Monday, January 11, 2010

I have not died. Yet. I'm too lazy to update this thing. For now, please come to see us for the


Society of King Charles the Martyr Annual Mass and Meeting
Saturday, 30 January, 2010
11:00 a.m. Procession and High Mass in the Presence of a Greater Prelate
The Rev'd Canon W. Gordon Reid, Preaching
Missa Brevis in G, K.V. 140 - W. A. Mozart
Followed by a luncheon.
Please make reservations (for the luncheon) with the church office at 410-539-1395.
Come for just the Mass if you like.

Thursday, December 03, 2009

A Sermon preached on the Vigil of the Immaculate Conception

by Fr John Hunwicke, SSC
at Pusey House

On May 13, 1917 .… Yes, if I were Jeremy Paxman and that were a Starter Question, you would all by now laudably have pressed your buzzers. But I wonder how many of you recall the first words which the Lady ‘brighter than the sun’ said to those three Portuguese peasant children, ninety years ago this year. They were ‘Do not be afraid’. ‘Afraid’ is what frail humans so often feel when confronted by evidences of divine power; the Lord himself said on His Easter Morning: me phobeisthe. But I like to indulge myself an idiosyncratic fantasy that Our Lady, when she appeared on that stony, arid field at Cova da Iria - although I imagine she spoke to Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta in some Portuguese dialect - was really addressing England; Protestant England with its underlying anti-Catholic bigotry (‘scratch an Englishman...’) even when it is overlaid by the broader anti-Christian secularism of our own age. (When the 1928 Prayer Book came before Parliament, someone asked an atheist MP why he was so keen to vote against it, and he explained ‘But I am a Protestant atheist’.) And such English, I put it to you, are scared, dead scared, scared out of their wits, by the great Mother of God, Mary most holy. Have you noticed that there's a certain sort of churchperson who twitches rhythmically at the very phrase 'Mother of God’. If you explain that Jesus is God and so his mother Mary is the Mother of God, they give you that sort of sideways look that implies they know you're playing some sort of Jesuitical trick on them, but they can't quite spot the catch. Well, of course, there is a catch; it is that they don't live with a real faith that Jesus is God. As Newman once analysed it, liberal protestants demote our Lord Jesus Christ into the slot reserved for Mary (I am butchering Newman's elegant periods into journalese so I will call it Top Creature Slot) and then they're puzzled when we Catholics situate Mary there. 'Romanism is not idolatry unless Arianism is orthodoxy’, he observed.

So what - if they can't completely avoid talking about Mary - do liberal protestants call her? 'The mother of Jesus’; 'the Virgin’; and - get this - `the Madonna’. As if it's safer to refer to her in Italian than to use the Prayer Book phrase 'Our Lady’. So let's keep her, they feel, in an Art History context - the Madonna... Weird, really, isn't it: you wouldn't, probably, refer to Fr Jonathan as ‘the Il Principale’ or to our beloved Prime Minister as ‘the Il Duce’. Or perhaps she will be called 'the bee vee’, as if it sanitises and makes her safe to turn her into an English acronym.

In a sermon I preached forty years ago, at the Mattins of Christmass Day in the year of my diaconate, I said that the Incarnation meant that God was in the belly of a Palestinian peasant girl who is Queen of Heaven. Critics fell into three categories: those who disliked my phrase because of its physicality and because it placed the origins of our faith among foreigners (surely Mary must have been a middle-class Englishwoman and if not a member of the WI then at least of the Young Wives); those who didn't like the phrase Queen of Heaven; and those who disliked both.

'The Immaculate Conception’. It's a lovely rolling phrase, isn't it (we classicists would analyse its rhythm as the trispondaicus). And it's a phrase, too, that can scare people silly. Is it sometimes the physicality – again, of conception - that disturbs them; conception, a process that occurs a little way south of the tummy button? Not the sort of thing the fastidious want to have dragged in front of their noses. C S Lewis points out that the devils too are fastidious in their horror at the flesh: Screwtape refers to a human as 'this animal, this thing begotten in a bed’. Or perhaps people are scared of the word 'Immaculate’; perhaps it suggests foreign religion - little old Irish women clutching their rosaries or Spanish ladies in black making their nine successive First Saturday communions in honour of the Immaculate Heart (a devotion which Cardinal Ratzinger with gentle irony once called 'surprising for people from the Anglo-Saxon and German cultural worlds’). But 'immaculate’ is a completely biblical concept in its Hebrew and Greek equivalents: it means spotless; and only what is without blemish is truly for God (for example, a spotless sacrificial lamb). Because Mary is to be wholly for God, is to give God his body, to give God his endowment of genes, give God the food of her breast: so Mary by God's gift is to be the Immaculate, the one without blemish, the one in whom the Divine likeness has never been marred.

