A busy weekend coming up at St Clement’s. High Mass three days running!
On Saturday at 11, Fr Sipe will sing the Mass of the Presentation of Our Lady to commemorate the 20th Anniversary of his priesthood, and in thanksgiving for his recent promotion to Full Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. This will be followed by a lunch for sixty or seventy people: friends, colleagues and parishioners. Already the smell of baking hams is drifting from the church kitchen.
Then on Sunday, the last Sunday after Pentecost, I will sing the High Mass, and our Guest Preacher will be Brother Steven Haws, a member of the Community of the Resurrection from Mirfield, Yorkshire, in the north of England. Brother Steven is an old St Clement’s member, and it is always good to welcome him back.
To crown it all, Monday is the Feast of our Patron Saint Clement, and our Guest Preacher that day will be Fr Fred Robinson, Rector of the Church of the Redeemer, Sarasota, Florida. Fr Robinson will be the last of our special preachers in this 150th Anniversary Year of the opening of St Clement’s. It has been a great year, and the many special preachers have given it a special flavour. Next year we will be back to normal (if St Clement’s can ever be called normal!), though I plan to vary the preaching diet with some of the local clergy.
“That is one mark of the genius of God – His gifts come so regularly yet they are never weary. They reach us a thousand times, but the thousand and first time they are still wonderful, surprising, touched with dew. If a church is wearisome I utterly distrust it. I should never allow my children to be brought up in it. And I distrust dull churches, however orthodox they be, just because they are hopelessly out of touch with June. I should like my children to feel that all things are a unity: that the summer and the sacraments are kin; that the pealing of the organ and the song of birds are part of the one hymn that rises heavenward, for the Creator and the Father of Christ are one.”
(From “The League with the Stones”)
“I question if we think enough of the protection of the Church of Christ. We recognise the protection of the home. We know what it means for childhood and for youth. Without it and all the discipline it brings, what a poor affair were human life! But never forget that God who in his mercy has given us the protection of the home, has given us too the protection of the Church. It guards us in our infancy by baptism, and by all the keeping which baptism implies. It guards us by its congenial fellowship, and by its constant opportunities of service. It guards us by its recurring worship, nowhere more needed than in town and city where men are so apt to lose in crowded days the vision and the voice of God. You can do something to protect the Church; but the Church can do far more to protect you. Just as you needed the home when you were children, do you need the Church to the last hour you live. And the joy of that tender guardianship is this, that it checks nothing which is good and beautiful, but fosters everything that has been planted there, helping it to the glory of its growth.”
(From “The Garden of the Church”)
“I do not wonder that the crowd was stricken when Jesus looked round about on them with anger. I do not wonder that when Jesus turned and looked on Simon Peter in the hall, the heart of Peter was broken with the look, and he went out into the night and wept. Will anyone say that was a look of anger? My brother and sister, it was a look of love. And the past was in it, and all its tender memories, and the dear dead days that were beyond recall. And it saved Peter when the night was past to think that the Lord had turned and looked at him; but first down to the very depths it judged him. No wild rebuke would ever have done that. It would have hardened him, and made him reprobate. No word of Sinai, given in flame and thunder, would ever have carried conviction to that heart. One look of Christ did more than all the Decalogue. One look of Christ outmatched a thousand threatenings. One look of Christ showed in what height and depth the Father had given all judgement to the Son.”
From “The Judgement of the Son”)
I’m tired of Church politics, so I’ll just describe 24 hours. That should be less contentious!
Yesterday evening, I spent two hours at the Cathedral chapter, of which I am a member. Most of the time was taken up with next year’s proposed budget, but there were a few amusing sidelines, such as the question of how the Cathedral’s dedication was spelled. Was it Our Saviour or Our Savior? I assumed it was – and should be, considering where we are – Our Savior, but no, it seems that all its documents spell it in the English way. I guess it was set up before the American simplification of spelling began. No one was very impressed by my solution, which was to rename it “Our Most Holy Redeemer” after the lovely church of that name in Clerkenwell, London. I did also suggest that to call it “Philadelphia Cathedral” tout simple was a bit arrogant, when there were several other Cathedrals in the city.
