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.
In 1995, I went to Hamburg, as Vicar-General of the Anglican Diocese in Europe, to represent the Church of England at a ceremony in the Cathedral, on the fiftieth anniversary of the fire-bombing of Hamburg by the Allied air forces.
The service itself was very moving, as representatives from cities such as Coventry and St Petersburg recalled the awful experiences their own cities had gone through. But the most moving thing of all was that from early morning until late at night, various young people’s voices read out the names of those who had been killed. German voices were followed by Russians, and they were followed by English voices. And the most moving aspect of all was that these quiet voices went on and on and on during the entire service. Many of us were crying at the enormity of the evil we had inflicted on each other.
I’ve never attempted to read out the vast number of names in the Requiem books of any of the churches I have served. It has always seemed enough to lay all the names upon the altar while the All Souls Requiem is said. But maybe it would do us good to hear the entire list read out through a quiet microphone all during the Mass. I know that I was never so in communion with the departed than during that service in Hamburg.
A new month begins in a few hours time, and it will be a busy one – but also a month full of good things.
Tomorrow, All Saints Day, we have a lovely setting of the Mass, the majestic Messe Solennelle by Louis Vierne. Our guest preacher is Fr David Kennedy, Rector of the Church of the Holy Guardian Angels, Lantana, Florida, who is the Past Master of the Society of the Holy Cross.
The next day, Monday, is All Souls Day, when there will be Requiem Masses, culminating in a High Mass of Requiem and Absolution of the Departed at the Catafalque at 7 in the evening, all sung to the haunting traditional Plainsong setting.
On Sunday, November 8, the 11 o’clock High Mass will be a Solemn Requiem for those who have given their lives in the defence of freedom in the wars of the last century (and, indeed of this). Because St Clement’s has had British Rectors in Fr Peter Laister and myself, the church will be decorated with the red poppies which became the symbol of the First World War, because after the guns were silenced, the devastated, barren land threw up thousands of red poppies.
On the last Sunday of the Church’s year, November 22, our preacher will be a member of the Community of the Resurrection of Mirfield, Yorkshire, Brother Steven Hawes, who was once a member of St Clement’s. Br Steven’s mother lives in Philadelphia, and so we are blessed with his visit home once a year.
The very next day, Monday, November 23, is one of the greatest days in our Calendar, the Feast of our Patron, St Clement of Rome. We have the last of our 150th Anniversary preachers that evening, Fr Fred Robinson, Rector of the Church of the Redeemer, Sarasota, Florida. No one else in our area, of course, keeps that feast; so we have a great many visitors, and I hope they will increase more and more.
These are only the special joys of November. The ordinary joys are of the daily Mass and Evensong and confessions; the Deanery Clericus (no, honestly, it is a joy to meet with my fellow clergy of this city – I may not agree with every one of their theological opinions, but I love their variety); a Requiem for a faithful old member; the Cathedral Chapter (I’m not quite sure what I am doing there!); a special Mass of Thanksgiving for a colleague’s anniversary; our own Vestry meeting; a Thanksgiving dinner in the Rectory for friends whom I have known from forty years ago to just a couple of years ago.
So there’s my November (or some of it) which begins tomorrow. By the way, who was the ass who first said: “You can’t put the clock back”? Of course you can, and I’m just off to do it.
Much will be written about Fr John Heidt in the coming days. He was a remarkable Anglo-Catholic priest, who served in both the Church of England and the American Episcopal Church, ending his ministry as Canon Theologian of the Diocese of Fort Worth.
I want to write just a few personal memories of Fr John, which I’d like to share.
First, we arrived at Oxford at the same time. I came south from Edinburgh and John and Katharine his wife flew over from Texas, and we met in the drawing room of the Warden of Keble, Dr Austin Farrer. John and Katharine had been given the apartment at the top of the Warden’s Lodging for their time in Oxford, and very soon their hospitable kitchen was a meeting place for many of us. It was there I met so many of those Americans who are still my friends now that I live in their country. Austin introduced us, saying something like: “Well, you are both exiles from foreign lands; you can have many a happy hour criticizing the English!”