It is because Mary alone in the roots of her being is unmarked by sin that Mary alone is truly and wholly free. In our hearts, too, we should make her free and 'fear not’; she is never to be locked up in the tourist industry as a statue of doubtful taste carried in processions by foreign peasants for the English to photograph from within their coaches; Mary is not to be locked up by the Heritage business in a Merry England; she is not to be the Madonna of the Art Historians imprisoned in coffee­ table books.

If Mary is the Mother of God Incarnate, she is our Mother too, because we are in Christ, limbs of his body by our baptismal incorporation. Mary comes to us tonight, and what would a mother bring us her children except food; food for her children in exilio; food packed for our journey. Mary comes to this place and to this moment of time; Mary comes, bright with all the beauties known by men and angels; Mary comes to set upon our lips the blessed fruit of her womb Jesus.

Fr John Hunwicke is Priest-in-Charge of St Thomas the Martyr, Oxford, and Honorary Senior Research Fellow of Pusey House

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Sarum Vestments

Early 16th-century chasuble from England:

Thursday, November 19, 2009

IMMACULATE CONCEPTION BVM
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
6:00 pm
-
Procession and High Mass in the Presence of a Greater Prelate
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Mass in C - Baldassare Galuppi
Ave Maria - Igor Stravinsky
Adam Lay Ybounden - Boris Ord
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Grace and St Peter's Church
Baltimore, MD
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All are welcome. There will be a reception following the Mass.

Saturday, November 14, 2009

St Paul of the Cross and the Anglican Church


It is customary to speak of the ‘dreary eighteenth century.’ Owing to the deadness and
artificiality of the times, the era fully deserved to be so designated. Yet even in so bleak an
age, the grace of God could and did produce Saints. One of these chosen souls who, in
this inauspicious time, rose to sanctity was Paul Daney, now known as St Paul of the
Cross. From his earliest youth his heart was given to God. The Passion of our blessed
Lord was the principle subject of his meditations. A desire to share in that Passion caused
Paul to choose a life of mortification. Others, attracted by his sanctity, joined him in his
retreat, and so came into existence the austere Congregation of the Discalced Clerks of
the Most Holy Cross and Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, commonly known as the
Passionists.


Strange to us are the workings of God’s Spirit. Italian though he was, Paul felt himself
strongly impelled to pray for England, the cold, rationalistic, Protestant England of his
day. “O England! England!” he would exclaim. “Let us pray for England. I could not help
doing it, even if I wished, for as soon as I begin to pray, that unhappy kingdom comes
before me. I remember her every morning in the Holy Mass, and have done so for forty
years. What may be God’s intentions for that kingdom, I know not. Well, let us pray on,
and leave the issue in God’s hands.”


Surely God heard the prayers of His Saint. Not sixty years elapsed after the death of Paul
in 1775, before the commencement of the Oxford Movement, when England’s Church
began to wake from her long sleep. While the awakening was of a different kind from what the
Saint had in mind, it happened, as it so often does, that God answered His servant
according to His own infinite wisdom, and did not permit Himself to be hedged in by the
limitations of the vision even of a Saint. But none the less are Anglicans to be grateful for
the prayers of St Paul of the Cross, and we can be sure that he who prayed so earnestly on
earth still prays for us from his place in heaven.


From Athletes of God, by the Rev’d S. C. Hughson, O.H.C.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009


The Annual Requiem Mass of the Guild of All Souls

Saturday, 14 November, 2009
11.00 a.m.


St Paul's Church
2430 K Street NW
Washington, D. C.


The sermon will be given by Father Frederick S. Thomas, SSC, Rector of Grace & St Peter's Church, Baltimore, Maryland, and a member of the Guild's Council.