That morning I had said Mass at 7 a.m. when I substituted St Margaret of Scotland for St Gertrude, since Margaret is the Secondary Patron of my native land. She was the wife of King Malcolm and like many a modern wife, spent a great deal of his money on her favourite (note English spelling!) things. Happily these were not the latest fashions in clothing but rather churches, hospices, schools, orphanages. She must have been a formidable lady, but produced a son who has also been canonized, St David, King of Scotland, which I think is a compliment to the mother, just as I always look with greater respect at any priest whose son has also become a priest.
This morning it was St Hugh of Lincoln, and tomorrow will be St Hilda of Whitby, so it is turning out to be a rather British week. On St Hilda’s Day my intention will be for Canon Martin Warner, one of the Guardians of our Shrine of Our Lady of Clemency, and a Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, who will shortly be consecrated Bishop of Whitby.
After Mass I had a flurry of domestic things to do: a visit to my eye doctor for a check up – result, I can still read the smallest line on her charts, which seemed to disappoint her. But she cheered up when I told her I wept a lot! Though I think she thought it was an eye default rather than the state of the Church!
Then I went to the Reading Terminal Market, which sounds like a sale room for old books but is in fact a delightful mixture of stalls, from Amish farm products to cookery books and hand-made chocolates. All I had to do was order a turkey for my Thanksgiving dinner next week. Since I am having seven friends to dinner, I wanted a twelve pound bird, but found the choice was between a 10 to 12 pounder or a 12 to 14 pound bird. Naturally I chose the latter, which means I will have a lot of delicious left-overs.
The last thing I had to do this evening was to chair the monthly meeting of St Clement’s Vestry, which managed to conduct all its business in just thirty minutes. Then I had dinner with two friends in a little Italian restaurant nearby, which specializes in the north Italian cuisine I came to love when I lived in Milan.
So, as you can see, it has been a strenuous 24 hours!
Someone asks me to write my views about the validity of Anglican Holy Orders. I could, of course defend their validity from the time of the Reformation till today with the sound arguments so many have used against the Papal Encyclical which pronounced them totally null and void. Which, of course, is why the RCs reordain Anglican priests who change Churches.
But all this is now quite unnecessary, since – at least in the UK – most Bishops were consecrated with Old Catholic bishops being co-consecrators. The RC Church recognizes the validity of Old Catholic orders, so there is no reason now to deny the validity of Anglican bishops and priests whose consecration or ordination was by bishops in the Old Catholic succession.
I have been to the consecration of several Scottish Episcopalian bishops, all of whom had an Old Catholic bishop, who (as is their custom) laid hands on the new bishop separately, rather than in the usual Anglican “scrum”. So, since I was ordained by one such Episcopalian bishop, my orders are as “valid” as any Old Catholic or RC priest’s.
Not that I have ever lost a wink of sleep over this question – a God who paid any attention to such a weird view of what makes a priest valid would be a queer fish!
Much of the latest proposals from Rome about Anglicans becoming Roman Catholic seems to belong in the realm of fantasy rather than reality.
One of the most absurd proposals is that married Anglican Bishops who convert can be reordained, but not as bishops, only as priests. But to sweeten the blow to their egos, they will be able to be “ordinaries” in charge of ex-Anglican congregations, and ( what a relief!) will be allowed to carry on wearing purple cassocks, copes and mitres, pectoral crosses, episcopal rings and all other vestments of a Bishop.
So people like the Bishop of Fulham, who, as far as Rome is concerned, is not a Bishop at the moment, will be ordained as an RC priest, but then allowed to continue to dress as the Bishop he never was! What is the point? Humpty Dumpty said “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean”, and this seems to be the Pope’s view too.
Of course, the Holy Father must have pretty awful advisers, or he would realize that English Anglo-Catholics are not going to be tempted to swim the Tiber by being allowed to keep “valued elements of Anglican liturgy and spirituality”. Most of them despise the Prayer Book and use the roman Mass and recite the Roman breviary. For many of them, it is only because they are married that they have not become normal Roman Catholics years ago.
