and some imaginative opportunities not to be missed.

The 2010 Special Edition of the Messenger, Anglicans & Catholics in Communion: Patrimony, Unity, Mission, is now available for download. Visit the dedicated page from the menu above to download the available papers.

Here is the second part of the presentation of slides featuring displays from the Exhibition at the Vatican Museums in 2002 and subsequently in Norwich Cathedral on the shared history of Anglicanism and the Catholic Church, and their common mission in the England of the 21st century.

At the General Audience on Wednesday, 18 January 2012:

Dear brothers and sisters,
Today marks the beginning of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, which for more than a century has been celebrated by Christians of all Churches and ecclesial Communities, in order to invoke that extraordinary gift for which the Lord Jesus Himself prayed during the Last Supper, before His Passion: “that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me” (John 17:21). The practice of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity was introduced in 1908 by Father Paul Wattson, founder of an Anglican religious community that subsequently entered the Catholic Church. The initiative received the blessing of Pope St. Pius X and was then promoted by Pope Benedict XV, who encouraged its celebration throughout the Church with the Brief, Romanorum Pontificum, promulgated Feb. 25, 1916.

The octave of prayer was developed and perfected in the 1930s by Abbé Paul Couturier of Lyon, who promoted prayer “for the unity of the Church as Christ wills, and in accordance with the instruments He wills.” In his later writings, Abbé Couturier sees this Week as a way of allowing the prayer of Christ to “enter into and penetrate the entire Christian Body”; it must grow until it becomes “an immense, unanimous cry of the whole People of God” who ask God for this great gift. And it is precisely during the Week of Christian Unity that the impetus given by the Second Vatican Council toward seeking full communion among all of Christ’s disciples, each year finds one of its most efficacious expressions. This spiritual gathering, which unites Christians of all traditions, increases our awareness of the fact that the unity to which we tend will not only be the result of our efforts, but will rather be a gift received from above, a gift for which we must constantly pray.

Each year, the booklets for the Week of Prayer are prepared by an ecumenical group from a different region of the world. I would like to pause to consider this point. This year, the texts were proposed by a mixed group comprised of representatives of the Catholic Church and of the Polish Ecumenical Council, which includes the country’s various Churches and ecclesial Communities. The documentation was then reviewed by a committee made up of members of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity and of the Faith and Order Commission of the Council of Churches. This work, carried out together in two stages, is also a sign of the desire for unity that animates Christians, and of the awareness that prayer is the primary way of attaining full communion, since it is in being united with the Lord that we move toward unity.

The theme of the Week this year - as we heard - is taken from the First Letter to the Corinthians: “We Will All Be Changed By the Victory of Our Lord Jesus Christ” - His victory will transform us. And this theme was suggested by the large ecumenical Polish group I just mentioned, which - in reflecting on their own experience as a nation -- wanted to underscore how strong a support the Christian faith is in the midst of trial and upheaval, like those that have characterized Poland’s history. After ample discussion, a theme was chosen that focuses on the transforming power of faith in Christ, particularly in light of the importance it has for our prayer for the visible unity of Christ’s Body, the Church. This reflection was inspired by the words of St. Paul who, addressing himself to the Church of Corinth, speaks about the perishable nature of what belongs to our present life - which is also marked by the experience of the “defeat” that comes from sin and death - compared to what brings us Christ’s victory over sin and death in His paschal mystery.

The particular history of the Polish nation, which knew times of democratic coexistence and of religious liberty - as in the 16th century - has been marked in recent centuries by invasions and defeat, but also by the constant struggle against oppression and by the thirst for freedom. All of this led the ecumenical group to reflect more deeply on the true meaning of “victory” - what is victory? - and “defeat.” Compared with “victory” understood in terms of triumphalism, Christ suggests to us a very different way, one that does not pass by way of force and power. Indeed, He affirms: “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all” (Mark 9:35). Christ speaks of a victory through suffering love, through mutual service, help, new hope and concrete comfort given to the least, to the forgotten, to those who are rejected. For all Christians, the highest expression of this humble service is Jesus Christ Himself - the total gift He makes of Himself, the victory of His love over death on the Cross, which shines in the light of Easter morning.

We can take part in this transforming “victory” if we allow ourselves to be transformed by God - but only if we work for the conversion of our lives, and if this transformation leads to conversion. This is the reason why the Polish ecumenical group considered particularly fitting for their own reflection the words of St. Paul: “We will all be changed by the victory of Christ, Our Lord” (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:51-58).

The full and visible unity of Christians for which we long demands that we allow ourselves to be ever more perfectly transformed and conformed to the image of Christ. The unity for which we pray requires interior conversion, both communal and personal. It is not simply a matter of kindness and cooperation; above all, we must strengthen our faith in God, in the God of Jesus Christ, who has spoken to us and who made Himself one of us; we must enter into new life in Christ, which is our true and definitive victory; we must open ourselves to one another, cultivating all the elements of that unity that God has preserved for us and gives to us ever anew; we must feel the urgency of bearing witness before the men of our times to the living God, who made Himself known in Christ.

The Second Vatican Council put the ecumenical pursuit at the center of the Church’s life and work: “The Sacred Council exhorts all the Catholic faithful to recognize the signs of the times and to take an active and intelligent part in the work of ecumenism” (Unitatis redintegratio, 4). Blessed John Paul II stressed the essential nature of this commitment, saying: “This unity, which the Lord has bestowed on his Church and in which he wishes to embrace all people, is not something added on, but stands at the very heart of Christ’s mission. Nor is it some secondary attribute of the community of his disciples. Rather, it belongs to the very essence of this community (Ut unum sint, 9). The ecumenical task is therefore a responsibility of the whole Church and of all the baptized, who must make the partial, already existing communion between Christians grow into full communion in truth and charity. Therefore, prayer for unity is not limited to this Week of Prayer but rather must become an integral part of our prayer, of the life of prayer of all Christians, in every place and in every time, especially when people of different traditions meet and work together for the victory, in Christ, over all that is sin, evil, injustice, and that violates human dignity.

From the time the ecumenical movement was born over a century ago, there has always been a clear recognition of the fact that the lack of unity among Christians prevents the Gospel from being more effectively proclaimed, since it jeopardizes our credibility. How can we give a convincing witness if we are divided? Certainly, as regards the fundamental truths of the faith, much more unites us than divides us. But divisions remain, and they concern even various practical and ethical questions - causing confusion and distrust, and weakening our ability to hand on Christ’s saving Word. In this regard, we do well to remember the words of Blessed John Paul II, who in the Encyclical Ut unum sint, speaks of the damage caused to Christian witness and to the proclamation of the Gospel by the lack of unity (cf. no. 98,99). This is a great challenge for the new evangelization, which can be more fruitful if all Christians together announce the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and give a common response to the spiritual thirst of our times.

The Church’s journey, like that of peoples’, is in the hands of the Risen Christ, who is victorious over the death and injustice that He bore and suffered on behalf of all mankind. He makes us sharers in His victory. Only He is capable of transforming us and making us - from weak and hesitant men - into strong and courageous people working for good. Only He can save us from the negative consequences of our divisions. Dear brothers and sisters, I invite everyone to be more intensely united in prayer during this Week for Unity, so that common witness, solidarity and collaboration may grow among Christians, as we await the glorious day when together we may profess the faith handed down by the Apostles, and together celebrate the Sacraments of our transformation in Christ.

By his teaching, his example and his paschal mystery, the Lord has shown us the way to a victory obtained not by power, but by love and concern for those in need. Faith in Christ and interior conversion, both individual and communal, must constantly accompany our prayer for Christian unity. During this Week of Prayer, let us ask the Lord in a particular way to strengthen the faith of all Christians, to change our hearts and to enable us to bear united witness to the Gospel. In this way we will contribute to the new evangelization and respond ever more fully to the spiritual hunger of the men and women of our time.

© Copyright 2012 - Libreria Editrice Vaticana

Fr Mark Woodruff writes:

Just after the New Year, I went to the Cotswolds to visit a retired evangelical Anglican archdeacon friend of mine. Without hesitation I would say that he is western Catholic, a true churchman, to his finger tips. The retreats for priests he used to give were pearls of the Wisdom of the Scriptures and the Church’s Tradition he had received in the Church of England and was passing on to those who had ears to hear. One of the things that has united the Anglican archdeacon and the Catholic priest, grateful for his own roots and formation in the Church of England, is our love for the rites of the Book of Common Prayer, with its daily rhythm of Morning and Evening Prayer, the pastoral offices and the “noble simplicity” of its Office of Holy Communion. Once, he asked Graham Leonard, the retired bishop of London, whether there was anything he regretted about becoming a Roman Catholic. “I don’t regret anything for a single minute; but the one thing I really do miss is Evensong. We have nothing quite like it.” My archdeacon friend said he had always regarded Evensong as a perfect tool for pastoral mission, with its near perfect structure of reverent beauty, music, preaching, Scriptures and prayer, for drawing in those who were moved to worship but not yet ready for the sacramental life. “The Catholic Church should really give some thought to adopting Anglican Evensong,“ he said. “But it has!” I replied; “and I am going to Choral Evensong as a service fully of the Catholic Church next weekend.” He was as moved as I was to think that this peerless liturgy, increasingly difficult to find even in Anglican parishes, has been embraced as a treasure by the Catholic Church from the Anglican tradition, as a foretaste of the unity of all Christendom in which all our churches will own the gifts given to each other for the Universal Church.


