Choral Evensong

From the Religion News Service, a story about how Choral Evensong is catching on in England, attracting people who otherwise don't attend Church of England services:

Evensong is a creation of the English Reformation, derived from monastic prayer traditions. Its liturgy is drawn from the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer, created by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer in 1549. It usually lasts about 45 minutes and includes Scripture readings, psalms and the Nunc Dimittis (Song of Simeon) and Magnificat, both taken from the Gospel of Luke.

Some of the greatest choral music sung at evensong was written at the time of Queen Elizabeth I, soon after its liturgy was first designed, by composers such as Thomas Tallis and William Byrd. The works of other English composers, such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Richard Ayleward, Hubert Parry and Herbert Howells, are also frequently featured.

Of course, the BBC has been broadcasting Choral Evensong--or Catholic Vespers more recently--for years.

The Anglican Ordinariate prominently presents Choral Evensong as one of its primary examples of Anglican Patrimony brought with them to their unity with the Catholic Church.

The Religious News Service story concludes, however, with this sad note (get it?):

Then there’s the more practical reason to come to evensong. Cathedrals in England often charge high admission fees — about $25 in some cases — so some tourists opt instead for evensong, which is free.

The Past and the Future of Christianity in England

Damian Thompson uses some demographic trends to predict or project a sad future for Christianity in England:

It’s often said that Britain’s church congregations are shrinking, but that doesn’t come close to expressing the scale of the disaster now facing Christianity in this country. Every ten years the census spells out the situation in detail: between 2001 and 2011 the number of Christians born in Britain fell by 5.3 million — about 10,000 a week. If that rate of decline continues, the mission of St Augustine to the English, together with that of the Irish saints to the Scots, will come to an end in 2067.

That is the year in which the Christians who have inherited the faith of their British ancestors will become statistically invisible. Parish churches everywhere will have been adapted for secular use, demolished or abandoned.

Our cathedral buildings will survive, but they won’t be true cathedrals because they will have no bishops. The Church of England is declining faster than other denominations; if it carries on shrinking at the rate suggested by the latest British Social Attitudes survey, Anglicanism will disappear from Britain in 2033. One day the last native-born Christian will die and that will be that.

Thompson goes on:

But the point stands: Christianity is dying out among the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic inhabitants of Great Britain. The Gospel that Augustine and his 30 monks brought to England when they landed at Ebbsfleet in ad 597 is now being decisively rejected.

Saint Paul tells us that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek; the Almighty is not interested in ‘heritage’, the new name for ethnicity. But since Britons with Anglo–Saxon and Celtic ancestors make up 90 per cent of British Christians, that rejection represents a devastating loss of faith.

It has all happened so quickly. Anglicans in particular are abandoning their faith at a rate that (in more ways that one) defies belief. According to the British Social Attitudes surveys, their numbers fell from 40 per cent of the population in 1983 to 29 per cent in 2004 and 17 per cent last year.

He has warnings for the Catholic Church in England too, which cannot rely on immigration to fill its pews. Read the rest of his article here. He concludes:

As a Catholic, I believe that the gates of hell will not prevail against the church founded by Peter. There will always be someone to take the place of ‘the last Christian’. But not necessarily in Britain, where the death rattle has begun.

Not necessarily in the United States of America either. 

To juxtapose the perhaps dark future for Christianity in England to its bright and glowing past, go see these pictures of stained glass from Canterbury Cathedral, the former Catholic church appropriated by Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell. More on the exhibition at the Cathedral's website.

Our Lady of Walsingham, pray for us!

Pilgrimages Yesterday and Today

Interesting project:

'Pilgrimage and England's cathedrals' employs a ground-breaking combination of interdisciplinary perspectives and methodologies to identify and analyse the core dynamics of pilgrimage and sacred sites in England from the 11th to 21st centuries, assess the growing significance of English cathedrals as sacred/heritage sites today, and inform management of/public engagement with these iconic buildings. Set against the background of the worldwide growth of pilgrimage and increasing importance of sacred sites, the project's innovative approaches and timely research agenda also contributes substantially to defining and establishing the emerging field of Pilgrimage Studies.

At the heart of this project is a new, wide-ranging analysis of the meaning and breadth of 'pilgrimage' and the role of sacred places past and present. Why did pilgrimage matter in the past and why does it still matter today? In exploring these issues, the project focuses attention on the role of cathedrals: places where, uniquely, national and local history and identity, material culture and traditional and emerging religious practice can be encountered together. Pilgrimage was central to the development and status of English cathedrals in the Middle Ages and although most shrines were destroyed at the Reformation, many of the great churches and monasteries which housed them remain as cathedrals today, literally shaped by their pilgrim past and retaining a strong pilgrimage legacy. Anglican cathedrals are increasingly refocusing on and reinstating shrines, reflecting an international multi-faith phenomenon in which an estimated 200 million people across the world engage in pilgrimage and religious tourism annually.

Historically the pilgrims going to a certain cathedral were intent on visiting a saint's shrine, praying for his or her intercession, acting in penitence for some great personal sin or in reparation for the sake some great blessing on themselves or another. Pilgrimage on earth was aimed at eventual arrival in heaven. It was expensive, dangerous--although pilgrims were supposed to be protected--arduous, and time-consuming. Walking along the pilgrimage route, the pilgrims were focused on their goal.

Although they were stripped of their shrines and saintly significance after the English Reformation, English cathedrals have remained a goal of pilgrimage. The project organizers comment that many coming to the cathedrals in the study, York, Durham, Canterbury, and Westminster, are not even Christian or may practice no faith at all:

Moreover, over 40% of those visitors came from faith traditions other than Christianity or had no religious affiliation. This suggests that cathedrals are seen as shaped by, but transcending, Christianity, offering unique access to the 'spiritual' within the context of history, heritage and culture, and providing meaningful spaces for people of all faiths and none. These developments demand fuller, rigorous, multi-disciplinary investigation so that implications for cathedrals, visitors and communities can be explored in detail.

