Five Years Ago: Someone Else Remembered!

Her Majesty's Government recalled the fifth anniversary of Pope Benedict XVI's visit yesterday too, according to Vatican Radio:

The United Kingdom is this week marking the fifth anniversary of the apostolic visit to the country made by Pope Benedict XVI.

The trip, from 16-19 September 2010, was the first ever official Papal State Visit to the UK, as Pope John Paul II’s visit was a pastoral one.

During his four-day trip, Pope Benedict visited both Scotland and England, and beatified Cardinal John Henry Newman.

To mark the 5th anniversary, the British Ambassador to the Holy See, Nigel Baker, said the State Visit “took our bilateral relationship to a new level”, adding the UK and the Holy See have built on it since then, “through Royal, ministerial and official visits and an intense bilateral engagement on the issues that matter - the Middle East, Ukraine, climate change, human rights, poverty and international development, human trafficking, geo-political conflict.”

“The 2010 State Visit looked to the future; to how the UK and the Holy See might co-operate better to improve our planet, tackle poverty, and contribute to the common good,” he added. “That objective remains as relevant and as necessary today as it did five years ago”.

The Catholic Herald re-posted William Oddie's comments from five years ago after the visit:

The richness, volume and sheer variety of the teaching the Pope gave us, and its perfect suitability for each of its many very different audiences, ranging from his intellectually hugely impressive address to the leaders of civil society in Westminster Hall to his call to that enthusiastic audience of schoolchildren to aim at becoming saints, was astonishing. And perhaps the first thing that needs to be said is that this was above all a personal triumph for the Holy Father himself. What came over consistently was the huge warmth, the seemingly inexhaustible loving kindness of the Pope’s gentle but nevertheless powerful personality. After all the caricatures, the man emerged.

Despite his intellectual impressiveness, which was evident throughout, everyone now knows that this is no withdrawn, scholarly rigorist, incapable of relating to people or understanding their lives: this alleged coldness, it was widely claimed, was what explained the supposed lack of enthusiasm about the visit, even among Catholics.

Well, we will hear no more now about his purported lack of charisma, an assessment invariably followed with a comparison, to Pope Benedict’s disadvantage, with John Paul II. Pope Benedict is, we have now all seen, hugely charismatic: but his charisma is of a different kind, less dramatic, less forcefully energetic than that of Pope John Paul.

As I've prepared the posts for this anniversary, I have indeed noted that some surprise on the part of the British hierarchy seems to come through their remarks; in the vernacular, they seem to be saying: "We didn't know you had it in you!" 

William Oddie on Next Year's Interment of the Catholic Richard III as an Anglican Protestant

William Oddie at The Catholic Herald outlines the reasons for regretting that Richard III isn't to be buried in a Catholic church with a Catholic Mass and prayers for the dead:

The point is that he was the last of the Plantagenets and therefore a Catholic King, almost the last (only his usurper remained nominally faithful before the great apostasy): so he ought to be being reinterred in a Catholic cathedral. What is there about that proposition which is even slightly controversial? It may not have been politically doable for our bishops to insist on it: but it is quite clear that the way in which the whole thing is to unfold, with the tacit agreement of the Bishops’ conference, has to be seen as a defeat for the English Catholic Church: it is, in microcosm, a narrative demonstration of our current position within English culture. And I am writing this because someone needs to say that the gruesome ecumenical subservience this indicates ought now to be challenged and repudiated by all English Catholics.

It may of course be that relations are not as calm as they appear on the surface. Is it my imagination, or has there, in fact, been some behind the scenes discord over all this? The reinterment will take place in the presence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, as though Richard had been rendered posthumously protestant. Cardinal Nichols, so far as I can see, will not be present. Was he asked? This is what the Cardinal had to say about the whole thing: “The death of King Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 was a decisive moment in English history. Following his death, Richard III was buried in the Franciscan Friary in Leicester, and his body lay in its grave until it was discovered in 2012. It is now fitting that his remains should be reinterred with dignity and accompanied by the prayers of the Church in Leicester Cathedral, the mediaeval parish church of Leicester. We commend all who have died to the love and mercy of Almighty God, and continue to pray for them, as we shall for Richard III and all who have lost their lives in battle.”

