A Catholic Convert, a Shrine, a Saint, an Abbey, and a Lady

Father John Hunwicke, formerly an Anglican minister and now a Catholic priest in the Anglican Ordinariate in England, has a blog titled "Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment". Recently he published several posts on an nineteenth century Catholic convert from the Church of England, previously a Presbyterian, and a minister of both churches. This convert is Sir Harry (Henry) Trelawny of Trelawne, Seventh Baronet.

First, Fr Hunwicke describes Trelawny's portrait on the National Portrait Gallery's website. Then some notes on his conversion to Catholicism, a conversion his wife did not share. Fr Hunwicke also describes Sir Trelawny's view of his ordination and priesthood as an Anglican after he became a Catholic--thus dealing with the issue of Anglican Orders, finally decided by Pope Leo XIII. In the third post, Fr Hunwicke quotes Ambrose de Lisle's account of Father Trelawny's ordination in Rome, Pentecost Sunday 1830:

De Lisle's account, which he says he had from Sir Harry and Miss Trelawny the following year, is both circumstantial and credible: " ... going on a visit to Rome, he made the acquaintance of the late Cardinal [Carlo] Odescalchi (portrait above)... Sir Harry told the Cardinal all his convictions, and explained his reasons for believing in the validity of Anglican Orders, and therefore, of his own priesthood. When the Cardinal had heard all he had to say, his Eminence replied that he had no idea there was so much to be adduced in favour of the orders of the Anglican Church, and that he could quite understand Sir Harry's strong feelings on the subject. Still he represented to Sir Harry that, as the custom of the Roman Catholic Church from the commencement of the schism had always been to re-ordain those of the Anglican clergy who returned to her communion, it was was clear that the question concerning their previous orders was a very delicate one, and one that was beset, at all events, with many grave doubts, that, consequently, it was not right in Sir Harry to continue to say Mass without submitting to a conditional re-ordination. Upon this Sir Harry replied to the Cardinal that from the first he had been ready to submit to a conditional re-ordination, but that the Catholic authorities in England would not hear of anything short of an absolute and unconditional rejection of his previous orders. The Cardinal, however, said that he took a different view of the matter, and was prepared to re-ordain Sir Harry with a tacit condition, the sacramental form, of course, remaining untouched. Sir Harry gave his full consent ..."

Then in the fourth post, Fr Hunwicke speculates on who wouldn't ordain Sir Trelawny in England after his conversion in 1810 so that he had to wait until 1830 in Rome.

In the first post, Fr Hunwicke mentions that Sir Harry Trelawny founded a shrine to Our Lady of Light in Clacton on Sea in Essex, so I looked it up and found this website.

The National Shrine of Our Lady of Light, Spouse of the Holy Spirit, a devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary that Trelawny and his daughters brought to England from Brittany, is now maintained by the parish church of Our Lady of Light and Saint Osyth, located in Clacton on Sea (North Sea). Saint Osyth was a (perhaps) martyred saint of the early 8th century and there was of course a religious house founded in her honor, a Priory then Abbey of Augustinian Canons:

An Augustinian priory was founded (fn. 3) in honour of St. Osyth at Chich, probably about the middle of the reign of Henry I, by Richard de Belmeis, bishop of London (1108—27). The founder granted to it the manor of Chich and the churches of Clacton, Southminster, Mayland and Althorne, and Henry I granted the churches of Blythburgh and Stowmarket in Suffolk. Blythburgh afterwards became a cell to St. Osyth's, canons being settled there in or before the reign of Stephen. (fn. 4) The priory at St. Osyth's was converted into an abbey about the middle of the century. It was dedicated to SS. Peter and Paul and St. Osyth. . . .

British History Online also documents the Abbey's dissolution:

In 1538 the convent had licence (fn. 51) to exchange lands, including the manor and rectory of Abberton, with Sir Thomas Audeley; and in the same year an attempt was made through him, as has already been said elsewhere, (fn. 52) to secure the continuance of Colchester and St. Osyth's in the form of secular colleges. But this failed, and on 6 November Cromwell gave orders (fn. 53) for their dissolution. No resistance appears to have been offered by St. Osyth's; for Sir John Seyncler in a letter (fn. 54) to Cromwell on 21 November mentions the abbot as one who was a true subject, and would obey the king without grudge. The abbey, however, did not actually fall until 28 July, 1539, when it was formally surrendered (fn. 55) by John Whederykke, alias Colchester, abbot, Cornelius Williamsun, William Neuman, John Russull, prior, Ralph Dale, Nicholas Bushe, John Harwyche, John Sherman, Richard Wood, John Thorpe, Richard Synyll, William Jolly, Edmund Grai, Robert Sprott, George Thurston and Thomas Haywod. . . . 