File that under the heading "The Unintended Reformation"! The Protestant reformers of the sixteenth century in England would be shocked. Since Christianity means Jesus Christ, transcending Christianity would be the furthest thing in their minds; yet, their reformation started the process of destroying the worldview that held saints in heaven and sinners on earth (and in purgatory) in a community of pilgrimage and love.

The Peterhouse Partbooks

I am always thrilled to find someone who has a project that means so much to them when it may seem so obscure to anyone else. Herewith, Blue Heron, a group engaged in bringing the Peterhouse Partbooks from the early 16th century age of English Cathedral music to our attention:

Peterhouse’s Henrician partbooks are the most important extant source of English church music on the eve of the Reformation. The repertory of five-part polyphony that they contain is both large and varied, consisting of seventy-two compositions in the standard forms of the day—Mass, Magnificat, votive antiphon, ritual plainchant setting, and one or two pieces whose function is debatable—and more than half of these works do not survive in other sources. The composers represented (twenty- nine, plus one anonymous) range from those widely admired both at the time and also today, such as Robert Fayrfax and John Taverner, whose careers are relatively well documented and whose music is ubiquitous in sources of the period, to the most obscure, such as Hugh Sturmy, whose careers have yet to be traced and whose music survives nowhere else. The musical quality of the collection is generally very high, and many pieces (by no means only those by well-known composers) show not only skilled craftsmanship but also marked imagination and strong character.

The cover above is for the first of five cds of music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, containing the titular Three Marian Antiphons by Hugh Aston, a Magnificat by Robert Jones and Quales sumus O miseri by John Mason. You can read the complete CD liner notes here.

Their second cd, cover (?) above contains:

Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, Volume 2

Nicholas Ludford (c1490-1557): Missa Regnum mundi

Sarum plainchant · Proper for the Feast of Saint Margaret

Richard Pygott (c1485-1549): Salve regina

Restored by Nick Sandon

The second installment in Blue Heron’s 5-CD series of Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks features Nicholas Ludford’s radiant Missa Regnum mundi, sung in a musical context like that of its probable original occasion, a festal mass for St Margaret, with plainchant items from the Proper according to the Use of Salisbury. The disc concludes with Richard Pygott’s extraordinary Salve regina, one of the longest votive antiphons extant and a marvel of rhetorical expression.

This is the world premiere recording of all the music on the disc.

More on ordering the discs from the Blue Heron website here.

March 2nd, the Feast of St. Chad

St. Chad, the Apostle of the Midlands, is honored today on both Catholic and Anglican calendars in England. The Cathedral in Birmingham, England, designed by A.W.N. Pugin is under his patronage so it seems appropriate to highlight the feast and the cathedral the day after remembering Pugin's birth.

The relics of St. Chad were authenticated in 1995 centuries after the destruction of his shrine during the reign of Henry VIII and are honored in the cathedral, which was built between 1839 and 1841--the first Catholic cathedral constructed in England since the English Reformation (although it was not named formally a cathedral until the hierarchy--with a bishop and a diocese in Birmingham--was restored in 1850).

St. Birinus and St. Osmund

John Whitehead reminds us of two saints: St. Birinus (at Dorchester on Thames) and St. Osmund (at Salisbury Cathedral):

St Birinus, whose feast it is today [December 5], was the missionary bishop who evangelised the mid-Thames valley and later the Kingdom of Wessex. He died in 649 0r 650. Originally buried at Dorcherster on Thames his relics were later tranlated to Winchester, although there were relics and a shrine, of which part remains in a modern reconstruction, at Dorchester. This served as the site of the of a cathedral until 1072 when the cathedra of the united east-midland dioceses was established at Lincoln.

The former cathedral, which retained for some time pro-cathedral status, was refounded as an Augustinian priory, now known as Dorchester Abbey, and its surviving church is one of the most interesting examples of a medium-sized monastic building and its gradual eveolution. It has some wonderful medieval glass and carving, both on the building itself and in the fine selection of tomb effigies.

More on Dorchester Abbey here and more on the Catholic church in Dorchester here.

and

Were today not Sunday [December 4] it would be the feast of St Osmund, Bishop of Salisbury, who died in 1099, but was only canonised in 1457 - the last pre-reformation recognition of sanctity for an English saint. There is an online life of him here.

The cathedral he knew at Old Sarum was replaced in the thirteenth century by the present Salisbury cathedral, and it was there that his bones were enshrined, and to that building that my thoughts turn. Or rather to some of its features which were destroyed in the eighteenth century. Regular readers of this blog will be aware of my revulsion at the destruction of historic and beautiful buildings and monuments, and here is another example of what shocks me.

At the end of the 1780s the Chapter of Salisbury called in as their architect James Wyatt. Now as an exponent of Neo-Classicism he was fine - witness the library at Oriel built in 1788. Let loose on a medieval cathedral he was lethal. Durham, Hereford and Salisbury bear witness to his ravages. If at Hereford he had in part the excuse of the collapse of the west tower in 1786, and at Durham his schemes were stopped short of destroying the Galilee Chapel, at Salisbury there seems to be neither excuse nor restraint.

Demolishing two later Hungerford and Beauchamp chantry chapels of 1464 and 1481 which flanked the Trinity Chapel at the east end can, I suppose, be explained, but not excused, as restoring the original configuration of the eastern chapels. . . .

More on St. Osmund of Salisbury here.