“WHERE IS YOUR FATHER NOW?”

This is especially appropriate in this Month of the Holy Souls.
By the Rev’d H. A. Wilson, vicar of St Augustine’s, Haggerston, London
To Stanley, aged ten, recently bereft of his father.

Where is your father now? “I believe,” you say in the Creed … and that people in church say aloud together “in the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, the Resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.” Let’s think together about what these great old words mean.
The Church is not a building, like St. Augustine’s; it is a society, a club, a fellowship. Its members are those who have been baptized. And it is not only in this world. Once a Christian, always a Christian; once a member of the Church, always a member of the Church, even beyond your mortal body’s death. In this world the Church is Militant. “Let us pray for the whole state of Christ’s Church militant (military, fighting) here in earth,” says a priest at the altar. To it belongs every baptized person whose soul is still living in his or her body. But your father’s life on earth has come to an end. His soul and body have been separated. But his life has not ceased. He still lives, and will always live, somewhere. And he is still, as he always will be, a member of the Church. He was a good man. Has he gone to hell – the place of eternal misery and punishment, intended only for those who have no use for God and the things of God, who deliberately chose not to be good here? Of course he has not.


Then, has he gone to heaven? I do not think so; and I do not believe that you think so either. For heaven is the place of absolute perfection, in which where is neither sin nor any trace of it. Please God, your father will reach heaven one day; but I think that, just because he was a good man here, he himself would be the first to say that he does not deserve to go there – yet. Our Lord teaches that the “faithful departed” go at death to a place between earth and heaven, that is neither; and that there they are, as you might say, in A Souls’ Hospital, being made fit for the heaven that they have earned. This is The Church Waiting – or, as it is sometimes called, Expectant (which means the same thing) – in paradise or purgatory (“purging,” “purifying,” “cleansing”). But it is still the same One Holy Catholic Church. And the Church in heaven is The Church Triumphant, The Church Victorious; the glorious company of the holy angels and the Church’s heroes and heroines (Our Lady, St. Augustine, St. George, St. Michael, and all the rest): still in the same one Church, founded by our Lord, for all people everywhere at all times – this is what “Catholic” means – both on this side of death, and on the other side of it: God’s great one family. So you see what is meant by “The Communion of Saints.” “Communion” means “fellowship.” “Saints” means “the baptized,” in whatever part of the Church they are. The Lord Jesus is the elder brother of us all. All the baptized, in this world, in purgatory, in heaven, are brothers and sisters in Christ.

Our Lord once said that the Church is like a house. It has three floors: militant, expectant, triumphant; but it is all under one roof. On the ground floor are you and I; militant against, fighting against, sin and temptation. On the first floor are the holy dead, the faithful departed, in God’s hospital, being made perfect and fit for heaven; and we here can help them very much by going to Requiem Masses (“may they rest in peace”) on their behalf, and by saying our prayers for them. It may also be – and I think it most likely – that they too are helping us by their prayers, though we cannot be quite sure of this yet. On the top floor, up in the sunlight, always seeing God face to face, are the members of The Church Triumphant; the men and women, boys and girls, who were once people in this world, just like us, but have now done with fighting, have won the battle, have lost all trace of sin and imperfection, and are young and well and happy again in the visible presence of God – and know that they will never, throughout eternity, leave him. We are in communion and fellowship with them too. We do not pray for them: there is no need. But we often ask them, our brothers and sisters, to pray for us – and for our dead on the middle floor – that we may all one day be where they are. …

“The Resurrection of the body.” This means your body, old boy, and your father’s too. Not only our Lord’s body on Easter Sunday; it was earlier in the Creed that you said that you believed in the resurrection of that. But yours; and mine. Because we are Christians, we believe that some day and some how, after death, our souls and bodies will come together again, and be reunified for ever. St. Paul has written a lot about this; you will read about it when you are older. … So, you see, you need have no fear of you and your dad being unable to recognize one another when you meet again on the top floor. So, cheer up, old man. That same St. Paul says that, because we are Christians, we are not to be “sorry, as men without hope” for those who have died. Because we are men, and because we had – and still have, and always will have – such fathers, we are to be always their good sons, living the sort of lives they would have us live, forgetting them never. All will be well, in God’s good time. Keep smiling. You have not lost your dad. God never wastes anything that he has made; and he made you and him. No love is ever lost; for “God is love.” God simply loves your love of him, and of your father. Go on loving both, until this life of yours ends too; and then you will find, as have millions of Christians before you, that it is all right – and always was all right, really.


