The Ordinariate at Our Lady of Walsingham

I have not posted much on Ordinariate news lately, but there are some great updates at the website of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham this month. The Ordinariate held its Called to be One event reaching out to Anglicans on September 7 and now they have an Ordinariate Festival coming up this weekend.

Here's a new opportunity for the Ordinariate that seems so perfectly fitting: the Marist order priests who have been at the Catholic shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham (remember that there are two, one Anglican and one Catholic) are leaving. Who better to take over than the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham? Monsignor Andrew Burnham made the proposal in a post on The Tablet blog, mentioning that it would benefit both the shrine and the Ordinariate:

The Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, in these early years, is looked upon with nervousness from outside.  Fellow Catholics have not all learnt yet that Ordinariate Catholics are no more different from them than Catholics of a different diocese.  Some Anglicans remain to be convinced that the ordinariate is the new ecumenical instrument for all they most value to be brought into the full communion of the Catholic Church.  The ordinariate is intrinsically a matter of congregations and groups, rather than individual priests, and it is not immediately obvious how a group would generate itself in the right part of East Anglia to focus day-by-day on Walsingham.   There are plenty of reasons, therefore, why the vision might grow pale and become a dream.   And yet there is certainly a window of opportunity and, as devotees of the Blessed Mother, Our Lady of Walsingham, all attest, “He that is mighty” has magnified her.  All generations shall call her blessed.  This then is a time for imagination and boldness and for love to conquer fear. 

The Feast of Our Lady of Walsingham is next week on September 24!

The Translation of St. Thomas a Becket's Relics

I posted the last letter St. Thomas More wrote to his dear daughter Margaret Roper the day before the anniversary of his martyrdom. In the letter he mentions that he hopes his execution is scheduled for the morrow, before the Feast of St. Thomas on July 7. A Clerk of Oxford explored that feast more fully here yesterday and then discusses some aspects of medieval feasts and devotion to saints:

Translation feasts like today's are particularly tricky to explain to a modern audience. It's easy to be cynical about their original motivation, since the practical benefits are usually so obvious as to make the whole idea seem like nothing more than a money-grab: building a bigger or more prominent tomb to attract and accommodate pilgrims, providing a saint with an extra feast to celebrate (often at a more convenient time of year for travel or liturgical commemoration - as clearly illustrated in the case of Becket, whose December feast, awkwardly close to Christmas, was supplemented by a summer translation one), claiming a saint as belonging to one church rather than a rival, and so on. Some medievalists get very sniffy about the pragmatism of it all, their high-minded idealism clearly offended by the idea of churches trying to make money off their saints. There's a lingering Puritanism in some circles (even within academia, but certainly outside it) which can't quite allow that medieval cults of saints were ever anything but a big con - that the saints of the Middle Ages were mostly a bunch of obscure people who were praised far beyond their merits, credited with patently invented miracles, and lauded in tiresome hagiography, with the aim of extracting money from gullible pilgrims. . . .

But if we take translation feasts as an example, trying to understand rather than to condemn or mock, they can tell us fascinating things about the communities who organised them. They can help us trace, for instance, which parts of a community's history were most important to its identity at any point in time, or how a community defined itself against other nearby houses - the translation of Thomas Becket marked the moment when he became Canterbury's most famous saint (as he remains today), surpassing the Anglo-Saxon archbishop-saints, who were still venerated but no longer as culturally useful as they had been for the community in the period immediately following the Norman Conquest (on which see this post on Dunstan and this on Ælfheah). A translation tells us not all that much about the saint whose physical body is its focus, but a great deal about what a saint's memory meant to the people who venerated him or her. What is really commemorated today, then, is not just Thomas Becket but his importance to Canterbury and to the wider world: the fame which brought pilgrims to his shrine, the political charge which made him important enough for his name to be scratched out and his carols cancelled in the sixteenth century, and, yes, the income which built Canterbury Cathedral, a treasure-house of medieval art which still draws thousands of tourists and pilgrims every year. All this deserves to be remembered - and even blogged about.

Read the rest--and enjoy all the great pictures--there.

You Can't Make This Up!

For the first time since Henry VIII broke away from Rome and set the English Reformation on its course, a Catholic Mass has been celebrated in Beverley Minster, according to The Catholic Herald:

The first Mass celebrated by a bishop since the reign of Henry VIII has taken place in Beverley Minster.

The Mass marked the 50th anniversary of a local Catholic primary school named after St John of Beverly.

Bishop Terence Drainey of Middlesbrough celebrated the Mass, which was attended by teachers, students and their families.

“It was a very great privilege to be able to celebrate Mass in a place which has been a focus of prayer and worship for hundreds of years,” he said. “St John of Beverley is a major figure in our Catholic and English cultural history. He is the second patron of our diocese as well as being the patron of the Roman Catholic school in Beverley whose anniversary we were celebrating.”