18 years ago I gave away my surplices, scarves and hood to friends, as I prepared to enter into the fullness ofcommunion in the Catholic Church. I was one of many who was told by Cardinal Hume to “bring your Anglicanism with you”; but there were some aspects of it that lamentably I was leaving behind - “friends I have loved long since and lost awhile,” you might say. One of these was classic Anglican worship. From now on, I participated in it as an ecumenical guest. It was my tradition, yet it wasn’t. As a former Anglican cathedral precentor, this was something I loved inside out, but could never really contribute to or participate in from my place within Christ’s Church as a Catholic. Until now.


On Sunday, I joined over a dozen priests, his excellency the Ordinary of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, Bishop Peter Elliot of Melbourne, Australia, the Abbot and several of the brethren of Farnborough, a dozen Knights of Malta and a congregation of hundreds for Solemn Evensong at the Westminster diocese’s Church of St James, Spanish Place in London to give thanks for the first year of life of the Ordinariate of our Lady of Walsingham. St James’ was the perfect setting. It may have a venerable history as the Chapel of the Embassy of Spain in origin; but it is also a neo-Gothic English church in the Early English style (with some transitional-Norman features) and you could be forgiven for thinking you were in a corner of Westminster Abbey, Salisbury Cathedral or Christ Church, Dublin. It felt like this was Anglican Evensong on home territory.

 
As the liturgy progressed, a profound sense visited me, that something that I had laid down for the sake of Catholic communion was being restored to me. It took me back to my teenage membership of the choir at St Paul’s Marton in Lancashire, which somehow integrated a Roman-oriented feel to the conduct of worship with the traditional services and music of the Church of England – Ireland in F, and Stanford in B flat (under the gently but impassioned direction of Mr Ray Fishwick).I had suggested to Fr Christopher Pearson of the Ordinariate, who organised the celebration, that to be truly Anglican he and his brethren should wear surplice, scarf and hood. Of course, not many of them had either possessed or used this vesture in their Anglican days. So, here we were, nearly forty years later, processing into Evensong in cassock and cotta to the strains of Anglican choral music, just like Fr John Cayton and Fr Maurice Haigh in Marton of yore. Of course this was Solemn Evensong and it struck me how like in dignity and simplicity the ceremony was when I was a student at the College of the Resurrection at Mirfield. I was deeply inspired; I knew every word by heart and every note of the music, down to the harmony of the chants and hymns. Afterwards, speaking to seasoned Catholics, to generous Anglican friends who had come specially - in support and out of affinity – and to many newly made friends among the faithful and clergy of the Ordinariate, we discussed time and again the point that had dawned on us: that there was nothing distinctive of Anglicanism that could not be lived in communion with the Catholic Church as it now is. Nothing that is true of the classic Anglican tradition, its orthodox teaching and its liturgical and spiritual treasury, requires separation for protecting its integrity or principles.


Prior to Evensong, the organist, Iestyn Evans, played Herbert Howells’ Psalm Prelude Set One, Number One (opus 32). This is perhaps the most famous, soul-searching and best loved of his organ pieces. Howells’ music for the organ and the services of the Anglican Church has such a distinctive voice that, beyond the cornerstone laid by the music of Charles Villiers Stanford, it has set the tone for what we now instinctively recognise as the characteristic style of Anglican liturgical singing and organ improvisation. He was a student of Stanford, Hubert Parry and Charles Wood at the Royal College of Music, following earlier training under Herbert Brewer at Gloucester Cathedral. It is a nice coincidence that one of his earliest pieces of liturgical music, the Mass in the Dorian Mode, was first performed at Westminster Cathedral soon after he arrived at the College, thanks to the interest of Richard Runciman Terry, the cathedral’s great first director of music. The first set of Psalm Preludes dates from 1915-16; and the first piece especially betrays the profound effect on him of Vaughan Williams and his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis that had so moved him at the 1910 Three Choirs Festival. Dating from the First World War, each Psalm Prelude in this set, arguably, should be considered alongside the war poets, with the events at Ypres, Gallipoli and Verdun. Set One, Number One is a meditation on Psalm 34.6: This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles.


Then came George Thalben-Ball’s Elegy. Thalben Ball was a fellow student of Howells’, a prodigious pianist, who gave the first English performance of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto at the Royal College of Music at the age of 19. He became organist of the Temple Church, taking its choir to international fame with the recording of Mendelssohn’s Hear my Prayer and its solo, O for the wings of a dove. The BBC’s daily service on the radio during the Second World War came from the Temple and the Elegy began as an improvisation when the service ended a few minutes earlier than expected one day. It was an immediate “hit” with the public.


Then the procession of the Ordinary and other clergy made its way into church with Sir Hubert Parry’s Introit for the Coronation of King Edward VII in 1902, I was glad when they said unto me, We will go into the house of the Lord (Psalm 122, Laetatus sum). The striking introduction and the interplay of choirs and organ or brass fanfares were actually written for a new version, for the coronation of King George V. Parry’s original was more reverential in tone. The rewritten piece, however, has been used time and again to match national and local services of joyful celebration ever since. It is known to be a great favourite of the Prince of Wales’, who urged it be used for the Bridal Procession at the marriage of his son, now HRH the Duke of Cambridge, to Kate Middleton.


The responses (which are vestiges of the recitation of Psalm 51 (the Miserere) at a dawn vigil and Psalm 70 (Deus in adiutorium) as an introductory psalm at offices) were sung to the setting by Bernard Rose written for Magdalen College, Oxford (which will figure again later). Since publication in 1961, their popularity has never waned. Strangely, they were intoned by a member of the choir, not the Officiant or another precenting priest.


Psalms 114 (In exitu Israel) and 115 (Non nobis, Domine) followed, sung exquisitely to familiar Anglican chants. The choice was a perfect match for the words, as the writer cannot remember which chant was used: possibly the Reverend Sir Frederick Gore Ouseley’s double chant in A flat. If so, Ouseley is an embodiment of the nineteenth century nineteenth century English church music and Anglo-Catholic patrimony. A baronet, he was ordained to serve as curate at St Paul’s, Knightsbridge, and its foundation to exemplify the ideals of the Tractarian and Ritualist revival, St Barnabas’, Pimlico. He rose to be Professor of Music at Oxford and founded St Michael’s College, Tenbury Wells, his school for the renewal and revival of English choral church music. His chants and other settings of the Anglican liturgy were thus written to bring that revival about. His most famous student and disciple was Sir John Stainer, his organist at St Michael’s for a while, who not only eventually succeeded him as Professor of Music, but also raised standards in cathedral worship from his influential posts as organist at Magdalen College, Oxford and then at St Paul’s Cathedral. His researches into early music began to establish in English liturgy the treasures of Tudor composers, unheard for centuries. He was also a champion of the adaptation and revival of plainsong in Anglican worship. Thus he was at the heart of a movement, led from the cathedrals he influenced, to bring high aspirations even into small parishes for excellent choral leadership of psalm-singing, hymns and anthems.


In a slight departure from the order of Evensong, the lessons were introduced and ended in the same way as in the new Roman Missal (“A reading from….” and “The Word of the Lord: Thanks be to God”). This is not the custom even at Roman rite Vespers or Readings. Let us hope that at future Evensongs the classic and familiar forms will be allowed their rhythms: “Here beginneth the seventh verse of the fifteenth chapter of the Book Deuteronomy” and “Here endeth the First Lesson.” The second lesson was from II Thessalonians 2. 13-14.


Although in Anglicanism, both in the Catholic tradition and in the Cathedrals, it can be customary to sing an office hymn after the first lesson and before the Magnificat (a tradition consolidated with the publication of the English Hymnal in 1906, which gave a complete set for Morning and Evening Prayer, mostly translated by John Mason Neale and set to the Sarum form of the tunes), this practice was not followed at St James’, even though it was a Solemn Evensong and incense was to be prepared for the Ordinary to cense the altar. Monsignor Newton was attended throughout by two deacons, one transitional and the other permanent, each vested in dalmatics.