From Fr Wilson’s book East Window. Fr Wilson was noted for his many publications, including the famous Haggerston Catechism and his descriptions of life in an East End London parish. Early in his ministry he was involved in the Anglo-Catholic Congresses in 1920 and 1923.

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Benedict XVI on the Limits of Papal Infallibility

Since this topic is again a bit of a talking-point, I will (again) quote
some words of Cardinal Ratzinger, which seem to me the most remarkable
observation made on Papal powers - by someone who subsequently became Pope - for
well over a thousand years.

"After the Second Vatican Council, the impression arose that the pope
really could do anything ... especially if he were acting on the mandate of an
ecumenical council ... In fact, the First Vatican Council had in no way defined
the pope as an absolute monarch. On the contrary, it presented him as the
guarantor of obedience to the revealed Word. The pope's authority is bound to
the Tradition of Faith ... Even the pope can only be a humble servant of its
lawful development and abiding integrity and identity ... The authority of the
pope is not unlimited; it is at the service of Sacred Tradition."

Since this is how Benedict XVI sees papal power, how can any
catholic-minded person have any objection to it?

---
Also noteworthy in this connection is the Papal Coronation oath in use for centuries, which contains the same idea that the Supreme Pontiff cannot, to suit his fancy, alter the Tradition of the Church or add anything not congruent with it. But we already knew that, didn't we?

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

All Souls at Grace and St Peter's


Grace and Saint Peter's Church
707 Park Avenue
Baltimore, MD 21201



ALL SOULS DAY
Monday, November 2

Low Masses:
11:30, 12:00, 12:30

Solemn Requiem Mass and Absolution at the Catafalque
6:00 pm

Missa pro defunctis - Cristobal de Morales
Followed by a dinner, to which all are welcome.
Thanks to Fr John Alexander for the image.

Tuesday, October 06, 2009


First, let me again apologize for the lack of posting here. There are other things to be done, and we must press on.


Two announcements: Our old friend (?) Bishop Pookie, Titular Archbishop of Bangor, Maine, has been invited to pontificate at the Annual Mass and Meeting of the St Thomas Cranmer Society for the Promotion of Heresy and Schism this February at a parish church yet to be determined. In addition to Bishop Pookie, the key-note speaker will be Bishop J.S. Spong, to whom no fruit shall ever be given (sorry - inside joke).


In addition, the fine blog Anglican Wanderings is back. Please see the link in the sidebar.

Wednesday, September 09, 2009

ANGLICANISM

Please read this explanation of the term Anglicanism by Fr John Hunwicke, SSC.

Anglicanism is a nonsense religion, a dim, pathetic, ridiculous superstition, developed within the last 150 or so years. It relates to what is doctrinally distinctive about those in communion with the See of Canterbury. Sometimes it is expressed in terms of a via media: some sort of Middle Way between the excesses, on the one side, of Protestantism, on the other side, of Popery.

Sometimes it appears in the form of an idea called the Branch Theory, in which Christ's Church is composed of three Branches: the Roman; the Greek; and the Anglican. No explanation is ever thought necessary as to why the 'Monophysite' Syrian Orthodox Christians who meet in S Thomas's are not a 'branch', or why the Methodists, or the Swedish Lutherans, or the Moravians, are excluded. Little consideration is ever given to the possibility that the Great Latin Church of the West might be deemed a Via media between those Western ecclesial bodies, including the Anglicans, who were exposed to the 'Reformation' with its radical denials of Tradition and of Sacramentality, and the Orthodox.Sometimes this 'Anglicanism' is constructed by looking at the Prayer Book and the Articles. Sometimes, by examining carefully the writings of those divines, Caroline or Tractarian, who attempted to modify the damage done to the Provinces of Canterbury and York by the 'Reformation'. In each case, the unspoken assumption is that Anglicanism started with the breach from Rome. You have the bizarre situation in which Anglicans cheerfully claim to be the ancient Catholic Church of this land, yet if you asked any of them "Who founded the Church of England?", 95% would reply "Henry VIII". (I regarded it as a triumph of my 6-year ministry in Devon that, after I put that question onto a pub-quiz, my parishioners were a little uncertain whether the answer on Father's answer-sheet would be S Gregory or S Augustine.) The legal position in English law of the Church of England is that she was founded in 596; yet pretty well anybody would tell you that she started with the breach from Rome.

