Chesterton on the "Book of Common Prayer"

Hilaire Belloc commented on Thomas Cranmer's masterpiece of English prose in the Book of Common Prayer as I noted in my review of Mysterium Press's edition of Cranmer last week. Belloc was born and raised in a Catholic family; his friend G.K. Chesterton was a convert to Catholicism after sharing the Anglo-Catholic faith of his wife Frances for years. As an Anglican, Chesterton used the Book of Common Prayer in church services; as a Catholic (after 1928), he looked back on the experience.

The late Father John Hunwicke (+April 30, 2024), a former Anglican minister who converted to Catholicism as a member (and priest) of the Anglican Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, posted some comments from Chesterton about the Book of Common Prayer on his blog. He does not give the source, however, but I wonder if they're from a collection of columns from the Illustrated London News. This post from the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society doesn't give the source either.

From Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment, May 2, 2018:

" ... why has the old Prayer-Book a power like that of great poetry upon the spirit and heart? The reason is much deeper than the mere avoidance of journalese. It might be put in a sentence; it has style, it has tradition; it has religion; it was written by apostate Catholics. It is strong, not in so far as it is the first Protestant book, but in so far as it was the last Catholic book. 

"As it happens, this can be proved in the most practical manner from the actual details of the prose. The most moving passages in the old Anglican Prayer Book are exactly those that are least like the atmosphere of the Anglicans. They are moving, or indeed thrilling, precisely because they say the things which Protestants have long left off saying; and which Catholics still say. Anybody who knows anything of literature knows when a style lifts itself to its loftiest efforts; and in these cases it is always to say strongly what we [Catholics] still endeavour to say, however weakly; but which nobody else ever endeavours to say at all. Let anyone recall for himself the very finest passages in the Book of Common Prayer, and he will soon see that they are concerned specially with spiritual thoughts and themes that now seem strange and terrible; but anyhow, the reverse of common."

Father Hunwicke further commented: More of this tomorrow; it comes from a collection of his pieces published in 1935, the year before he died (he had converted in 1922). When you read my next instalment, you will grow, I suspect, more and embarrassed about .... modern Catholic culture.

Here is the second post and here is the third.

Even though the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (BCP) revised some of the rubrics, etc., much of Cranmer's English prose, including the Litany and the Collects, etc., remained, as this interview about the 1662 BCP notes:

This quality is one that the 1662 BCP preserves from Cranmer’s work more than a century earlier. It reflects the orality of mid-sixteenth century written English. This is also why people notice its strong cadences. It was written for the ear. That’s a great usability advantage because it increases memorability.

So Belloc and Chesterton agreed on the excellence of Cranmer's English prose! ChesterBelloc!

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!

Newman on Papal Infallibility, Then and Now

Father John Hunwicke, a priest of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham and a famous blogger, writes about Newman's concern before the First Vatican Council about Papal Infallibility for First Things. Father Hunwicke is writing in the context of Pope Francis' pontificate, but I am interested in Newman's ability to find the third way, neither being Ultramontane (relying on the Pope's decrees to an excessive degree) nor Cisalpine (ignoring the Pope):

Perhaps the greatest Anglican intellect of the late twentieth century, Henry Chadwick, described Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman as “a formidable controversialist, as supreme a master of irony and satire as any in our literature.” There can be little doubt that Newman's skills both dazzled his followers and admirers, and infuriated those whose own ecclesial comfort required them to evade his conclusions. In the febrile aftermath of the “Papal Aggression,” the restoration of the English Catholic hierarchy in 1851, Julius Hare, Archdeacon of Chichester, read a Charge to the clergy of his archdeaconry, in which he unloaded his wrath on “Dr. Newman's Circaean talent for metamorphosing historical facts.” 

Newman has employed a large portion of his time and of his ingenuity in the twofold process of transmuting fable into history and history into fable, until he seems to have almost lost the perception that there is any real, abiding distinction between them, and to fancy that they become one or the other at the touch of a sophist’s wand.

In our own day, as controversy swirls around the Bishop of Rome, we have much to learn from one particular touch of Newman’s “wand”—his account of what the pope can and cannot do.

In the Apologia pro Vita Sua of 1864, Newman takes up a criticism leveled against Catholicism—namely, that it is intransigent. Rather than denying this charge, he accepts and strengthens it, then characteristically turns it against the Church’s critics:

It is one of the reproaches urged against the Church of Rome, that it has originated nothing, and has only served as a sort of remora or break in the development of doctrine. And it is an objection which I embrace as a truth; for such I conceive to be the main purpose of its extraordinary gift.

Newman denied that Rome was the site of innovation. He saw that “the Church of Rome possessed no great mind in the whole period of persecution,” nor in the centuries that followed. “For a long while, it has not a single doctor to show: St Leo, its first, is the teacher of one point of doctrine.” Just as Peter was not the dazzling originator of new teaching, his successors have more often served as a brake on innovation than as its impetus.

Before the First Vatican Council in the late nineteenth century, Newman feared that the kind of Ultramontanism William Ward anticipated, with a Papal Decree published everyday, would result. When Newman wrote his response to former Prime Minister Gladstone's attack on Papal Infallibility as a danger to the British government, he argued for the same limitation and balance that Father Hunwicke notes the German bishops cited against Bismarck's Kulturkampf fears, which Pope Pius IX endorsed:

Despite the misgivings of Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman, Vatican I led to a welcome clarification in Catholic thinking about the Roman primacy. Vindicating Newman's root conviction that doctrinal clarification normatively results from the repudiation of error, this clarification arose from an attack made upon the Council and the Church by Chancellor Bismarck. The German episcopate issued a ringing response to Bismarck, asserting that

even as far as concerns ecclesiastical matters, the pope cannot be called an absolute monarch, since indeed he is subject to Divine Law and is bound to those things which Christ set in order (disposuit) for his Church. He cannot change the constitution of the Church which was given to it by its divine Founder. … The constitution of the Church in all essential matters is founded in the divine arrangement (ordinatione) and is therefore immune from every arbitrary human disposition.

Their lordships went on to emphasize that papal infallibility “is restricted to the proper meaning of the supreme papal Magisterium; [which] indeed coincides with the extent of the infallible Magisterium of the Church herself and is bound to the doctrine contained in Holy Scripture and in Tradition and to the definitions already made by the Church's Magisterium.”

The German press appears then to have suggested that the German hierarchy had watered down the conciliar definitions and produced a document that was viewed with disfavor in Rome. Pio Nono himself responded by endorsing the German statement, in a manner too lengthily and exuberantly fulsome to be quoted in full.

Please read the rest there. I'm thinking about Newman and conscience and Newman and Papal Infallibility again now because of some presentations I'll be making in July this year at the Spiritual Life Center. Stayed tuned.