John was an anima naturaliter theologica as well, of course, as naturaliter catholica. He loved nothing more than to sit up to the wee sma’ hours debating (over many a glass of wine) any and every hot topic exercising the Church of the 1960’s. And the strange thing is, these were almost the same topics that are exercising the Church today. John had a gift of being able to write on such subjects and explain them to non-experts, and to this end he was always happiest when he was editing theological magazines, some of which he even founded. Such publications came and went, but John was always a willing contributer. He has kept this gift to the end, dying as editor of “Forward Now!”, the monthly magazine of Forward in Faith – North America.
For fifteen years, Fr John was Vicar of Up Hatherley in Gloucestershire. This is one of the few Anglo-Catholic churches in the Diocese of Gloucester, and Fr John soon had it full to the doors. He did this by a combination of his outgoing personality, the warm welcome he and Katharine gave to anyone who called at the Vicarage, and his willingness to try unusual forms of worship. I will never forget the astonishment on the face of the visiting Bishop who was to preside at a High Mass of Thanksgiving for some significant occasion, when – instead of Elgar’s “Ecce Sacerdos Magnus”, for example – he entered the church to a vibrant rock band, drums rolling and cymbals clashing. I’m certain this was not Fr John’s favourite style, but at the party afterwards (and this was no coffee hour, I assure you!) I met the rock singer and discovered that – leather jeans, earrings and all – he was about to go to seminary and train for the priesthood. And all because Fr John Heidt had convinced him that was the most exciting job in the world and that God would show him how to use his musical gifts in his ministry.
I am sure many other such stories can, and will, be told, now that Fr John has gone on to mediate between Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas, to check up on how many angels can really dance on the head of a needle, and enquire what Francis Xavier really thinks about the South India controversy – not to mention what God thinks about Bishop Iker!
He has gone on in the hands of a loving Father who is welcoming him home as one who loved and served him to the utmost of his ability here on earth. And there will already be those waiting for him who owe their own faith to Fr John, just as there are many still here on earth who thank God for his witness. And that includes me.
The generous gesture by His Holiness Benedict XVI in offering to set up an Anglican Rite within the Roman Catholic Church has inspired the Archbishop of Canterbury (so I am told) to make a reciprocal gesture. His encyclical on the subject (carried, as is the Anglican way, by a letter to the Times) is expected at any moment.
For a long time, it has been clear that there are a large number of Roman Catholics who have been dismayed at the direction their Church has been taking, and who have cast envious eyes on the freedoms enjoyed by their Anglican brethren.
These Roman Catholics are distressed by the increasingly reactionary conservatism within their own Church. They see great efforts being made to accommodate the Lefevrists who split from Rome after the Second Vatican Council, some of whom have even said that the papal throne is vacant and that the modern version of the Mass is protestant and heretical. One of their bishops is a neo-fascist who claims that the German persecution of the Jews has been greatly exaggerated by the Jews for their own purposes. These people decry the removal of the prayer for the conversion of the “perfidious Jews” from the Good Friday prayers.
The likely converts to the Anglican form of Catholicism watch with sadness as Catholic theologians are condemned by the Roman Curia for daring to speculate that some of the latest definitions of dogma such as Papal Infallibility might be a hindrance to the unity of all Christians which Vatican II proclaimed as a vital goal for the Church. Or that poor Paul VI was bullied by conservatives into refusing to recognize contraception as a God-given answer to an over-populated world.
Many of the Roman Catholics who may well be expected to take advantage of such an offer from the Archbishop of Canterbury will be divorced and remarried, homosexuals, young couples who practise contraception, people who believe that abortion, while always a tragedy, is nevertheless sometimes the lesser of two evils, and that celibacy, while a fine life-style choice for some, is by no means necessary for parish priests.
Then there are the many Roman Catholics who are tired of the modern Mass in bad English, tired of balloons and nuns on guitars, tired of scruffy priests who appear in polyester vestments at the card tables that have taken the place of the marble High Altars. They will rejoice in the beauty of Anglican Evensong in English Cathedrals, Nine Lessons and Carols from Kings College, Cambridge, and most of all (of course) in the glorious Tridentine Mass offered week by week in St Clement’s.
When Lambeth makes this world-shattering announcement, I expect that the great majority of the thousands of priests who have left the Roman Catholic priesthood to embrace the sacrament of matrimony will ask for reception into the Anglican Church (Roman Rite). Unlike the Anglican priests joining the Roman Catholic Church (Anglican Rite), these priests will not need to be reordained.