The more I hear the growing sound of back-pedalling among Anglican clergy here and in the UK, the more I suspect that the Anglican/Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) had better get on with its sounder and less Looking-Glass methods of promoting friendship between our two Communions. Adult Christians should be able to face the fact that even if Roman Catholics and Anglicans do not believe the same things about doctrine or morality (and especially about who has the right to decide on these things), and then get on with living the Christian life and loving each other – and even Baptists and Russian Orthodox and Presbyterians – to say nothing of the rest of the world for which Christ died.
Blog-block must be the same as Log-Jam, I guess! I need some lumberjacks to get the jam cleared. I’m sure some of you must fancy yourselves as lumberjacks, so help me by suggesting topics or subjects for me to blog about. If you look at my tags, that may inspire you more than it inspires me – today at least. Maybe dinner tonight with good friends will get the blog rolling again.
The Anglo-Catholic equivalent of Swine Flu is Roman Fever, and very few of us escape it. But the particular strain of this fever changed totally after Vatican II, and now it seems to be mutating again. Maybe my readers will be interested (and amused?) to hear of my own brush with the malady.
After taking my degree in modern languages from Edinburgh University in 1963, I went to Coates Hall, the Scottish Episcopal Theological College in Edinburgh. I meant to be there for the three year course leading to ordination, but God (at least I hope it was He!) had other ideas.
Because of my three year’s residence at the University, I knew all the staff of the College, except the new Principal, Canon Kenneth Woolcombe, who had taken the place of Richard Wimbush, who had been elected Bishop of the romantic diocese of Argyll and the Isles. “Dickie”, as he was universally known, was a shy, friendly man who had been very helpful in furthering my vocation to the Priesthood. The new Principal, Kenneth Woolcombe, was an unknown quantity, and – to the disapproval of some – he came to us from the Church of England!
I am sure that Canon Woolcombe was told before taking up the post that the Scottish Episcopal Church was ultra-Conservative and stuck in the mud, needing a good shake up. Where better to start than with the new generation of priests training at its national college? Canon Woolcombe was just the man to do the shake-up. His method, as I now realize, was that of pulling down in order to build up again. But at the time, some of us found the pulling down a bit too much.
No doctrine or practice was allowed to pass unchallenged. For the first time for many of us, we were faced with the claims of liberal Biblical scholars that the Bible could not be relied on for historical accuracy, no, not even the Gospels. And our narrow assumptions about Church history, and the effortless superiority of the Episcopal Church and its “incomparable” Liturgy were also challenged by a much more skeptical view of how the Church had developed from its earliest days. This was all done with the laudable intention of getting us to think for ourselves and not simply accept everything on authority, but for some of us it went too far.
I came to know Kenneth Woolcombe much later when he had been Bishop of Oxford and then a Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, and I loved his irreverent asides, and knew him to be a man of deep faith. But at the age of twenty, I found some of his asides difficult to forgive. For example, he claimed that the verse of the Office Hymn we sang every night at Compline:
“From all ill dreams defend our eyes,
From nightly fears and fantasies;
Tread underfoot our ghostly foe,
That no pollution we may know”
was simply a primitive appeal to God to stop the devil causing us to masturbate! There was no suggestion that the writer of the hymn might have been wise enough to know that there were worse forms of pollution, such as malice, pride, anger, etc, that might enter our minds that night. As I said, it was all done to shock, and it certainly succeeded. Of course some of us retaliated, and for the next week or two half the voices in chapel just stopped singing that verse. Knowing Kenneth as I do now, I am sure this rebellion delighted him, but he never said a word.
Like most Anglo-Catholic ordinands, I had had bouts of “Roman Fever”. a questioning whether it was right to persevere in the Anglican Communion, when so much of it was less than Catholic, at least as we understood “Catholic”. The Church of Rome seemed so much steadier, its Latin Mass beautiful and the same throughout the world. Coates Hall had a good relationship with the Roman Catholic seminary in the Scottish Borders, and when we had visited there, I was very impressed by their Spiritual Director, Fr Jock Dalrymple. His quiet manner hid a deep spirituality and a great gift of listening.