The canticles were to a setting by Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, from the magnificent Service in C from 1909. This is Irish Anglican patrimony. A Dubliner, he studied at Cambridge, Leipzig and Berlin. His orchestral music is strongly influenced by his German experience, and owes a debt especially to Brahms. His attitude to the Anglican Church to which he belonged, in comparing it to the Lutheran churches he encountered in Saxony and Prussia, would have been shared with many of his ordinary Anglican contemporaries in the second half of the nineteenth century: that the Church of England was a Protestant Church alongside and essentially like those of Germany. He had no Anglo-Catholic inclinations, but may have seen the need for Anglican liturgy to aspire to the musical standards and artistic traditions so vigorous historically in the Lutheran church-world. This interplay with the culture of fine Protestant sacred music was a factor in the creativity of some of the Renaissance and Baroque Catholic composers (as we have noted before); so it is interesting to note the musical absorbency of Anglicanism, too, in the century of the rediscovery of Bach’s music, and the long forgotten works of the first composers for the English liturgy. The craftsmanship of Stanford’s writing marked a turning point in the English tradition of church music and set high new standards. His pupils included Gustav Holst, Herbert Howells and Ralph Vaughan Williams; their calibre may have surpassed their master’s, but there is no doubt as to the debt they owe him for the skills he passed on to them. And even with their very different compositional styles and inspirations, it is still Stanford whose music seems to provide the familiar terra firma on which other forms of sacred Anglican church music, some earlier and some later, can stand and excel.


After the Third Collect, the rite of Evensong as authorised for use in the Ordinariate revealed a small detail that showed the effect of fullness of communion in the Catholic Church: as it is a custom to commemorate the dead at Vespers, the Ordinary greeted all the faithful and said, “May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.”


The anthem was Henry Balfour Gardiner’s lush Evening Hymn. This great favourite is one of the few compositions of his that survive. He was highly self-critical, probably destroying much of his own work while generously promoting that of others, both financially and as a conductor. Gustav Holst and Frederick Delius owed much to this man’s benefaction. Evening Hymn is really a sumptuous setting of the Compline hymn, Te lucis ante terminum and comes from the period he was teaching music at Winchester College.


The Ordinary’s glad and thoughtful sermon, a reflection on Newman’s thinking as he responded to the call of God to become a Catholic, and ending with an act of trust in God for the future and what may be called of the Ordinariate, may be found on the Ordinariate website.


The hymns – and their tunes - were all chosen by Mgr Newton himself. Thus Newman’s Praise to the Holiest in the height from the Dream of Gerontius was sung to Sir Arthur Somervell’s Chorus Angelorum. See our earlier post on this tune.


Ready for the Procession of the Blessed Sacrament, the choir sang O Salutaris Hostia by Edward Elgar. For a century and more, Anglican Catholics took devotion to the Blessed Sacrament to their heart. By them it was sung in English long before Roman Catholics followed suit, and by them it was maintained long after it practically disappeared from many Catholic parishes. So Benediction was in English, but O Salutaris and Tantum Ergo were in Latin. Elgar’s Catholic church music is remarkable because it belongs to the tradition of English Cathedral church music, for which he also wrote. Once again, here we see, long before the Decree on Ecumenism and Ut Unum Sint, an exchange of treasures and gifts, or at least giftedness, between the Anglican and Catholic churches. By the same token, both motets form part of the regular repertoire of Anglican choral foundations – far from just being Latin and Roman Catholic they have been warmly embraced as part of the Anglican patrimony for years. Tantum ergo was to the setting by Déodat de Séverac, the Provençal composer of operas and piano music, the promise of whose mature, melodic style was cut short at 49 in 1921.


The hymns for the Procession of the Blessed Sacrament, at which the Knights of Malta provided an escort and over which they carried the canopy, began with William Chadderton Dix’s Alleluia, sing to Jesus. Many of Dix’s hymns were conceived during a time of great depression, following a serious illness of which he almost died aged 29. It is thus a hymn of the deepest hope and confidence, and the phrases, “not as orphans are we left in sorrow now,” “shall our hearts forget his promise, “I am with you evermore?”” and “Earth’s Redeemer, plead for me” are thus especially poignant. But it did not come to public attention until publication in 1867, after which it was immediately snapped up for inclusion in the Anglo-Catholic Hymns Ancient and Modern as an Ascensiontide and Communion hymn. The tune, Hyfrydol, was by Dix’s mid-nineteenth century contemporary Rowland H. Prichard. The wedding of the verses and the perfect tune for them seems not to have come about until the inspired editing of the music of the English Hymnal in 1906 by Ralph Vaughan Williams, who rearranged the harmonies in the form familiar to most choirs today.


The second hymn was George Hugh Bourne’s Lord, enthroned in heavenly splendour from 1874. This is another Ascensiontide Communion hymn, perfectly fitting a Procession of the Blessed Sacrament into the Holy of Holies, the sanctuary. Vaughan Williams set this to another Welsh tune of rare and powerful melody in G minor, Bryn Calfaria; but most people prefer a Victorian tune in a major key; so at Evensong we followed the Ancient and Modern tradition and used Sir George Clement Martin’s St Helena from 1889. Martin followed Stainer as organist of St Paul’s Cathedral. He wrote the Te Deum that was sung on the steps of St Paul’s for the famous Diamond Jubilee open air service, celebrating Queen Victoria’s 60 years on the throne. 


After a prayer for the Pope, we joined in saying before the Blessed Sacrament exposed the beautiful General Thanksgiving from the Book of Common Prayer. Generations of Anglican confirmation candidates had to know this, as well as the Commandments and the Creed, by heart. It was written not by Cranmer in the sixteenth century, but in 1661 by Edward Reynolds, a gentle Puritan, who had succeeded John Donne as Preacher at Lincoln’s Inn and later submitted to what looked like the final Presbyterian settlement of the Cromwellian Commonwealth. Yet he did not accept Presbyterianism as the sole doctrine or system to the exclusion of others, and did not differ from the teaching and order of the Church of England, provided it might rightly be governed. He believed, for instance, that bishops were acceptable as long as they were not prelates and sole rulers, but fellow-presbyters with the other ministers and governing in council with them. (This is not so dissimilar from the synodal form of governance provided by Anglicanorum Coetibus for the Ordinariates – or indeed from the spirit of Lumen Gentium!) Others were more resolute in their defence of the old order of the Church of England and lost their livings and office. Reynolds benefited from his moderation and equivocation, becoming Dean of Christ Church and Vice Chancellor of the University of Oxford, although he advocated mitigation and reason in the application of the Commonwealth Solemn League and Covenant, rather than intolerance and severity. It was his opposition to the Commonwealth’s later test of allegiance to the English state, so as finally to exclude the monarchy, that finally lost Reynolds his position of influence from the University of Oxford. He returned to his parish at Braunston and was soon given the living of St Lawrence Jewry in the City of London. With further change and uncertainty in church life, as well as the burden of an unstable constitution, sustained not, after all, by Parliament but by force of arms and dictatorship, it was Reynolds who preached before Parliament in April 1660, condemning the uncertainties and wrongs of the preceding years and calling for a settled constitution to be brought back in its old form. In May he was sent by Parliament to Breda in the Netherlands to ask King Charles II to return to England as monarch and accept a moderate form of episcopal governance in the Church. Upon the king’s Restoration, such was his renown for learning, preaching and personal holiness, Reynolds was appointed a Court preacher with nine other Presbyterian divines. On the basis of the king’s Royal Declaration calling for conciliation between the Anglican and Presbyterian parties, he accepted episcopal ordination and the see of Norwich. But his conciliatory efforts at the Savoy Conference (that had resulted from the Declaration) were to no avail; and Parliament, now solidly Anglican and in no mood for accommodating the Presbyterians, refused to back the King’s efforts at a settlement. He continued at Norwich, seeing himself as a chief presbyter among other presbyters, tireless in the relief of the poor and conciliatory to those who were now cast as Dissenters and Non-Conformists. A Puritan, he was not a Calvinist. He did not preach a narrow doctrine of election but an Evangelical proclamation of the gospel that is open to all. Of the Father, he wrote, “Adam looks on Him as a judge, and hides - the prodigal looks on Him as a father and returns”. The magnificent General Thanksgiving he wrote conveys his spirit of God’s generous love that provides freely “the means of grace and the hope of glory”. Its sense of relief at the restoration of order in society and government after years of strife, turmoil and bloodshed is expressed in blessing the Father of mercies. Its hope for unity and peace in the Church is found in the typically Puritan resolve on a simple, thankful life in God’s service and the pursuit of holiness. More or less the same sentiments were voiced by Fr Paul Couturier in the 1930s, when he called all Christians to pray that they might become united in their hearts and outdo each other in aspiring to an ever greater holiness that would inevitably bring them closer in union to Christ and thus each other. It is amazing that this prayer by a Presbyterian, Puritan, Evangelical bishop is now a prayer cherished in the Catholic Church. Perhaps Reynolds, if he had lived in the mid twentieth century would have readily recognised his own faith in the Church of Christ as it was expressed in the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church at Vatican II, Lumen Gentium. So perhaps this miracle in the lex orandi is nothing more than the natural outcome of the lex credendi we all held together all along.