Now, this is strangely worded, considering who wrote it. “The death of King Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485”, says the Cardinal “was a decisive moment in English history”. Well obviously: but why was it so decisive? Because it placed on the throne the dynasty which renounced papal authority and made it illegal to pray for the departed; which invented the Church of England with all its doctrinal baggage; and which inaugurated a persecution of English Cathoiics which lasted at least four hundred years and which in some ways (though much milder) still persists. The Battle of Bosworth wasn’t just “decisive”: from a Catholic perspective, it was catastrophic. The reinterment of Richard III by a protestant archbishop may be considered to be a triumphal demonstration of how firmly in place still is the anti-Catholic ascendancy that Bosworth made possible.

Perhaps we should view this as a re-set from Father Tomlinson's more hopeful view yesterday--Catholics and the English Catholic past are still so very foreign in England--and the Ordinariate has a lot of work to do!

William Oddie on Father Ian Ker's "Newman on Vatican II"

In The Catholic Herald William Oddie discusses Father Ian Ker's new book Newman and Vatican II:

Newman was not a systematic theologian; he himself insisted that he was, rather, a controversialist. In this he seems instinctively to have identified himself with the fathers of the early Church who, as he pointed out, “rather than writing formal doctrinal treatises… write controversy”. Newman wrote voluminously in response to particular occasions. Sometimes, this meant writing a book (The Idea of a University, the Apologia Pro Vita Sua) or a sermon or a series of lectures (Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching); most, often perhaps, a letter, of which there are at least 20,000 extant.

Sometimes Newman’s controversial instinct, normally expressed gently, produced polemic of wonderful wit and acid brilliance, as with his defence, in the Apologia, of his own integrity and that of his Church against the contemptuous attacks of Charles Kingsley. Kingsley was generally seen at the time as having been quite crushed by Newman’s response, and in the second and subsequent editions of the Apologia Newman, magnanimous in victory, consigned his most swingeingly cutting opening chapters to an appendix. Normally, he is more gentle in his argumentation; but he responds unfailingly to the issues in which he finds himself engaged or which are brought before him: much of his thought is contained in his correspondence, on which Dr Ian Ker has drawn heavily in this new book, his brilliant, indispensable and pithily entitled (sic) Newman on Vatican II.

It is a real question. How, indeed, would this controversialist “Father of Vatican II” have responded to the manifold controversies of these post-conciliar times? Everyone, liberal or conservative, attempts to recruit Newman for their own point of view. . . .

As I've heard Father Ian Ker discuss that last point, he ascribes it to selective quotation, leaving out the context of some pithy saying of Newman so that he means the opposite of what he was saying. Anyone writing or speaking about Newman has to be very careful not to manipulate him into saying something he didn't. You must read him deeply and carefully and make sure you have not misstated his ideas.

Dr Ker argues that Newman would have understood the Council in a broadly similar way to that in which Pope Benedict explained it; thus, we can see Newman not merely as the “unseen Father of Vatican II” but also as a guardian of its aftermath. Just as Benedict XVI said, explaining his ideas on “The Hermeneutic of Change in Continuity” (one of Dr Ker’s chapter titles), that the Church “increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same”, so Newman had said, in his “Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine”, that Christianity “changes in order to remain the same”. . . .

Read the rest here.

William Oddie on the Ordinariate Liturgy

William Oddie was once an Anglican and he recently attended a Mass at an Ordinariate church and then wrote about it in The Catholic Herald:

I had never once felt, since my conversion, that I missed Anglicanism: the Church of England had become so awful, so impossible for anyone tending in a Catholic direction, that I was far more conscious, when I made my submission nearly 25 years ago, of how wonderful it was to be a Catholic. But I had forgotten, after my youthful atheism, how wonderful I thought so much of Anglicanism was, after the dry, dry desert of actual unbelief. One thing I loved was the setting of the Ordinary of the Eucharist (as I always called it before I discovered the excitements of Anglo-Catholicism) by the composer John Merbecke. This was Cranmer’s translation set to a kind of reformed plainchant (one note to a syllable), which though deriving from Gregorian chant eschewed its (I think wonderful) peripatetic longeurs. On Advent Sunday, I sang the creed to Merbecke for the first time in nearly 30 years: it all came back as though it was yesterday, and it was wonderfully moving. Another unexpectedly wonderful bonus I hadn’t anticipated was the entire absence of the suppressed irritation I so often feel at the debased English of the readings in the Roman Missal from the Jerusalem Bible: the readings, of course, were from the Authorised version, the King James Bible, now authorised afresh for liturgical use by our dear Pope Benedict.

