Holy Week and the Ordinariate

I interrupt my self-imposed absence from blogging during Holy Week because I want to comment briefly on the most providentially serendipitous historical context of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham's Holy Week in London.

Taking over Our Lady of the Assumption and Saint Gregory on Warwick Street, the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham this Lent, began Holy Week services in the Anglican Use, of course, with Palm Sunday. But it is the homily of Monsignor Keith Newton for the Chrism Mass that I draw your attention to, as he begins with a quotation from Blessed John Henry Newman, citing a letter Newman wrote to A.J. Hammer in 1845: "To my mind the overbearingly convincing proof is this--were St Athanasius or St Ambrose in London now, they would go to worship, not at St Paul’s Cathedral, but to Warwick Street".

You might remember that Newman later recalled in the Apologia pro vita sua: "I had once been into Warwick Street Chapel, with my father, who, I believe, wanted to hear some piece of music; all that I bore away from it was the recollection of a pulpit and a preacher, and a boy swinging a censer."