Fr Mark Woodruff writes:

The last couple of years have been pointing to a new future for the English Church. First, the several jurisdictions of the Orthodox Church in Britain that are part of overseas national or regional Churches decided to live and act together. From now on, we will be talking less of the Russian, Greek, Serbian and other Orthodox Churches in this country and more of an Orthodox Church of Great Britain. Archbishop Gregorios of Thyateira and Great Britain remains the ruling bishop of the churches belonging to the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in this kingdom, but he is now to be known more widely as the President of the Assembly of Orthodox Hierarchs of Great Britain. Orthodoxy is not composed of national and provincial churches like Anglicanism and Lutheranism; it is supposed to be a single entity and thus manifest the universal Church of Christ wherever it is found – a living reality and an ecumenical objective on which it is united even now with the Catholic Church. So the new arrangements will bring its true nature and purpose to the fore. The Orthodox Church is not ethnic, or exotic: it is a local Church in Britain too, an integral part of the universal Church as we know it in these islands. Estimates are that in Britain there are half a million Eastern Christians of various backgrounds. This often disregarded body is a vast gift from God to sustain and reinvigorate the mission and service of all the Churches in this land. It is also his sign.

When the pastor for all the Churches and the servant of their unity, Pope Benedict, visited us in September 2010, he told us that the only way we can give a convincing account of the hope that lies within us is by unity – not good relations, but unity. This can be found in none other than the faith that the Church has received from the apostles. What God is painstakingly making clear in the different Orthodox Churches in Britain shows us that you do not have to abandon your identity, your traditions, your history or your ethos to be one in life and mission. There are still Greek, Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Antiochian, Arabic and other kinds of Orthodox dioceses and parishes, including a kind of English Orthodox Ordinariate – the largely ex-Anglican Antiochian Deanery of the United Kingdom. Each retains its rich and distinctive identity, the sense of family-belonging among its members, its precious cultural and liturgical traditions. But, without any threat to their integrity, they are not only in full communion between each other. They are working on how to be one body in British society, for all the world to see. As Pope Benedict said on how to achieve Christian Unity back in 1972, they are "entering more deeply into the mystery of the Church where you are, to discover that its reality is none other than one". Through them, God is showing us the road we must take to unity. There are tensions and problems and it may take many decades to achieve it. But internal Orthodox ecumenism is being determined by engaging with each other in hope, to deal with difficulties and disagreements, not by separation and estrangement. This is exactly what Pope Benedict was talking about: ecumenical progress is about plumbing the spiritual depths: getting under ecclesiastical self-interest, and settling in the Tradition that we have received.

Secondly, the black-majority and black-led Pentecostal Churches can no longer be seen simply as overseas denominations or individual congregations planted in Britain over the last half century. They form an increasingly coherent movement within the body of the Church in Britain. They are increasingly diverse. They are often serving people at the greatest risk in some of Britain’s most deprived areas, reminiscent of the zeal for service that brought practical relief and the good news of Jesus Christ by the hands of the Anglo-Catholic movement in the nineteenth century and beyond, as well as the Catholic Church in the same period. Some of these churches have their roots in the Reformed and Evangelical traditions. For other churches, the Pentecostal movement resulted in a breaking away from the Catholic Church and so there remains a strong sense of theological affinity as the search for integrating Church and Renewal in the Holy Spirit progresses. Several others have recognised their affinity with the Orthodox Church and its pronounced emphasis on the theology and operation of the Holy Spirit. Several evangelical charismatic individuals and churches have thus found their destiny in Orthodoxy. One, the Apostolic Pastoral Association, which has a strong African identity, takes inspiration from the Coptic Orthodox Church, itself from north Africa, because of its own concentration upon the apostolic faith of the Bible.

In both these families within the Church and how they are developing, the Spirit is blowing where he pleases, and dissolving the old certainties of who we are in the Body of Christ and how we belong to Him. Precisely as the former Cardinal Ratzinger once prophetically said, it is through going deeper than our denominations and encountering the single mystery of the Church.

This is the lens through which to view the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham that began to take form in January 2011. Too many people have seen this in an insular, English way as a mere swap between a choice of rival denominations. Is this what Anglo-Catholics actually believe about the Church of England being "part of" the one, holy, Catholic Church? Is that what those who are now Roman Catholics actually believe about the Catholic Church in which the entire Universal Church of Christ subsists and with which all Christians are already almost completely united by virtue of their Baptism? Of course not. For if we look at this new phenomenon in Anglophone Christianity from the point of view of the Pope and the unity of the Church that he is seeking, here is a concrete message that in the Church, whose complete unity is yet to be revealed, we will not all just have to change to Roman Catholic-"ism". The one Universal Church will integrate all kinds of gifts and providential histories that belong as gifts of the Spirit to the one Tradition and that serve the unity of our faith. In this one Church’s visible unity, there will be a Latin-rite Catholic reality enriched by all the cultures of the world; there will also be a Russian Orthodox reality, a Wesleyan Methodist reality, various realities with a proud attachment to the faith and values of the Reformation, a Baptist reality, a rich mix of Pentecostal and Charismatic realities. There will also be an Anglican reality with all the nuances and "noisy conversation" of its tradition as well as its glorious musical, liturgical and pastoral patrimony. The Pope is saying that the Catholic Church is not narrow, or that it can only conceive of absorbing the other and watering down the different. This is what some Catholics clearly want. But "united, not absorbed" was the declaration of Dom Lambert Beauduin at the Malines Conversations. Thus the Catholic Church is being urged by its supreme pastor to extend itself, imagine vast new spaces long uninhabited, and live up to realising it is called to be the manifestation of the entire universal Church itself. Of this, the Ordinariate for Catholics bearing their inheritance from the treasured Anglican patrimony is a foretaste. It is also a sign that the unity of the churches has to come out from behind great historic ecclesiastical institutions. These have their God-given purpose still, but they are the means and structure for the Church’s proclamation and service, not her limit.

The next Messenger will be a sequel to Anglicans and Catholics in Communion, capturing the important documentation and analysis about both the implementation of Anglicanorum Coetibus one year on. It will also take stock of our new phase in ecumenism, in which the historic witness of the Catholic League remains an insistent voice, proclaiming that there can be no true and lasting unity that does not first, or at least in the end, embrace the faith that the communion of all Christians needs communion with the Apostolic Local Church of Rome, whose Bishop is the universal pastor Christ has given to his Church and servant of that unity which is vital for that "convincing account of the hope that lies within us" to which Pope Benedict compels us.

As the annual Week of Prayer for Chrsitian Unity approaches - it was devised and first spread round the world by Catholics, and it was the Catholic League's founders who first promoted it in England - please pray ever more urgently for the Unity of Christians. Our nation and society demand nothing less of the Churches in our land than to manifest the one life and truth of Christ whom we proclaim.

This text has been edited from Fr Keith Newton’s address and answers to questions from the floor at a day of exploration hosted by the South London Ordinariate Group in Kennington on 29 January, 2011.

Now that it has been transcribed with the approval of the Ordinary, we offer it as a valuable snapshot of a particularly exciting period in the Ordinariate's gestation - from the processes being put in place as people were looking forward to them, to the kind of questions and concerns in people's minds as they contemplated a journey to make the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham a reality.

Indeed, this may be useful and informative for those planning the establishment of an Ordinariate in other parts of the Church.


What is the Ordinariate?
Fr Keith Newton

Talk at Kennington Park, 29 January 2011

Preparing the Way
As I begin to say something about the Ordinariate, you must realise that I have been living and sleeping this for the last fifteen months, ever since the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus was published in November 2009. A lot of things have been going on and my part in it has been relatively small, despite what some of the press might say. Bishop Andrew Burnham and I had not been involved in any way in producing that document. When it arrived, what was in it was as much of a surprise to us as it was to many other people. We had indeed been to Rome; and we had been told that problems for Anglo-Catholics who wanted to be in communion with the See of Peter were a matter that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was going to be taking very seriously. Thus it ended up producing Anglicanorum Coetibus. Over the year since, what we have done - including, in my case, several trips to Rome - has always been with the knowledge of the Archbishop of Canterbury. I have been quite upset by the press at times, when it has been suggested that we have been going behind the Archbishop’s back. You may remember, for instance, when we went to Rome in April 2010, that, as we were on our way back, the Sunday Telegraph published a front page article stating that neither the Archbishop of Canterbury nor the Archbishop of Westminster were aware of it. They were not only well aware, they gave us their blessing. So, as I was saying, I have been planning and thinking about this for a long time.