Of course, as we are beginning to hear from Forward in Faith and other Anglo-Catholic organizations, many of those who welcome the Holy Father’s generous offer would really rather not use the Anglican Prayer Book, but would prefer to be ordinary Roman Catholics. So it may be with some of the RC’s who become Anglican: they might prefer just to use the normal Prayer Book.
But for those who will want to continue to use the Roman Rite while coming into visible communion with the See of Canterbury, St Clement’s stands ready to help his Grace of Canterbury make the converts feel welcome. As I write, videos of the Roman Mass in sixteenth century English (as celebrated in St Clement’s) are being stock-piled in factories, ready to be shipped to the many faithful RC priests and congregations who will be swimming the Thames.
They may find living as Anglicans a bit of a culture shock, and we will want to help them preserve much that is good and fine in their own tradition. I can already hear the Archbishop of Sydney calling on us to be generous in permitting the converts to maintain the Mass in all its fulness; Bishop Schori will soon weigh in (in her intuitive feminine way) with kindly words on the necessity of maintaining the new Anglicans’ love for our Blessed Lady and the Saints; and no doubt the Protestant Truth Society will find the new converts some relics of St Charles Simeon, St Florence Nightingale, and other Anglican stalwarts.
And of course none of this pastoral care for Roman Catholics who have decided that “enough is enough” and that conscience compels them to join the Anglican Church must be allowed to stand in the way of the search for that complete and visible unity which scholars and churchmen have been labouring for over the last century. Nothing else will do in the end. But no one should see Archbishop Rowan’s pastoral provision as anything but a timely help to fellow Christians in distress.
The fact that his announcement may be seen as a little rushed and taken without consultation with the RC church and ecumenical experts (except of course with those of us at St Clement’s, who will be intimately involved) should not be seen as insensitive. Of course as Anglicans we are not so absurd as to believe that anyone’s immortal soul is in danger of hell-fire according to which Church he belongs to, but as an early (and comparatively unknown) version of the Prayer Book puts it: “What’s sauce for the goose, is sauce for the gander”.
It is also reliably reported that it is almost impossible to catch swine flu while swimming either the Tiber or the Thames.
(Now I can remove my tongue from my cheek!)
I had two weddings yesterday, something unheard of in the history of St Clement’s, I think. And, as someone said on another topic: “Very pleasing to Almighty God, and on no account to be repeated!” They were two hours apart, but it was a bit of a rush to clear a couple of hundred people out and get another two hundred in half-way through.
I’ve married people all over Scotland, England and the Continent of Europe in my various jobs before coming to America, and used a variety of rites. But there are some customs that are peculiar to America, though they may have been adopted in Europe too by now.
The one I dislike most is the almost funereal entry procession of the bridesmaids, one at a time and with long intervals between them, though this can sometimes be enlivened by the naughty behaviour of little flower girls or ring bearers. As W.C. Fields once advised actors: “Never appear with animals or children”. I can testify to the danger of both of these: when I was Provost (Dean) of Inverness Cathedral, we had an Epiphany service for a wonderful charity called “Riding for the Disabled”. One little boy, who could not walk, was “The Star in the East” and held up a large silver star from a little cart which was pulled by a donkey. It was all very moving, till the donkey lifted its tail and did what donkeys do. The little boy said: “What a stink!” and dropped the Star. The three Wise Men fell about laughing, and the Verger glared at me, having warned me earlier that this was what would happen.
One of the weddings also had the ceremony of the lighting of a Unity Candle, which I had never done before. This one I rather liked, with it symbolism of taking two separate lights and lighting one bigger light from them. I am just not sure where this fits best into the service; we had it yesterday after the vows and signing of the register.
I almost always use the old Prayer Book wedding service, which is pretty straightforward, though I am always happy for readings to be included. But I have at last given way to pressure, and after the vows and putting on of the rings, I now say: “The Wedding Rite makes no mention of this, but Hollywood insists that I say ‘You may now kiss the bride’.” It is an innocuous custom, I suppose, but would have made more sense if Cranmer had written it in 1549 than it does nowadays when almost every couple has been living together for months if not years, and have presumably done a good deal more than kiss!