This website offers some details about the life and death of a later owner of the Abbey property:

The property was inherited in 1639 by Elizabeth Darcy, daughter of the 3rd Lord Darcy, who married Sir Thomas Savage, afterwards Earl Rivers and Viscount Colchester. Lady Savage inherited Melford Hall in Suffolk on her husband’s death in 1635 and St Osyth Priory from her father in 1639, and in 1641 she was created Countess Rivers in her own right.

Lady Savage was a staunch Catholic and Royalist with the result that she suffered cruel depredations upon her property in the Civil War. In 1642, the rabble sacked her house at St Osyth, chased her to Melford and sacked that too. All the furnishings were stolen or destroyed, and the deer in the park carried off. Lady Savage escaped to London and was forced to compound for her lands, to the extent of being reduced to the debtor’s prison, where she died in 1650.

You may find a portrait of this brave woman here. Her family continued to uphold the Catholic faith and one of her grandsons was accused during the Popish Plot hysteria: the last man to inherit the title of Earl Rivers was a Catholic priest and the title died with him.

So we see the usual combination of success and failure, suffering and perseverance, destruction and resurgence, dissolution and re-establishment in this story: An Anglican minister converts, develops a devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and brings it to England. An Augustinian Abbey and its church are dissolved, repurposed, and destroyed and a parish church preserves the name of a saint from long ago. A woman remains true to her faith, suffers for it and endures until death and her family, for a time at least, remains faithful.

Image Credit (public domain): portrait by Agnes Xavier Trail, a Presbyterian convert (brought into the Church by Carlo Cardinal Odescalchi!

Anglican Orders Redux

As this story from The Tablet recounts, a curia Cardinal is revisiting the issue of the validity of Anglican orders:

One of the Vatican’s top legal minds has opened the way for a revision of the Catholic position on Anglican orders by stressing they should not be written off as “invalid.”

In a recently published book, Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, President of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, calls into question Pope Leo XIII’s 1896 papal bull that Anglican orders are “absolutely null and utterly void.”

“When someone is ordained in the Anglican Church and becomes a parish priest in a community, we cannot say that nothing has happened, that everything is ‘invalid’,” the cardinal says in volume of papers and discussions that took place in Rome as part of the “Malines Conversations,” an ecumenical forum.

“This about the life of a person and what he has given …these things are so very relevant!”

For decades Leo XIII’s remarks have proved to be one of the major stumbling blocks in Catholic-Anglican unity efforts, as it seemed to offer very little room for interpretation or revision.

But the cardinal, whose department is charged with interpreting and revising Church laws, argued the Church today has a “a very rigid understanding of validity and invalidity” which could be revised on the Anglican ordination question.

To put this into historical and current context, therefore, is this article from the Homiletic & Pastoral Review, which points out that Anglicans, at least in the Thirty-Nine Articles, deem Catholic orders invalid (sacramentally):

The preoccupation with the Catholic rejection of Anglican orders in the past century has been accompanied by forgetfulness regarding the equally strong Anglican rejection of Catholic orders. Yet, the recognition that Anglican orders are not Catholic ones is not just a Roman Catholic pronouncement; it is also Anglican doctrine. Long before Pope Leo XIII declared, in 1893, that Anglican orders were deficient from a Catholic perspective, Queen Elizabeth I, in 1570, declared the Catholic view of orders deficient from an Anglican perspective.

The central points of Anglican belief are stated in the Articles of Religion, which were articulated and revised over a period of several decades during the tumultuous 16th century. Although Catholic-minded Anglicans since the Oxford Movement of the 1830s have often questioned them, the Articles were clearly intended to be an authoritative statement of Anglican belief. Though today, they do not carry the same kind of juridical authority as Roman Catholic doctrine, originally they carried even more. Conformity to them among the clergy was originally enforced on pain of death. Until the 19th century, it was a requirement for civil office in England. They have been included in every edition of the Book of Common Prayer in Great Britain and North America up to the present day, and are routinely cited by participants in Anglican theological discourse as representing the mind of the church.

Initially intended to affirm Catholic teaching in the face of the Lutheran reform, in successive revisions, the Articles came to adopt Protestant, and even explicitly anti-Catholic, views. Beginning with six articles stating points of Catholic doctrine by King Henry VIII in 1536, they had been expanded to 42 articles incorporating Lutheran ideas by Henry’s Protestant-leaning son, Edward VI, by 1552. These were eventually pared to 39 articles in 1570—following a convocation and the excommunication of the Pope by Queen Elizabeth. As John Henry Newman observed following his famous, but failed, attempt to interpret the Articles in a Catholic sense, “{i}t is notorious that the Articles were drawn up by Protestants, and intended for the establishment of Protestantism.”