In September 2010 there was an interesting article - I cannot remember who wrote it, but it may have been Ruth Gledhill in The Times - about going to the Ordinariate, in which the reporter said she had spoken to a senior Anglican figure, who could not hide his delight in telling her that the Ordinariate project had been put on the back burner and that Rome was back-pedalling like mad. I remember thinking that this was not true; but I also thought that in a sense it was, because, if any of you do any cooking, you know that you put things on the back burner not to forget them but in order for them to simmer, so that they are ready when you are ready and you can just turn up the heat to finish the cooking and everything is fine. So the Ordinariate was on the back burner, simmering nicely, ready for the heat to be turned up - and this is now what has happened.

People say that Rome works in centuries. What has been amazing to the Catholic clergy that I have been having conversations with about the Ordinariate is just how rapid this process has been, both in terms of the ordination of Father Andrew, Father John and myself and also the programme to erect the Ordinariate and begin the entrance of those groups who wish to join it. It is proving to be a very rapid process and it is making my head spin. I was still the Anglican Bishop of Richborough until 31 December last year. Then I was received into the Catholic Church on 1 January 2011 and on 15 January we were ordained priest, having been ordained deacon two days before. In the speech I made at Archbishop’s House after our ordination to the priesthood, I said that this was almost as quick as Cardinal Manning. But the Archbishop of Westminster pointed out, “No, you were much quicker than Cardinal Manning. He took two months and you took two weeks!” This is amazing in itself; but the reason is because the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was very clear that it was important for us to be ordained to be ready to meet those groups that were going to join us, to prepare the way - and a lot of work needs to be done - and make sure that this thing runs smoothly.


The Path to Reception and Catechesis
Since I became a Catholic, I have not been able to do very much really except work on the Ordinariate. My mail box is overflowing. But you will know that some things are becoming clearer now. The timetable is that those who wish to join the Ordinariate will leave their Anglican congregations by the Sunday before Ash Wednesday and from Ash Wednesday until Easter there will be a period of catechesis, of learning what it means to be a Catholic. That will take people through to Holy Week. The clergy who have been involved with groups will remain with them and, depending on the Catholic diocese people are in, the catechesis will either be delivered totally by the Anglican priest, or in some dioceses totally by Roman Catholic priests – but probably in most cases it will be by a combination of both. Then people will be received ideally on Maundy Thursday - but it could take place before Maundy Thursday, perhaps on Holy Tuesday, or at the Easter Vigil. But the best time will be on Maundy Thursday. Those to be received into full communion with the Catholic Church will probably be received by their own parish priest and then they will be able to take part in the Triduum - Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter. This way will be better, because you will know that in the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults the completion of initiation, confirmation and Holy Communion is deeply linked with the experience of going through the Triduum and its climax at the end of Holy Saturday in the Easter Vigil. Now, the RCIA is for new Christians; and so it is very important to distinguish between those who are being baptised (or who are coming into full Church life more or less for the first time) and those who are long-standing members of the Church in another denomination, but who are now coming into full communion with the Catholic Church. So we will not be using the RCIA process, or rite. Instead there will be a small rite of reception and confirmation in the Catholic Church that is appropriate to the groups of already practising and their members. After Easter, catechesis will continue, probably for several weeks leading up until Pentecost. Thus there will be a sustained period of catechesis before and after Easter.

Already many of the groups have been using Evangelium, which is a course on Catholic teaching and practice lasting something like 26 weeks. They are really enjoying it, so we are even now seeing how good catechesis in the Christian faith and discipleship may be as an ongoing feature of life in the Ordinariate. Cardinal Levada is very keen for the Ordinariate laity to be well catechised - many other Catholics will not have done much catechesis in their recent experience, but that is no reason for us not to; and perhaps it will be a strength that the people in the Ordinariate can offer to the rest of the Church. The Sevenoaks group is maintaining its identity as a Walsingham cell, meeting monthly for a mass, a talk and a meal. This will mean a continued structure arising from their Anglican patrimony, but it also offers an appealing way to provide ongoing catechesis. This will also provide a good structure on which to build future growth and development.


Ordination of the Ordinariate Clergy
As for the priests, they will also join in and contribute to the catechesis with their groups; but at the same time they will start a process of formation for ordination. That will take place in London for all the clergy on one day a week from Ash Wednesday until Pentecost. At some point in the Easter season those whose petitions for ordination have been accepted by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (and when a number of other steps have been followed) will be ordained to the diaconate shortly after Easter and then to the priesthood around Pentecost. Their formation will continue further for up to two years.

It is not that those priests who are coming into the Catholic Church for the Ordinariate are going to get a much quicker or shorter formation than any other ex-Anglican priest who becomes a Catholic and is eventually ordained. I know a number of people from my old Richborough area, who are now at a seminary and who will presumably be ordained in about two years’ time. So the process is equivalent and it is just that ordination comes at a different place in it. We also need to be clear (because I have heard one or two comments in which this is misunderstood) that those clergy who are petitioning for ordination in the Catholic Church in the Ordinariate will have to go through a very similar process of discernment to that of anybody else who seeks ordination in a diocese and who thus wants to become a seminarian in the Catholic Church. For instance, I have just been to St Luke’s Centre in Manchester for a few days to see the assessment and discernment that our clergy have to undergo. Additionally, necessary references will have to be taken up and the local diocesan Catholic bishops will also have to be happy with candidate clergy, since they will have to serve both the Ordinariate and the local diocese. All these things, including CRB checks, are now in hand.


Space to Discern the Nature of Being a Catholic Christian
So, that is the point at which our preparations find themselves and it is not long - about six weeks - to Ash Wednesday, when the process will begin. At that point the lay people will have to decide whether belonging to the Catholic Church in full communion is what they want to do. They will not need to make their final commitment until just before they are actually received, so there is plenty of opportunity for exploration and discernment in good faith and without pressure. But when the moment comes for making a commitment, it will be after a great deal of thought and prayer. The form it will take is that they will have to profess the Christian faith, usually by saying the Nicene Creed, and also agree that they believe everything that the Catholic Church teaches, signing a declaration to that effect. Then they will be received and chrismated, thus receiving the sacrament of Confirmation in the Catholic Church.

It is worth saying at this point that there is no such thing as a second class Catholic. This is very important to emphasise, because I have heard it said even by the Archbishop of York in a debate that, if he was going to become a Catholic, he would rather be a proper one and not a second class one. Let me tell you that that is nonsense – there are no second class Catholics. You are only a Catholic by belonging to one particular group or another – a diocese, or a religious order or some other kind of structure suited to a purpose, or group of people. First or second class does not enter into it. The Ordinariate is simply one of those ways in which you belong to in the Catholic Church. So I cannot see what point Archbishop Sentamu was trying to make. Perhaps he does not understand that the Catholic Church is much more diverse than most people realise. This is what makes it Catholic. I happened to be in Rome in October last year at the end of the Synod of Bishops of the Middle East. The final mass at which the Pope presided was very interesting, because normally, when you see a Papal Mass, it is all very beautifully choreographed and all the vestments match, and so on. But for the mass at which the Eastern Bishops concelebrated everyone was wearing something different - they were representing so many parts of the Catholic Church, from the Maronites of Lebanon, the Catholic Copts, the Melkites – there are all sorts of people, belonging to many different Churches in the one Catholic Church. And the Ordinariate in England & Wales is just one new part of her diversity.


Ordinariates further afield
We are mostly looking at the situation here in England. But do not forget that the Apostolic Constitution is not just for this country, it is for the world. Anywhere in the world where there are groups of Anglicans who want to come into full communion with the Catholic Church, they can form a possible Ordinariate group. The only groups being formed at the moment are in England and Wales, in Canada and in the United States. In Australia they are slightly behind us, but they are catching up and there could be one formed this year. For the time being, any Scottish groups will be linked to the Ordinariate in England and Wales, until such time as there is a large enough group to have its own Ordinariate within the territory of the Scottish Conference of Catholic Bishops. If there were groups in Ireland, they would need to go to their own local bishops in the Church in Ireland and say they wanted to form an Ordinariate; and the bishops would have to respond to that. But, as far as I know, nobody has done that yet. At the moment we have no group in Wales, but it would be possible. I have even had someone mention to me the possibility that there may be a group in South Africa too. Again, this is all possible. Wherever people are, all it takes is for them to approach the local bishop, say they wish to form a group and then he will have a conversation with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and they will see what can be done. So an Ordinariate is not just a special arrangement for people in England and Wales, or for that matter in North America or Australia. It is universal and thus provides a new canonical structure for people to belong fully to the Catholic Church. In this, no one is “second class”.


Identifying Anglican Patrimony – Worship and Theology
Now let me turn to some of the questions people have asked. What about “Anglican patrimony” and how exactly can it be identified? It has often been said that a distinguishing mark of Anglican identity, as distinct from the usual Catholic practice, is receiving communion in both kinds. I have to say, however, that I have not been to a Catholic church recently where the laity was not invited to receive the sacrament in both kinds. Obviously, in Westminster Cathedral, where there are enormous numbers, that is not normally feasible, but at most Catholic parish churches that I have been to the option is there. Not everybody takes it up, but it is more and more usual to do so; and I imagine that in most churches it is encouraged and not really an issue. Certainly in Ordinariate parishes I would expect that it would be the norm.