I could go on about how splendid it all was. It was not just a voyage of rediscovery, however: it was also a realisation anew of how lifegiving a thing it is to belong to a Church which determines and teaches with authority what theological meaning actually is. Cranmer’s freshly composed prayers (as opposed to his translations from the Sarum rite, as with the Ordinary of the Mass and many of his collects) are sometimes written in deliberately ambiguous language, so as to be acceptable to a distinctly, even dangerously, various public, some members of it — then as now — radically Protestant but many of them still resentfully Catholic at heart. Again and again, you come across phrases which can be read in either a Catholic or a Protestant way. The authorisation of the use of such prayers by the Congregation for Divine Worship, quite simply removes the ambiguities.

Read the rest here.

William Oddie on Chesterton's Cause

From The Catholic Herald:

Many, many people have prayed, for many years, for the opening of this Cause, without any official response. Now we seem to have one. The Bishop of Northampton (the relevant authority, since Chesterton’s home town, Beaconsfield, is in his diocese), has given Martin Thompson, of the Chesterton Society (with whom he has had a prolonged conversation on the matter), permission to say that he “is sympathetic to our wishes and is seeking a suitable cleric to begin an investigation into the potential for opening a cause for [G K] Chesterton”. So he has not yet opened an official Cause: but he has begun the necessary preliminaries without which no Cause could be opened. This isn’t yet the end of the long years of prayer for a Cause to be officially estabished: but to adapt and slightly reverse Churchill’s famous phrase, it is the beginning of the end, and not simply the end of the beginning (the beginning was ended years ago).

After that Chestertonian turn of phrase, Oddie quotes J.J. Scarisbrick, the Catholic historian and pro-life leader:

“We all know,” he replied, “that he was an enormously good man as well as an enormous one. My point is that he was more than that. There was a special integrity and blamelessness about him, a special devotion to the good and to justice … Above all, there was that breathtaking, intuitive (almost angelic) possession of the Truth and awareness of the supernatural which only a truly holy person can enjoy. This was the gift of heroic intelligence and understanding – and of heroic prophecy. He was a giant, spiritually as well as physically. Has there ever been anyone quite like him in Catholic history?”

And then he cites one of the qualities I've read about often--how Chesterton could disagree with someone's ideas without attacking the person (something we need so much today):

Chesterton, like many great saints (Newman springs irresistibly to mind) was a controversialist in his bones. But no matter how combatively he argued, as Belloc wrote after his death, “he seemed always to be in a mood not only of comprehension for his opponent but of admiration for some quality in him… it was this in him which made him, with other qualities, so universally beloved.” This combination of combativeness with charity was a quality that Chesterton shared with other holy men; it is, indeed, one of the reasons he understood them so well, a clear example of what is termed “connaturality”, the faculty by which one holy man has a special insight into the mind and heart of another; St Thomas Aquinas’s huge productivity, he wrote, could not have been achieved “if he had not been thinking even when he was not writing; but above all thinking combatively. This, in his case, certainly did not mean bitterly or spitefully or uncharitably; but it did mean combatively. As a matter of fact, it is generally the man who is not ready to argue, who is ready to sneer. That is why, in recent literature, there has been so little argument and so much sneering.”

Read the rest here. I have just been reading about the historian J.J. Scarisbrick and his pro-life efforts in Edward Short's new book Culture and Abortion. I had not realized the great biographer of Henry VIII and one of the early English Reformation revisionist historians was the founder of a comprehensive pro-life organization!  Mr. Short sent me a copy of Culture and Abortion, his book of essays from Gracewing Publishers:    

                                

In Christifideles Laici (1988), Pope John Paul II exhorts his readers to recognize that "The inviolability of the person, which is a reflection of the absolute inviolability of God, finds its primary and fundamental expression in the inviolability of human life." For this great champion of life, "the common outcry, which is justly made on behalf of human rights ... the right to health, to home, to work, to family, to culture-is false and illusory if the right to life, the most basic and fundamental right and the condition for all other personal rights, is not defended with maximum determination." This is the conviction that prompted Edward Short to write Culture and Abortion, a study which looks at how our own culture betrays the inviolability of life by invoking what feminists call 'reproductive rights' to justify killing children in the womb. Examining the scourge of abortion from a cultural perspective, Edward Short draws on history, literature and the encyclicals of popes to show how defending the right to life can help us to reaffirm an understanding of culture that is based not on human pride or human power but on what Pope Paul II calls the "civilization of life and love." Wide-ranging and incisive, Culture and Abortion takes a fresh and provocative look at the often unacknowledged evil that continues to define our culture of death.

 

Mr. Short has asked me for my honest opinion about his new book and I will offer it gladly soon!