Article 25 states that Ordination is not a sacrament (does not confer Sacramental Grace) in the Church of England:

Those five commonly called Sacraments—that is to say, Confirmation, Penance, Orders, Matrimony, and Extreme Unction—are not to be counted for Sacraments of the Gospel, being such as have grown partly of the corrupt following of the Apostles, partly are states of life allowed in the Scriptures; but yet have not the like nature of Sacraments with Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, for that they have not any visible sign or ceremony ordained of God.

Archbishop Thomas Cranmer did not intend that ministers in the Church of England be like Catholic priests at all, because he did not believe in the Real Presence in the Eucharist as Catholics do. Therefore, ministers in the Church of England did not have a sacramental sacrificial role:

. . .“Christ made no such difference between the priest and the layman that the priest should make oblation and sacrifice of Christ for the layman … but the difference between the priest and the layman in this matter is only in the ministration.” . . . .

The ministers of the Church of England were intended to be ministers of the Word, by speech in preaching, and by act in symbolic sacraments, and not priests of the true, substantive Body and Blood of Christ.

As a reminder, this is the Catholic teaching (from the Council of Trent) on priesthood:

Sacrifice and priesthood are, by the ordinance of God, in such wise conjoined, as that both have existed in every law. Whereas, therefore, in the New Testament, the Catholic Church has received, from the institution of Christ, the holy visible sacrifice of the Eucharist; it must needs also be confessed, that there is, in that Church, a new, visible, and external priesthood, into which the old has been translated. And the sacred Scriptures show, and the tradition of the Catholic Church has always taught, that this priesthood was instituted by the same Lord our Saviour, and that to the apostles, and their successors in the priesthood, was the power delivered of consecrating, offering, and administering His Body and Blood, as also of forgiving and of retaining sins. . . . 

Whereas, by the testimony of Scripture, by Apostolic tradition, and the unanimous consent of the Fathers, it is clear that grace is conferred by sacred ordination, which is performed by words and outward signs, no one ought to doubt that Order is truly and properly one of the seven sacraments of holy Church. For the apostle says; I admonish thee that thou stir up the grace of God, which is in thee by the imposition of my hands. For God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power and of love of sobriety.

The author, Father Donald Paul Sullins, is himself a former Anglican minister who became Catholic and was ordained under the Pastoral Provision issued by Pope St. John Paul II. He continues his article with a discussion of Anglican ministers becoming Catholic priests by sacramental ordination and states:

The Catholic Church today views the relation of Catholic to Protestant, not as the difference between wrong and right, but as between part and whole. It recognizes that many elements of genuine sanctity, doctrine, and orders are to be found in the separated churches of the Reformation, among whom, moreover, Anglicanism is held to have a special place. The bishops of England and Wales, in a joint statement, have made this explicit: “We would never suggest that those now seeking full communion with the Roman Catholic Church deny the value of their previous ministry. According to the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, the liturgical actions of their ministry can most certainly engender a life of grace, for they come from Christ and lead back to him and belong by right to the one church of Christ.” 18

If one’s personal experience of grace in Anglican priestly ministry does not prove that the underlying orders are valid, it is equally true that a defect in the underlying orders does not nullify the experience of grace. . . . [Pope Leo XIII's document] Apostolicae Curae’s declaration of nullity of Anglican orders in no way denies the genuine grace and truth that is present in Anglican ordained ministry. The Catholic Church recognizes with joy and thanksgiving, and affirms the legitimacy of, the fruits of the Anglican priesthood.

Please read the rest there. It's also appropriate to recall Pope Leo's encouragement of Anglicans who wanted the fullness of the Christian faith to come home:

38. Hitherto perhaps, while striving after the perfection of Christian virtue, while devoutly searching the Scriptures, while redoubling their fervent prayers, they have yet listened in doubt and perplexity to the promptings of Christ who has long been speaking within their hearts. Now they see clearly whither He is graciously calling and bidding them come. Let them return to His one fold, and they will obtain both the blessings they seek and further aids to salvation; the dispensing of which He has committed to the Church, as the perpetual guardian and promoter of His redemption among the nations. Then will they 'draw waters with joy out of the fountains of the Saviour', that is, out of His wondrous sacraments; whereby the souls of the faithful are truly forgiven their sins and restored to the friendship of God, nourished and strengthened with the bread of heaven, and provided in abundance with the most powerful aids to the attainment of eternal life. To those who truly thirst after these blessings may 'the God of peace, the God of all consolation', grant them in overflowing measure, according to the greatness of His bounty.