Because of the contrast between Fr Jock and Kenneth Woolcombe’s shock tactics, I was strongly drawn to “cross the Tiber”. I confided this to Fr Jock and we met several times to explore what I really believed and what I should do about it. There was no pressure put upon me at all; in fact, Fr Jock swiftly banished my naive assumptions that all was sweetness and light in the Roman Communion. He loved his own Church but was well aware that it too had its faults, and he insisted that I should have the whole picture before I made any decision.
Meanwhile, my unhappiness had come to the notice of the former Principal of Coates Hall, Bishop Wimbush, who summoned me to see him. He said I should wait and study the question much more before making any decision. Perhaps he also realized that Coates Hall was not the best place for me to do this. At any rate, he suggested that I should go and read a Theology degree at Oxford, and within a few weeks had packed me off to see his old friend, Dr Austin Farrer, Warden of Keble College, Oxford.
In Austin, as I have written in my post of May 2009, I met a genuine saint, and the fact that his sanctity was nurtured in the Church of England’s Catholic tradition did as much as anything to dispel my Roman fever.
At the time, I had little idea of how privileged I was to be treated like this and admitted to Oxford simply because I was having Roman fever. But the most important thing I learned from the experience was that the understanding and advice I received from both the Episcopal and Roman Catholic directors to whom I had taken my dilemma was the same. Neither side thought it was wrong to remain in my old Church, or to change to a new one. They were both more concerned that I knew what I was doing, and that I did it for the right reasons. Both were totally lacking in either bigotry or triumphalism.
I hope this spirit will inform those who are contemplating leaving either the Anglican or the Roman Catholic Church at the present time. Whether they are going to swim the Tiber or the Thames, I hope they will remember that the water of either river conveys Baptism to eternal life.
Keep December 6 at 5 p.m. free and send for a ticket now, or you may miss one of the great musical events of our 150th Anniversary. The Advent Carol Festival on the Feast of St Nicholas will be sung by what has been described as the best church choir on the East Coast with, on the organ, Peter Conte, who is recognized as one of the best organists in America, as his country-wide recitals attest, not to mention his playing of the largest working organ in the world, the Wanamaker organ here in Philadelphia.
There is going to be a great demand for seats, so please apply now, with the suggested donation of $20 (or much more, if you can afford it!) All the costs of the Festa will be covered by a few generous donors, so the proceeds of the evening itself will all go to the St Clement’s charities. Not one cent will be spent on admin, I assure you.
The secular world now begins so-called “Christmas” celebrations from November on, and the Church has to go along with this in some cases, such as schools, where services are held before the Feast itself. But with this Advent Fest, St Clement’s is proclaiming that the season of preparing for Christmas is not only important but beautiful. Half the pleasure of a special day is in the preparation, and this is so of both Christmas and Easter. Advent and Lent are beautiful seasons, and vitally necessary in a world where governments are back in the old Roman business of keeping the mob happy with “bread and circuses”, where all is tinsel and fools’ gold. The Church has the sense to dress in purple for two seasons a year and to talk honestly and openly about judgement, self-sacrifice, suffering and death – all anathema to the Disneyland, soap-opera, self-deluding lives led by so many.
So come and pack St Clement’s on December 6 and leave behind sufficient funds for our Helping Others Group to perform some of the corporal works of mercy in the winter ahead.
St Clement’s will be one of the few churches in America that will substitute the normal Sunday Mass with a special Requiem Mass, though this will be quite common in the UK. After the First World War, a profound silence used to fall over the UK at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, when all traffic stopped, all conversations were cut off, and a whole nation stood for two minutes of silence to remember those who fell in the war. Then the silence was transferred to the nearest Sunday, and bit by bit it was observed only in church or at the touching little gatherings out of doors at the war memorials in every village in the land. And even later, many voices were raised against having the remembrance ceremonies at all, saying that it was so long after the World Wars that the two minute silence was out of date.
But someone’s son was blown to pieces yesterday in Afghanistan; someone’s husband gave his life last week trying to defuse a booby trap in Iraq; most of us, sadly, have relatives or friends who bear injuries, physical or mental, from acts of war and terrorism. How many of us have avoided the scars of horror, anger, pity, despair, which followed from the sights we saw only a few years ago on television as the Twin Towers crumbled to the ground?