Beyond questions of custom and usage, much more difficult is the underlying question about what patrimony means and what makes it. I do not think we will really get to flesh this out until we start to live it out. It may be something about the way we do liturgy; it may be something about the words of the liturgy. Currently there are people who are working on an Anglican form of worship for the Ordinariate to use. It will not be exactly like other Anglican forms of worship, because it must conform to Catholic doctrine and, more than that, express it clearly. This means it will need to have been ratified by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The Americans already have an enormously thick Book of Divine Worship. If you go to one of the Pastoral Provision parishes you will be given one of these to use, but it is so thick that it hardly fits in the pew. It is also nearly twenty years old and is not going to be reprinted, partly because of the new opportunity created by Anglicanorum Coetibus and partly because in the light of two decades of experience it could benefit from revision. There is a group of people here in England working on a liturgy for us that has an Anglican flavour about it and that will inform, and be informed by, thoughts in other parts of the world where there will be an Ordinariate using Anglican patrimony in their Catholic worship. There is also something about hymnody.

Then there is the spiritual history that we are bringing with us. I think it is very interesting that, if one becomes a Catholic, normally you say “I’m going to become a Catholic” and you take on a new history, the history of the Catholic Church in England and Wales. The history of the Catholic Church from 1500 to 2000 is something people should know more about and it is going to form part of people’s history if they join the Ordinariate. But becoming a Catholic in the Ordinariate does not mean people will be putting aside their own history – they will be taking it with them. They will also be taking spiritual writers and theologians. For instance, I was taught by the great Eric Mascall, who was much revered by many Catholic theologians too. There are other great teachers in the Anglican Communion. I had a meeting with Cardinal Schönborn a couple of years ago and it came out that he is an incredible fan of C S Lewis. So there is such a wide range of experience, culture, theology, spirituality, people, worship and history that all goes into making up the Anglican patrimony.


Identifying Anglican Patrimony – Laity and Governance
Another side to Anglican patrimony is our tradition and systems of governance. That prompts the question of what involvement in the Ordinariate the laity will have. What needs to be understood is that there were two documents produced in November 2009. There was the Apostolic Constitution which is, as I understand it, basically about canon law; and to go with that were the Norms. The Apostolic Constitution cannot be changed, but the Norms can be altered by the Governing Council of the Ordinariate. There may be part of those norms concerning which we might say, “Is it possible to do it this way?” So there is room for adaptation and development, given particular conditions. Nevertheless, even now, in the Norms as well as the Apostolic Constitution itself there are certain things that have never happened in the Catholic Church before. I do not think people realise how enormous these changes are. For instance, the Holy Father has decided who is going to be the first Ordinary. It was his choice to make at the beginning, but in future the Ordinary will be chosen by the Holy Father on the recommendation of three names sent to him from the Governing Council of the Ordinariate. Now, that does not happen elsewhere in the Catholic Church. Generally when a diocese is vacant, it is the nuncio who makes consultations and produces the terna of names that he sends to the Congregation for Bishops in Rome. In our case, however, there is a more democratic aspect to it that has never been there before. The Governing Council, which is made up of clergy, some appointed by the Ordinary, some elected by the priests of the Ordinariate, will produce the terna. 

Also, there is to be a Pastoral Council. As I understand it, the Pastoral Council of a Catholic diocese is voluntary and at the discretion of the Bishop. It is advised, but not mandatory. But in the Ordinariate it is mandatory and it will involve laity in the governance of the church; and that, too, is something quite new in a Catholic setting. My reading is that this is a national, not an area or group, Pastoral Council, designed to work with the Ordinary and he with them. There will be a mandatory Finance Council that lay people can also be involved in – it is not limited to clergy. Furthermore, I expect that the Pastoral Council and Finance Council at the level of the whole Ordinariate will be reflected in local parish groups too. So every parish will have a Pastoral Council and Finance Council in which the laity are to be involved. Thus one of the things about the Anglican patrimony that we will be bringing to the Catholic Church will be this involvement of lay people. Not that we want Synods like the General Synod – God preserve us! – but there is a legitimate and proper role in evangelism, in mission, in finance and organisation which the laity should take part in. This is not concerned with arguments over doctrine, liturgy and the order of the Church, but the rightful role of the laity in living out their Catholic faith through the work and witness of their Church.

If you read the commentary that accompanies the Apostolic Constitution by Fr Ghirlanda, who is a canon lawyer and Rector of the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, he makes the point that there are certain things that are very clearly identifiable as aspects of this or any local Catholic Church, but there are additional attributes that are part of the Anglicanism we bring, that other Catholic Churches have not known and yet will be intrinsic to the Ordinariates. He clearly names the involvement of the laity in the governance of the Church. It is something I want to encourage. As much as it forms part of our patrimony, it will also be very new to us, because we will not be doing it in exactly the old way as in the Church of England, but in accordance with Catholic canon law. It will also be new to our fellow Catholics, and they will be very interested to see how it works and possibly what can be learned from it. So lay involvement as part of the patrimony we bring is something we should want to develop properly.


The Need for a Distinctive Body, “united not absorbed”
Another question concerns why a separate Ordinariate is needed – why cannot Anglicans becoming Catholics just join in together and contribute to their existing local parishes and dioceses? Will members of the Ordinariate lose out on the experience of belonging to the mainstream reality of the Catholic Church in this country? Is there a risk that they will define themselves too tightly and just look inwards to themselves, rather than outwards to others in the Church, Christians in other Churches and, perhaps more importantly, to people in the wider world?

Someone recently impressed upon me that the prophetic side to the Ordinariate that Pope Benedict is hoping for might get lost. Well, to me it would be a tragedy if we in the Ordinariate, lay people and clergy alike, became so absorbed with finance, administration and ritual rubrics that we failed to look outwards with our Catholic faith that has, after all, brought us this far. Yet, unless we form a grouping in our own right, there are certain purposes that the Church needs that we will not be able to serve. We have to play our part alongside our fellow Catholics in service and in mission by adopting a distinctive role. And that includes taking our place in the Catholic Church’s ecumenism. We have to be a bridge. Building a bridge is about linking up two sides; and we cannot begin to perform that function unless we are connected as part of the wider Catholic Church and it is connected as part of us. That is going to take a bit of time to settle down; but I do believe passionately that that is what we should be and that is what the Holy Father wants of us. I do not want us to be defined as ultra-rightwing traditionalists or “more catholic than the Pope” – that is not true of is in any case. For the true story is not about our separateness, but our journey more deeply into the Catholic faith and the fullness of the life of the Church.

For me, this has been going on since I was a young Anglican priest, who passionately wanted to be in communion with the rest of the Catholic Church. I had always hoped and imagined that full communion and unity between Anglicans and the See of Peter was going to turn out in a different way, but God works in ways that we do not really know; and so the Ordinariate is the answer God has given to our prayers. He has his reasons. And it will be up to the people joining the Ordinariate to make sure that they too have the same spirit of belonging to the whole Church - and serving as one of its links to the Anglican tradition and its vital sense of its place within wider English society too. As I said in my statement at the press conference, “I’m all for building bridges, not burning them down”. But it will all take time, not least because there is some rawness felt among Anglican church people about the Ordinariate and those who may be leaving to join it. But I think with time it really will be possible for the Ordinariate to be a point of contact and friendship between Catholics and Anglicans and even an instrument in the ongoing work of reconciliation.


Sacred Places
One place where it might be possible is Walsingham itself. I cannot believe for one minute that Our Blessed Lady wants two separate shrines. Yet at the moment there are two; and I hope that there will be an opportunity for the members of the Ordinariate, when we go to Walsingham, to form that bridge, a bigger bridge than there has been before. Certainly, since I have had conversations with the Guardians of the Anglican Shrine about how that might be possible, I can hope that when ordinary Catholics go to Walsingham they will be as much at home at the Anglican shrine as at the Catholic one. And we have already seen how members of the Ordinariate can still be part of the Anglican Shrine through maintaining their Walsingham cells. This could be our bridge to link the Catholic Church and the Anglican Shrine.

This leads into another question about people’s contacts with the Anglican people and the Church building they have known and loved, once they become Roman Catholics in the Ordinariate. People will need to leave their church and their Anglican worshipping community with their priest on Ash Wednesday. There has to be a genuine “moving on”, in becoming a Catholic in full communion. It is not simply going to be “business as usual”, because not all of people’s friends and fellow Christians desire or feel called to Catholics. We were hoping that there might be a possibility of sharing buildings, even providing for the Roman Catholic priest who is to say mass for the groups in the period between Ash Wednesday and the moment their own priest is ordained to the priesthood, to do this in the group’s accustomed place of worship. But this is looking less and less likely, because the Church of England has put out a legal position to address such an eventuality already. The suggestion is that, if there is to be any sharing of buildings by Catholic former members of a congregation, it would have to be agreed with the new incumbent and the PCC of those who remained in the Church of England. So it looks as if sharing is not going to work; certainly not in the short term.