39. Our appeal and Our hopes are directed in a special way to those who hold the office of ministers of religion in their respective communities. Their position gives them preeminence in learning and authority, and they assuredly have at heart the glory of God and the salvation of souls. Let them, then, be among the first to heed God's call and obey it with alacrity, thus giving a shining example to others. Great indeed will be the joy of Mother Church as she welcomes them, surrounding them with every mark of affection and solicitude, because of the difficulties which they have generously and courageously surmounted in order to return to her bosom. And how shall words describe the praise which such courage will earn for them in the assemblies of the faithful throughout the Catholic world, the hope and confidence it will give them before Christ’s judgement seat, the rewards that it will win for them in the kingdom of heaven! For Our part We shall continue by every means allowed to us to encourage their reconciliation with the Church, in which both individuals and whole communities, as We ardently hope, may find a model for their imitation. Meanwhile We beg and implore them all, through the bowels of the mercy of our God, to strive faithfully to follow in the open path of His truth and grace.

Cardinal Merry del Val, RIP

O Jesus! meek and humble of heart, hear me.
From the desire of being esteemed, deliver me, O Jesus.
From the desire of being loved,
From the desire of being extolled,
From the desire of being honored,
From the desire of being praised,
From the desire of being preferred to others,
From the desire of being consulted,
From the desire of being approved,
From the fear of being humiliated, deliver me, O Jesus.
From the fear of being despised,
From the fear of suffering rebukes,
From the fear of being calumniated,
From the fear of being forgotten,
From the fear of being ridiculed,
From the fear of being wronged,
From the fear of being suspected,
That others may be loved more than I, O Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be esteemed more than I,
That, in the opinion of the world, others may, increase and I may decrease,
That others may be chosen and I set aside,
That others may be praised and I unnoticed,
That others may be preferred to me in everything,
That others may become holier than I, provided that I may become as holy as I should, O Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
Amen.

Cardinal Rafael Merry de Val, Secretary of State for Pope St. Pius X, died on Feburary 26, 1930. He composed the Litany of Humility, above. He was born in England at the Spanish Embassy in London on October 10, 1865 and was educated at Catholic schools in England and then in Rome.

According to this article, he maintained those early links with England, including his investigation of the validity of Anglican Orders in the Catholic Church:

After graduating from the Pontifical Gregorian University, he became one of the most influential and consulted figures of pontifical Rome, especially when it came to problems regarding Anglicanism. His perfect knowledge of the environment and of the language, his frequent trips across the English Channel, and the esteem of Cardinal Vaughan gave him great authority.

Entrusted by Leo XIII with the thorny question of the validity of Anglican orders – at the uncertain, hesitant beginning of the ecumenical journey – he led the Holy See to the negative response, made official in September of 1896 with the bull "Apostolicae Curae," of which he was the main architect. On the basis of practice that had stood for three hundred years, and of an exhaustive historical investigation, Leo XIII confirmed the "nullity" of the "ordinations carried out with the Anglican rite," thereby denying the apostolic succession of those bishops. The reconciliation of Anglicans and Catholics, which had been proceeding for some time, came to an abrupt halt, while the young prelate established himself as the spokesman of a stance of doctrinal austerity that was different from, if not incompatible with, the policy of Rampolla, who was secretary of state at the time.

He was well known for his facility with languages, his piety and devotion (evidenced by the prayer above), and his great personal support of Pope St. Pius X, whose cause for canonization he introduced and supported. Cardinal Merry del Val died on February 26, 1930 during an operation for appendicitus. His cause for canonization has been introduced and he is a Servant of God.

Image source: Wikipedia commons.

Anglican Orders

Taylor Marshall, himself a former Episcopalian minister, writes about the vallidity of Anglican orders on his blog. He's answering a quesation he received after talking to Marcus Grodi on EWTN's The Journey Home: Does the Anglican Church have a valid Eucharist?

Dr. Marshall has a short answer (No.) and a longer explanation.

To quote: Here's the short answer: No, Anglicans or Episcopalians (the tradition deriving from Henry VIII's Church of England) do not have a valid Eucharist. This question was settled by His Holiness Pope Leo XIII in his papal bull Apostolicae Curae on the nullity of Anglican orders, issued 18 September, 1896. There are two reasons for the nullity of Anglican Holy Orders. After explaining these two reasons, I'll respond to the objection that Anglicans/Episcopalians have since "revitalized" their Apostolic Succession through the intervention of schismatic bishops of the Old Catholic/Orthodox/Polish National Catholic communities.

There are two reasons for the invalidity of Anglican Orders and Eucharist: First Reason Against Anglican Eucharist: Invalid Form of Priestly Ordination.

And the second reason is: "Invalid Form of Priestly Intent"--read the rest at "Canterbury Tales".