The Ordinariate Attraction

Over at Aleteia, Deborah Gyapong, a freelance journalist in Canada, writes about the Divine Worship of the Anglican Ordinariate:

Our liturgy is a Catholic Mass in the language of Shakespeare. We pray using sacral language forms of “thee” and “thou.” Though fully approved by the relevant Vatican congregations, our Mass is touched by the Reformation through the use of some of Archbishop Cranmer’s gorgeous English translations of Latin collects, the inclusion of the Comfortable Words of Scripture following our Penitential Rite and the beautiful Prayer of Humble Access before Holy Communion. Our liturgy also incorporates elements of pre-Reformation English Catholicism in its use of Sarum collects and chants.

The rubrics are similar to those of the Traditional Latin Mass—it is a ballet of genuflection, usually prayed ad orientem, but it has many of the hallmarks of the reform of the liturgy called for in the Second Vatican Council: it’s in the vernacular and in addition to traditional chanted introits and graduals we sing hymns (robustly, often in four-part harmony!).

What Pope Benedict XVI made possible was for us to bring the heirlooms of English Catholicism and the underpinning of the civilization of the English-speaking world into their pride of place in the Catholic Church, from which they developed.

Read the rest there.

The Prayer of Humble Access before Holy Communion:

Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of Thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink His blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by His body, and our souls washed through His most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in Him, and He in us. Amen.

The Comfortable Words are comforting words of forgiveness:

Hear what comfortable words our Saviour Christ saith unto all that truly turn to him.
Come unto me all that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you.
So God loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, to the end that
all that believe in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

Hear also what St Paul saith.
This is a true saying, and worthy of all men to be received, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.

Hear also what St John saith.
If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the propitiation for our sins.

I hope to go to Mass at Our Lady of Hope Catholic Church in Kansas City, the Ordinariate parish, yet this year during a visit to the Nelson-Atkins Museum exhibition of Thomas Tallis' Spem in Alium:

Artist Janet Cardiff’s contemporary sound installation emits polyphonic choral music written in the mid-1500s by Thomas Tallis. Called “Achingly beautiful” by the New Yorker and “Transcendent” by the New York Times, Forty-Part Motet is an immersive experience not to be missed.

The installation consists of 40 speakers arranged in a large oval turned inward. Sung in Latin and a cappella by the Salisbury Cathedral Choir, one singer’s voice comes from each speaker. Visitors are invited to enter and move amongst the configuration of speakers to discover what the artist describes as “walking into a piece of music.” The first of its kind at the Nelson-Atkins, Forty-Part Motet is a new way for visitors to engage with contemporary art.

I wonder if they will have the exhibit in the Cloister at Nelson-Atkins?

Janet Cardiff: The Forty Part Motet at The Cloisters

Closing tomorrow at the Metropolitan Museum/Cloisters in New York City:

The Forty Part Motet (2001), a sound installation by Janet Cardiff (Canadian, born 1957), will be the first presentation of contemporary art at The Cloisters. Regarded as the artist's masterwork, and consisting of forty high-fidelity speakers positioned on stands in a large oval configuration throughout the Fuentidueña Chapel, the fourteen-minute work, with a three-minute spoken interlude, will continuously play an eleven-minute reworking of the forty-part motet Spem in alium numquam habui (1556?/1573?) by Tudor composer Thomas Tallis (ca. 1505–1585). Spem in alium, which translates as "In No Other Is My Hope," is perhaps Tallis's most famous composition. Visitors are encouraged to walk among the loudspeakers and hear the individual unaccompanied voices—bass, baritone, alto, tenor, and child soprano—one part per speaker—as well as the polyphonic choral effect of the combined singers in an immersive experience. The Forty Part Motet is most often presented in a neutral gallery setting, but in this case the setting is the Cloisters' Fuentidueña Chapel, which features the late twelfth-century apse from the church of San Martín at Fuentidueña, near Segovia, Spain, on permanent loan from the Spanish Government. Set within a churchlike gallery space, and with superb acoustics, it has for more than fifty years proved a fine venue for concerts of early music.

The article on Spem in alium suggests that Tallis wrote this brilliant piece during Mary I's reign, not during Elizabeth I's. After all, the words are drawn from the book of Judith, one of the Deutero-Canonical works usually omitted from Protestant Bibles. The conclusion is:

All these considerations together point to a planned premiere of Spem in alium in Nonsuch Palace in 1556, with Queen Mary Tudor as the intended dedicatee. In the event, that premiere seems not to have occurred—most likely because of the death of Fitzalan's son and daughter in 1556, and of his wife in 1557. The most likely first performance was therefore in 1559 or 1567, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. (The newly crowned Elizabeth spent five days at Nonsuch in August 1559, and we know from Wateridge's anecdote quoted above that the piece was performed in Arundel House in London; the date of that performance has now been determined to have been 1567.) Queen Elizabeth is therefore most likely the first English monarch to have heard Spem in alium, although the evidence suggests that it was composed for her half-sister, Queen Mary Tudor, as a fortieth-birthday present.

Spem in alium
Spem in alium nunquam
habui praeter in te, Deus Israel:
qui irasceris et propitius eris,
et omnia peccata hominum
in tribulatione dimittis:
Domine Deus, Creator caeli et
respice humilitatem nostram.

Translation:
I have never put my hope in any
besides you, O God of Israel,
who grows angry, but then,
becoming gracious, forgives all the
sins of men in their tribulation:
Lord God, creator of heaven and
earth, look upon our lowliness.

I have read that one reason Spem in Alium is so popular now is that it's featured in that "grey" book series. The exhibit has had quite an effect on visitors and The Cloisters' website for the exhibit is quite detailed. Here is another review.