The Costly Value of Moving On as well as Bringing Patrimony
Clearly there is something about leaving and moving on in becoming a Catholic. This is hard, but in fact it is part of our journey: no one said it would be easy. In the 1980s, I was a missionary in Malawi and I remember to this day being at Gatwick airport. I had two young children - four and one - and my wife. She never wanted to go to Malawi. When she was interviewed, they said to her, “Why do you want to go to Africa?”, and she said, “I don’t!” They said, “Then why are you going?” She replied, “Because my husband sees it as his vocation.” They then asked her, “Do you do everything that your husband tells you?” “No, I don’t,” came the reply. But she felt that it was very important to support me in what I thought was my vocation, to go and serve in a different part of the world. But she will tell you that, as we walked through that big airport, she felt it was like going into a prison. We had no idea of what life would be like. We had never been to Africa in our lives. We did not know where we were going to live. We did not know if people wanted us there. We did not know whether we would be welcomed. We did not know whether we would manage, whether we would be paid – I was going to earn only a third of what I was earning in England. There were all those unknowns; but we did it. And in truth, there was no point in all the time that we were there that we felt on our own. In life, you just sometimes have to take a step into the unknown and trust that God is going to hold you up. It is an act of faith.

Now, between Ash Wednesday and Easter Day people preparing to be received will be asked not to receive Holy Communion. For some people that is a sticking point; but certainly Fr Andrew Burnham, Fr John Broadhurst and myself did exactly that during Advent. I stopped receiving Communion in the Church of England just before Advent and during Advent I went to mass in my local Roman Catholic parish. It was far from easy, as I sat in the pew. But it was an important part of the process for me, a really important journey of change; because, by the time we had got to the end, we were longing, just longing, to receive Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. That is an experience that we all need to go through. Remember, anyway, that the obligation on Catholics is not to receive Communion, but to be at Mass every Sunday. I think we have got into a position, even within the Catholic Church, in which everybody thinks that the point of coming to Mass is to receive Communion. It is not – it is to take part in the re-presentation of Our Lord’s saving works. Holy Communion is the fruit of that and we encourage everyone to receive. But it is not always necessary. So, those preparing to be received I urge to take that period between Ash Wednesday and Easter as a period of growth. Having gone through it myself, I think they will find it a very necessary step to have taken on their journey. Where the groups of new Catholics in the Ordinariate groups will worship (if, as seems likely, they cannot worship in their old church) will be decided by the local Catholic Deanery, in consultation with the Ordinariate priest. Probably through the first part of the catechesis period it would be best to join in the worship at one of the local Catholic parish’s major liturgies alongside your own pastor, who will be doing the same, at least until he is made a deacon and can take a liturgical part. But it would also be good to meet as a group in your own right, to pray together once a week, or say the office together. Thus, as well as being part of the Catholic Church near you, you should still keep together as a group.


Remaining obligations to Anglican parishes
What about people who have positions of lay responsibility in their Anglican parishes, who are keen to join the Ordinariate, but for whom moving is complex, given certain legal obligations? Well, as a matter of fact, there has been some advice from the lawyers about this. Those who are church wardens need to hold the public annual parish meeting earlier. This can be done at any time and it does not have to coincide with the annual general meeting of the congregation. This will enable the election of fresh church wardens for the parish. As for a Treasurer or Secretary of the Parochial Church Council, there is no need to wait for an AGM; and those joining the Ordinariate should pass these responsibilities in Anglican congregations on now. Of course, there would be nothing wrong with a period of handover from a distance for a few months, if that would help the situation. We do not want to be seen as those who went away, forgot about those who were left, did not care and left others to pick up pieces. This all wants to be done as smoothly and helpfully as possible. Someone asked me at the press conference, “Don’t you care about those who are not coming?” I said, “Of course I care about them. I wish they would follow me. Not all of them are following me at the moment and more will follow as time goes on. I do care about them.” The way we deal with this will be important as we do not want to be seen to be the cause of bad feeling. But people resign and hand over tasks all the time, so there is no reason why this should not be handled in the same way. There are slight anomalies concerning elections of PCCs, as technically Catholics and members of other Churches, too, can be members. But I do not think that would be particularly helpful.

I understand how difficult it is for people to make the decision to move from what they know and love, especially if they have been closely involved through friends, schools and family connections. It has been the same for me. But if acting on a call to go forward on the journey to be a Catholic is what we really want, then we need not fear the unknown. Christ is there for us whatever trials we have to face; he is with us in our agonised decisions, with us on our journey as we trust him to lead us, and he is there to welcome and guide us wherever we go. He is always there for us and it is he for whom we are Christians.

The important thing is for everyone, Anglican and Catholic, to focus now on where the Lord is calling them to serve him and thus where they ought to be in the Church. There will always be plenty of jobs going in the Ordinariate groups, so I don’t think we will allow anyone to get away with doing nothing! 


Individuals not belonging to Groups
What about individuals who are isolated from where potential groups are based or who live out in the sticks? Of course, the Ordinariate is for groups of Anglicans, so, obviously, if people can become part of a group, or at least be associated with one, that would be best. The Ordinariate website has them all listed. It is a list that is growing all the time, as people are becoming more public about them. But there remains a major problem for isolated laity and I have raised this specially with Bishop Alan Hopes, the Episcopal Delegate for the Ordinariate from the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England & Wales. It is quite clear that when Fr Ghirlanda wrote about the Ordinariate he said it was both for groups and individuals. So no one should miss out on belonging to the Ordinariate who wants to, just because they cannot belong to a group.

So, individuals who live where there is no group can still be part of the Ordinariate, but they worship at a local diocesan church. Already three or four people have been in touch with me to say that – amazingly - there is to be no group in Brighton. My advice has been to go and see the local Catholic priest as a first step and we can take it from there. In the case of Brighton, I have sent people to Fr Ray Blake, who I know is passionate about the Ordinariate and will welcome them with open arms. People should ask if they can be catechised and received into the Catholic Church at Easter and register not as a member of that local parish but as a member of the Ordinariate. This is entirely possible. Individuals would thus worship in the local diocesan Catholic Church and perhaps sometimes go and visit an Ordinariate group elsewhere for contact and support. It may even be possible to register with a group at a distance, even though a person would not normally worship with it. We hope that, should a group form in Brighton (and that may be possible if we get 5 or 6 people at least), it could form a nucleus around which more Church life could grow into a viable regular congregation. The number constituting a group is not defined, but it is meant to be a “little church”. Until a group can form itself with some strength and momentum, an individual would still be a member of the Ordinariate, although normally worshipping at an existing local Catholic Church. That is the best that can be done at the moment, but we can see how things develop in the time ahead.

So, nobody should say that, because they have no group nearby, despite dearly wanting to be part of the Ordinariate and not a diocese, they will need to wait for 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9 years until a local group finally emerges. Those who feel God is calling them in the direction of the Ordinariate should come. They can be received into full communion with the Catholic Church through the local parish and in due course, I am sure, groups will begin to form. I do not doubt that that will include Brighton. If people experience real problems with what I have suggested, they should come back to us and we will not lose track of people seeking to join the Ordinariate. Beyond what I have mentioned, I do not know how just yet; but it is work in progress. In the meantime, nobody should be left behind waiting for a group to form in their area.


Guidance for Receiving Individuals into the Catholic Church in the Ordinariate
One of the problems in the minds of some people may be that not all local diocesan Catholic priests are as supportive of the Ordinariate as others; or they do not understand its procedures, or the purpose it is supposed to serve. I am in discussion with Bishop Alan about the necessary instructions to priests on how to respond to individual enquirers and this may take the form of a letter from the local bishop. It would be important, for instance, to steer priests away from channelling people to the RCIA. By now RCIA courses will have been up and running since September and normally new enquirers will be encouraged to wait until the next sessions being in autumn 2011. As we were noting earlier, however, the RCIA is not appropriate for already baptised and practising Christians – especially Catholic Anglicans – and the agreed aim is in any case to prepare people for reception in Holy Week. I am sorry that some people have already had the mistaken advice to wait and join the RCIA process, but I can confirm that the Catholic Church in this country understands that people coming into the Catholic Church from the Anglican Church are in a different category and need to be treated in a different way.