Funnily enough, there is a distinctive doctrine of the poast-Reformation Church of England, yes, just one; or rather, there was until comparatively recent times: the doctrine of Royal Supremacy. In a raw and murderous form under Henry VII, this meant that the Monarch could change the doctrine of the Church upon a moment's whimsy or confiscate the chalice in each parish church if he found himself strapped for cash. In the more gracious period of the Stuarts, when the C of E, instead of resenting the tyranny of the Tudors, rather welcomed the patronage and protection of a kindlier dynasty, this transformed itself into the dogma of Passive Resistance: that even a bad monarch ought to be resisted by nothing more violent than passive non-collaboration. This is what distinguished Anglicans from both Protestant and Popish dissent. Neither Catholics, nor Evangelicals, nor Liberals, make this the basis of their understanding of 'Anglicanism' nowadays.The sooner that 'Anglicanism' is shovelled into the trash-can of History, the better.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Things


Sorry for the lack of posts. Since nobody reads this anymore, I doubt it has caused much concern or despair.


It seems that the General Convention is going on right now. So far, it's proving to be even more ridiculous than usual, but we expected that. I still think Bishop Ackerman had the right idea about all of this. He suggested at the Lambeth Conference last summer that if The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion are really serious about funding the Millennium Development Goals they'd cancel the Lambeth Conference and General Convention, and give the millions of dollars it takes to put them on to the United Nations. But no. The General Convention goes on as usual, for far longer than it need go on, costing far more than it need cost, while the deputies and bishops all revel in their cocktail parties and vacation time at Disney Land. There have been resolutions presented year after year calling for a curtailment of General Convention, but few seem interested. I suppose it's just a chance to get together and congratulate each other on how progressive and inclusive they are. I'm not really paying any attention to it. There's so much on the internet to read and watch but it's all extremely boring and silly, when not scandalous and horrifying. It hasn't been at all hard to ignore it.


Meanwhile, in the real world, real people are praying the Rosary, going to Mass, saying their prayers, and getting on with the business of living a Christian life.


For more edifying, intelligent, and interesting reading, please visit Fr Hunwicke's Liturgical Notes. There you will find a wealth of excellent posts on a variety of subjects ranging from Anglican Catholicism to the Liturgical year.
Our Lady of Walsingham, pray for us!
Mary, Mother of the Church, pray for us!
St John Fisher, pray for us!
St Thomas More, pray for us!
St Pius V, pray for us!

Tuesday, June 09, 2009

GRACE AND ST PETER'S CHURCH, BALTIMORE
SUNDAY IN THE OCTAVE OF CORPUS CHRISTI
Sunday, 14 June 2009
10:00 am
High Mass, Procession, and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament
Mass for 3 Voices - William Byrd

CHURCH OF THE RESURRECTION, NEW YORK
CORPUS CHRISTI
High Mass, Procession, & Benediction
Thursday, 11 June 2009
7:00 pm
Sermon: Father Paul Baggott,
Vicar of Our Most Holy Redeemer, Clerkenwell, London
Music: P. Narcis Casanoves (1747 - 1799)
Missa a 6 Veus, Lauda Sion, Tantum ergo (North American Premieres)
A reception follows.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Whitsunday E & B

WHITSUNDAY
May 31, 2009

10:00 a.m. Procession and High Mass
Mass of the Quiet Hour - George Oldroyd
Come Holy Ghost - Thomas Attwood

4:30 p.m. Solemn Evensong and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament
Followed by the Parish Picnic to which all are welcome
Magnificat and Nunc dimittis in D Major - Herbert Brewer
Come Holy Ghost, The Maker - Cedric Thorpe-Davie
Preces & Responses - Heathcote Statham

Grace and Saint Peter's Church
707 Park Avenue
Baltimore, Maryland 21201