St. John of Beverley was really a royal saint--King Henry V urged devotion to the saint after his victory at Agincourt! Henry VIII ordered his shrine destroyed in 1541, but his bones were found again in 1664 and reburied with a new shrine.

The Missing Shrine, the Whitewashed Painting: St. William of Rochester

Today is the feast of St. William of Perth (Scotland) or Rochester, a pilgrim martyr. According to the old Catholic Encylopedia he

died about 1201. Practically all that is known of this martyr comes from the "Nova legenda Anglie", and that is little. In youth he had been somewhat wild, but on reaching manhood he devoted himself wholly to the service of God. A baker by trade, he was accustomed to set aside every tenth loaf for the poor. He went to Mass daily, and one morning, before it was light, found on the threshold of the church an abandoned child, whom he adopted and to whom he taught his trade. Later he took a vow to visit the Holy Places, and, having received the consecrated wallet and staff, set out with his adopted son, whose name is given as "Cockermay Doucri", which is said to be Scots for "David the Foundling". They stayed three days at Rochester, and purposed to proceed next day to Canterbury, but instead David wilfully misled his benefactor and, with robbery in view, felled him with a blow on the head and cut his throat. The body was discovered by a mad woman, who plaited a garland of flowers and placed it first on the head of the corpse and then her own, whereupon the madness left her. On learning her tale the monks of Rochester carried the body to the cathedral and there buried it. In 1256 the Bishop of Rochester, Lawrence de S. Martino, obtained the canonization of St. William by Pope Alexander IV. A beginning was at once made with his shrine, which was situated in the northeast transept, and attracted crowds of pilgrims. At the same time a small chapel was built at the place of the murder, which was thereafter called Palmersdene. Remains of this chapel are still to be seen near the present St. William's Hospital, on the road leading by Horsted Farm to Maidstone. On 18 and 19 February, 1300, King Edward I gave two donations of seven shillings to the shrine. On 29 November, 1399, Pope Boniface IX granted an indulgence to those who visited and gave alms to the shrine on certain specified days. St. William is represented in a wall-painting, which was discovered in 1883 in Frindsbury church, near Rochester, which is supposed to have been painted about 1256-1266. His feast was kept on 23 May.

Although his tomb at Rochester Cathedral was a great draw for pilgrims, according to the Rochester Cathedral website:

A Place of Pilgrimage - The Cathedral became a major place of pilgrimage in the 13th century, following the death of William of Perth, a Scottish baker who was murdered nearby. His body was brought to the Cathedral and at his shrine, of which no trace remains, miracles were reported. Modern pilgrims who journey to the Cathedral still climb the Pilgrim Steps, now worn by the many thousands of medieval pilgrims visiting the shrine, often lighting candles at the William of Perth prayer-station in front of the oratory. Visitors who journey to the Cathedral today are direct descendents of those early pilgrims.

The church referred to in the Catholic Encyclopedia article, with the wall-paintig of St. William of Rochester, is All Saints Anglican Church. The wall painting, along with those of St. Edmund of Canterbury and St. Lawrence, were whitewashed during the English Reformation. St. William is, of course, depicted as a pilgrim, as you can see in this image.

Beverley Minster and St. John of Beverley

St. John of Beverley died on May 7, 721 and was buried in Beverley Minster, Beverley, Yorkshire and was canonized in 1037. Devotion to him led to the building of a tremendous Perpendicular Gothic abbey church (beginning in 1220) and to many pilgrimages. Henry VIII ordered the destruction of his shrine 820 years after his death and the dissolution of the monastery, but the church survived as a parish church. His relics were discovered in the 17th century and are venerated in the church today.

The EWTN Library provides this biography of St. John of Beverley:

This illustrious saint was born at Harpham, a village in the province of the Deiri, which comprised Yorkshire, Lancashire, and the rest of the kingdom of the Northumbers, on the south side of the Tyne; what lay beyond it being called Bernicia.

An earnest desire of qualifying himself for the service of God drew him young into Kent, where he made great progress in learning and piety, in the famous school of St. Theodorus, the archbishop, under the direction of the holy abbot Adrian. . . .

In 717, being much broken with age and fatigues, he resigned his bishopric to his chaplain, St. Wilfrid the, younger, and having ordained him bishop of York, he retired to Beverley, where he spent the remaining four years of his life in the punctual performance of all monastic duties. He died there the death of the just, on the 7th of May, 721. His successor governed the see of York fifteen years, was a great lover of the beauty of God's house and is named among the saints, April the 29th. The monastery of Beverley having been destroyed by the Danes, king Athelstan, who had obtained a great victory over the Scots by the intercession of St. John, founded in his honor, in the same place, a rich collegiate church of canons. . .Alcuin of York, Julian of Norwich and St. John Fisher all had tremendous devotion to St. John of Beverley. Henry V attributed his victory at Agincourt to him and encouraged--nay, ordered--devotion to him throughout England. His feast in the Church of England is a civil holiday in Beverley, with special prayers and processions. There is a Catholic church dedicated to St. John in his hometown, Hexham.