For instance, in the catechesis of a practising Anglican, you would not need to spend a lot of time on the Nicene Creed. A well instructed Anglican would believe and comprehend it in any case, otherwise they would hardly be at the point of seeking to belong to the Roman Catholic Church. That said, however, there are real differences between the Anglican and Catholic Church: different ways of doing things and different ways of expressing and understanding the faith. For some this may be problematic and need to be worked through. So a more suitable catechetical programme is being formed and there is no reason why this could not be available to diocesan priests asked to prepared and receive individuals who wish to join the Ordinariate (and we have already mentioned how useful the Evangelium course has been for those who are already well versed in their Christian faith and Church life). As long as priests have the right advice from us and access to the right resources, I suspect that in practice they use their own judgement as to what is necessary.

It is worth saying that any enquirer as an individual or in a group is under no pressure because they simply wish to explore possibilities. If someone goes through the course and then says that they are not quite ready, that is fine. If may be that they feel ready later on and I should have that that they could be received then, perhaps following a further conversation with the priest who was preparing them before as an individual, or the priest who leads the group to which they wish to belong. Once the Ordinariate is set up, reception will be the responsibility of the Ordinariate priest, not the diocesan priest. But I am sure that taking time for discernment will be respected and taken into consideration as a real part of a person’s experience that leads to reception.

At the moment, enquirers have been asked to fill in a little form on which we record people’s details. This includes a place for them to sign, confirming that they believe all that is taught by the Catholic Church to be true. Some people have told me that they are not ready to sign it yet, so I have said “Don’t sign it.” It is not necessary for people to do so until they are ready to be received, and the period of exploration and discernment is still under way. So there is plenty of time yet. Besides, it is a personal profession of faith that has to be right for each person. People are not joining the Catholic Church just as a group – they are fundamentally making an individual profession of faith. People may be planning to do this together, but there is an individuality on which it all depends. Fr Andrew Burnham had said it is a bit like going on a pilgrimage to Walsingham: you all pay for it separately, but you get on the bus and go together.


The Sisters from Walsingham
At this point it seems fitting for me to pay tribute to the sisters from Walsingham. It was not just the three former bishops and their families who left our positions in the Church of England. We were accompanied with the advice and preparation of good Catholic priest-friends and our fast from the Eucharist was barely the month of Advent. But the sisters went without Holy Communion for three months, as they waited on the Lord. Sister Wendy tells me that, usually in the past, when she had gone to a Catholic mass she had been quite upset not to receive Communion, because she thought, “I’m being refused Jesus here and I really can’t stand it.” But she says that three months was easy, because the sisters knew what the end result was - receiving Communion in full communion with the Catholic Church with the Successor of Peter. What if they had held back and come later? Would they have spared themselves a great deal of heartache? But this was a great sacrifice they offered in order to be faithful to our Lord. I think it was God’s will, and this is why they are an inspiration. It was so pleasing to us to have them with us at our reception too. And then to find out that the Ordinariate is to be called the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham reveals how God has been in it all the way.


Second and Third Waves?
When will the second or third wave be organised, if people are not ready to go at the moment? Well, there is no closure on the Apostolic Constitution. It is now a permanent part of the Catholic Church in England and Wales. It will be part of the Catholic Church in other parts of the world, too. There is no closed door. Once we have opened up the way this time round, we then have to start to deal with others who come after. Hopefully, we will learn something from the process we have undergone, particularly with regard to the clergy in planning with the theological educators on how it is going to be done and what is needed in the future. It seems to me that you cannot start up a new process of formation for clergy every month. You would have to arrange it in semesters, or something like that. Already there are more priests coming to me and asking, “How do I join the Ordinariate?” Probably they are a bit late to join at the moment, because the process for discerning clergy for ordination is well on its way. So I doubt if anyone coming to me now, particularly if they have a group with them, will be able to be ordained in the first wave. But I am sure it can be organised well for a future point. There will be no problem over the catechesis or reception of lay people, but the practical difficulty will concern the formation, time and resources needed for the ordination of clergy. That is part of a conversation we need to have with the bishops and the theological educators in the seminaries, so that we are sure we can devise a process that runs smoothly.


Retired Clergy
What about retired Anglican clergy – will they be able to belong to the Catholic Church through the Ordinariate and continue to serve in a priestly ministry? Anglicanorum Coetibus is for groups of Anglicans, although, if you read Fr Ghirlanda’s commentary, he says it is for individuals as well as groups. But the questions that have to be answered about individual priests not linked to a group is (a) are they useful to the Ordinariate or could they be?; and (b) are they useful to the local diocese or could they be? It is quite possible for someone to be ordained within the Ordinariate, who would normally exercise his ministry within the diocesan context because he is not linked to a group and has no group he can be linked to. But it would require me to have a conversation with the local Catholic bishop about that person from the beginning, as it would be a question of whether he is going to be useful and work alongside the other priests in the diocese. 

There is also the question of how the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith will look at applications from people who are not in groups. I doubt whether they would say they could be ordained purely on the grounds that they want to say mass privately since that is what they have done all their life. In any case, there needs to be a pastoral process of discernment for each of the priests who enter the Ordinariate and that will always involve a conversation with the local Catholic bishop about his views and needs. That is because we do not expect the Ordinariate clergy to be confined to ministering within the Ordinariate. They cannot be. If they only have one congregation to look after 30 or 40 people, then they have the time on a Sunday or a Saturday night to help with the local diocese; and so they should. Diocesan priests are overworked and they have a lot of pressure on them. There are big congregations and the more the Ordinariate clergy help the local clergy, the more the Ordinariate will be accepted as part of the natural Catholic life of the Church in England and Wales. Even now, if there are any Catholic priests who are complaining about the Ordinariate, I have not met them yet. All of them have been so enthusiastic, want to be helpful, want to be encouraging and hope that we will equally want to be part of the local Catholic life. The best way forward is for there to be reciprocal support between the clergy of the Ordinariate and the clergy of the diocese – and in the case of all our Ordinariate priests, those with groups and those who are isolated, the local diocesan bishop will need to be happy. But I think this will be quite possible.


Funding the Ordinariate
What about the finances of the Ordinariate – how will it be funded? We are currently trying to set up a charitable trust, which will take a little bit of time. There are two ways of giving to the Ordinariate at the moment. The first is to give directly to CaTEW, the Catholic Trust for England and Wales, which is a Catholic fund held by the Bishops’ Conference, of which I am now a voting member. They have ring-fenced a fund for the Ordinariate within their accounts, so that anybody who sends money to them for the Ordinariate can be assured that it will be devoted to this purpose alone. We already have £250,000 given by the Catholic dioceses of England & Wales; we have been offered some money by Forward in Faith and the Catholic League, too, is offering assistance.

Very interestingly - and I am very touched by what happened - in November I went to Pluscarden Abbey near Inverness, which has great Anglican links through Aelred Carlisle, who had been a monk on Caldey Island. When he left the Anglican Church, the Caldey monks divided into two. Most of them became Catholics and formed Prinknash Abbey, while some remained and formed Nashdom Abbey, which became Elmore Abbey and is now in the Close at Salisbury. The Prinknash monks founded Pluscarden Abbey in Scotland; and, when you go into their chapel there, you will see a picture of Aelred Carlisle and several others in the community with Anglican backgrounds. Once I had resigned as Bishop of Richborough, I went there to get some rest away from it all for a moment. For example, there had been a lot of press interest surrounding our resignations. But, when I sat down for our first meal, I was greeted by what the monk began to read from the lectern during supper. He said, “News from The Tablet – three Anglican bishops have resigned ......” Afterwards, the Abbot said, “We know you here for a rest, but would you like to talk to the Community about the Ordinariate?” So I talked to them for an hour or so. When I got back, the Abbot wrote to say they wanted to send a donation to the Ordinariate and that has gone into the CaTEW fund. The problem with CaTEW is that the fund they are holding for us will be for the Ordinariate’s general purposes and it is not possible at the moment to hold individual accounts for distinct parish groups. But I am grateful to the Catholic League, which has set up the Newman Fund to provide this facility for us. Thus it is possible to earmark people’s donations for particular parishes and groups, as well as attract Gift Aid tax relief. Once we get our own trust going, we will be able to operate like every other Catholic diocese. But we are only a few days old and it takes a bit of time to set things up.


The Principal Church of the Ordinariate
What about identifying the Ordinariate’s principal church and headquarters? At the moment we do not have a principal church; nor have we identified where the headquarters will be. This may be because it will have to be where I live; but I do not know yet where that will be either. I am supposed to be leaving my present house on 31 March and we are currently looking for a suitable house for me to live in somewhere around London. Until we know where that is, we can assume that the headquarters will be where I live, providing it is big enough to accommodate the administration. For the moment, the Bishops’ Conference has given me an office next to the chapel at its building in Eccleston Square.

We have not yet identified a principal church. The Tablet suggested that it was going to be St James’ Spanish Place, which was unwelcome news to its parish priest! I do not think we can put out the congregation of 1400 for a group from the Ordinariate. But I am sure something will be found. It is all in God’s hands.