We still need to remember these things. If we forget them, they will be repeated; but if we keep them in mind, we may learn from them and may just find ways of stopping them happening again. Burying our heads in the sand is not the answer: someone will always come along and kick our rear end thus exposed!
So when we stand for the two minutes silence tomorrow before the Mass, I will be praying for all who have given their lives in the wars of the past century and of this new one. It is no good calling these wars “senseless” and trying to put them behind us, and stop dwelling on them. They were not and are not senseless; but they make sense only to those who believe that there are worse things than death, things like standing by and watching the innocent being tortured and killed; things like seeing one’s family and loved ones forced into slavery.
And where better to proclaim this message of liberation than in the Mass? The Mass makes every Sunday Remembrance Sunday, for Jesus instituted it, saying “Do this in remembrance of me”. The recalling of the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross is what the Mass is all about, and
no crucifix can be bloody enough to represent the agonies, physical and mental and spiritual which our Lord suffered.
It is good for us to gaze on the Cross, though it shows such suffering, because it also shows that God is right here in the midst of our own sufferings. He will not treat us like robots by making it impossible for us to sin and suffer the consequences of sin (and that is supremely what war is all about), but he shows his solution to the whole mess mankind has made of this creation by dying for those he loves.
It is a far better thing to die at twenty one trying to save a comrade’s life than to live comfortably and selfishly into one’s nineties, doing nothing or very little for anyone. In the eternities, it will be confirmed for us what we begin to learn here in the Christian Faith, that it is the quality of love in our lives that counts, not the number of years we live.
Tomorrow, for two minutes we will think on these things.
Tonight, all over Britain, bonfires will burn. For weeks, children have been piling up branches and old furniture and anything else they can find that is combustible, and the pyres have risen on village greens, in gardens, in the countryside. And mothers have been badgered into making “Guys” – life-size rag dolls, dressed like scarecrows in old clothes. And for the past week or so, children have been hanging around on street corners, begging, in the time-honoured phrase “A penny for the Guy” (though today if all they got was a penny, great would be the indignation of the little darlings!). With this money, fireworks are bought, to be set off round the bonfire.
My British readers need no explanation for these folk customs, but some of you Americans may be wondering what I’m talking about. Well, believe it or not, it is about the attempt in 1605 to blow up Parliament in protest at the persecution and execution of Catholics. Whether it was a prelude to an uprising to assassinate King James VI & I and restore the Roman Catholic Church is a debatable question, but that is what was widely believed at the time. Pope Paul V had thundered excommunications and declared that it was no sin to overturn the monarch, so there was understandably a mighty hatred of the Papacy and its political manoeverings.
The plot failed; the plotters were executed; and the day was entered into the Prayer Book as a Day of Thanksgiving for the preservation of monarch and parliament. It was dropped in 1859, but the folk ceremonies continued. Even to this day, in Lewes, Sussex, it is an effigy of the Pope that is burned, not Guy Fawkes.
Today, there is little anti-Catholic feeling in the UK – except in Northern Ireland, of course. But since Benedict XVI issued his pastoral invitation to disaffected Anglicans to join his Church, mutterings about a new Popish Plot have been heard far and wide. Most outside observers seem to view the pastoral provision as a thinly disguised recruiting scheme for a Church that is short of priests thanks to celibacy rules and the fall-out of scandal.
More informed theories include one that may well prove true, though I doubt if the Pope gave it a moment’s thought. This is the view that the General Synod of the Church of England can now breathe a sigh of relief, and stop bending over backwards to try to keep within the fold Anglo-Catholics who will not accept women priests and Bishops. I am quite sure this is not true, but what’s truth got to do with rumours of a nice juicy Popish Plot?
Before we start collecting the faggots for Benedict XVI’s bonfire (now there’s a punny idea!) we should take a deep breath of skepticism. As I’ve said before, there are many more Roman Catholics flowing out of the RC Church than Anglicans flowing into it (for one thing, there are a lot more RCs to flow) and the changeover probably does all of them good. Let’s have a real Christian revolution and help anyone who wants to change Churches. We could even have farewell parties with fireworks and bonfires, and burn effigies of the Devil on them – after all, he’s the only one who profits from our petty squabbles.