However, I hate to appear curmudgeonly, so smile benevolently, and have only once (in Italy of course) had to say “Break”, like a boxing match referee, when the kiss went on – and on – and on!
I like weddings very much (for other people!) but knew an old priest in Scotland, who used to say (when provoked) “Weddings are all right, but I prefer a funeral”, and when people would say to him: “O Father, why on earth is that?” his eyes would twinkle, and he would say: “Well, at least there’s some hope in a funeral”. And n0 – it wasn’t me!
If the proposed Anglican Uniate initiative catches on, I predict that within a few years (or perhaps decades) a Pope will declare priestly celibacy optional for the secular clergy of the Western Rite. This will be because all over the world there will be the Anglican RC Rite churches run by married priests, rectories resounding to the jolly cries of children, Mothers Unions run by the Vicar’s wife. The celibate clergy of the Latin Rite are already voicing discontent that they too cannot have a wife, and surely this can only increase?
Of course I know that there already exist Uniate groups in communion with Rome, but these are mostly of an Eastern sort, and their parishes, clergy and clergy wives hardly impinge on the consciousness of their Western brethren. But when (as many seem to think will happen) there are Anglican Rite RC churches all over America and the UK, this will be a very different matter.
Papal pronouncements on priestly celibacy for the secular clergy have praised it to such an extent that they seem to be condemning their Eastern Uniate brethen to second-class status. I have often wondered at the insensitivity of this, especially since the Popes who have made such statements claim to be the successor of Peter, whose mother-in-law is shown in the Gospel as a fine woman.
The next logical step is for a future Pope to take Scripture seriously when it says that “A bishop shall be the husband of one wife”, and return to the Early Church practice of married bishops. Of course, this provision would rule out not a few of the Anglican bishops who seem at the moment to be keen on becoming Roman Catholics, since I am sure it never meant having two or three wives at the same time, but rather marrying one wife for life and being faithful to that vow, which some of them have found irksome.
If a future Pope takes the title “Peter II”, watch out for fireworks!
Today’s announcement of the new arrangements for receiving disaffected Anglicans into the Roman Catholic Church have been hailed in some quarters as though the Archangel Gabriel had blown his trumpet and ushered in the Kingdom of God.
But the euphoria will soon bite the dust. It is presumably Anglo-Catholics who are expected to go over to Rome, and yet I have grave doubts if the encouragement of an Anglican Rite within the RC Church will attract many. The Society of the Holy Cross and forward in Faith in the UK, for example, consist mostly of priests whose views on the Anglican Liturgy vary from “Quite a nice little Tudor Communion Service” to “nasty Protestant invention”. Most of these priests use the modern Roman Catholic Mass in their parishes, and would be horrified if told they had to use the Prayer Book (of any vintage). And even among convinced Anglo-Catholics there are still many who love the Church of England and its claim to be the Catholic Church of the country. The old jibe that the RC’s in England were “the Italian mission to the Irish” covers the fact that however close in doctrine Anglo-Catholics are to Roman Catholics, there is often a great gulf between them in that undefinable thing called culture or ambiance or just basic ways of living the church’s life.
In the USA, on the other hand, the problems are quite different. Many Anglo-Catholics have already left the Episcopal Church for a variety of reasons, usually very conservative ones, such as a gut-dislike of the modern Mass or women priests or gay Bishops and priests.
Those who left mainly over the Prayer Book tend to be the least Catholic-minded of this group. Many are positively Low Church (not to be confused with Evangelicals) and still regard Rome with distaste. So although they would be happy to have an Anglican-Rite, they see no reason to have it authorised by Rome.
The ones who have left on what might be called “moral” grounds might feel more at home in the Roman Catholic Church. But they are led by Bishops who have committed Holy Matrimony and who will therefore not be allowed to be bishops in the new Anglican Rite (as the latest document states clearly). And, worse than that, some of these bishops have been divorced and remarried, as have many of the priests. And I am sure that almost all of them do not consider contraception a mortal sin, as they would be required to do after conversion. So I give it only a few days before we hear such ex-Episcopalian leaders explaining why the Roman Catholic Anglican Rite might not be Right for them!
And as for those who have left because of gay Anglican priests and bishops, they are going to have a nasty awakening when it dawns on them why celibacy for many Roman Catholic priests and bishops is no problem at all!