When the Pope Met the Archbishop of Canterbury

William Oddie of The Catholic Herald had some questions about the value of the visit and said so in a column which received quite a few comments. His crucial question was, would the Pope and the Archbishop  "talk about the fact that since the ordination of women to the Anglican version of the priesthood, the possibility of reunion between the two churches has been made an impossibility for all time?".

Now he restates the issue:

I’m sorry to go over the same ground again, but it’s important that we should get this one right, and I confused the issue last time. The danger is not that the visit is happening at all: it is that because of the way in which it is taking place, and because of the very dodgy way the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity is handling it, the impression is being given that in some way the Pope and the archbishop are equivalent figures, and that Welby’s beliefs about his Church and his office are understood AND RECOGNISED by the Holy See.

It’s essential to remember what those claims actually are. Catholics believe that Henry VIII invented a new church called the Church of England. But that’s not what Anglicanism claims at all. Anglicanism claims that it is continuous with what came before, that it is THE SAME CHURCH as the Ecclesia Anglicana of the Middle Ages and that Archbishop Welby is the direct successor of St Augustine of Canterbury: the Wikipedia article on him begins with the words “Justin Portal Welby … is the 105th and current Archbishop of Canterbury”. The liturgical book of the church which Catholics believe was newly invented but which Anglicans believe is England’s historic Catholic Church, reformed not invented by the Tudors, described itself as The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and other Rites and Ceremonies of THE CHURCH according to the use of the Church of England (My emphasis).

The consequence of all that is the Anglican claim, explicit or implicit, is that the Catholic Church in England is not what it says it is, because it’s the Church of England which IS in England what the Catholic Church claims to be. In less ecumenical times, the English Catholic Church was sometimes derided as “the Italian mission”.

Those claims are soft-pedalled now, but they are still there. Their modern equivalent is that Anglican bishops, and archbishops, are in some way equivalent and equal to the Catholic bishops: that in these ecumenical times they are somehow in business together.

He then goes on to identify the difficulties he sees with the ongoing Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) discussions:

Those on the Catholic side are there to represent a coherent doctrinal tradition the objective content of which is accepted by all of them. They would all, for instance, without even thinking about it, see the Catechism of the Catholic Church as being an authoritative expression of that tradition. On the Anglican side, opinions differ widely: some would also accept most of the CCC: others would reject much of it, and particularly what it has to say about the sacraments and the nature of the Church. The Catholic Commissioners represent the Catholic Church: the Anglicans represent only their own personal opinion. There is no consensus between them; how could any consensus emerge between them and the Catholic Church? That is why the ARCIC documents are couched in such vague and ambiguous language: and it is why the CDF has accepted none of them as adequately representing the Catholic view of whatever they were claiming to be about: some they have rejected as clearly heretical.

But what actual harm does ARCIC do, you may ask? Doesn’t it serve the admirable objective of fostering charity between divided Christians? Well, the harm it does is the harm indifferentism and reductionist ecumenism always does. We can see what has happened since the Sixties: the faithful in the pews are uncertain what to believe any more. Everyone always used to say, whatever you think of the Catholics, at least they know what they believe. Not any more they don’t. The pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI began to reverse the disaster of indifferentism: but they never disbanded ARCIC, though JPII did suspend it after the ordination to the Anglican episcopate of an openly and militantly homosexual man. As I wrote last time, “It was a moment in which reality asserted itself. What is unclear is WHY that assertion of reality was itself suspended. Why did ARCIC then recommence operations as though nothing had happened, despite the fact that throughout the Anglican communion, openly gay bishops are now seen as quite normal and there are thousands of women priests, several of whom are even commissioners in the new ARCIC?”

That last sentence does give me pause: how awkward for the ARCIC teams if they would ever discuss the Eucharist, the Real Presence, the priesthood--with such completely different views of the sacraments! And if they will never discuss those issues, how could the ARCIC ever say they really explored the crucial issues that divide Catholics and Anglicans.

The Catholic Herald also provides the text of Pope Francis' remarks at the end of the visit, and the second paragraph in the excerpt below is rather troubling as it seems like an apology, when certainly no apology is needed:

The history of relations between the Church of England and the Catholic Church is long and complex, and not without pain. Recent decades, however, have been marked by a journey of rapprochement and fraternity, and for this we give heartfelt thanks to God. This journey has been brought about both via theological dialogue, through the work of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, and via the growth of cordial relations at every level through shared daily lives in a spirit of profound mutual respect and sincere cooperation. In this regard, I am very pleased to welcome alongside you Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster. These firm bonds of friendship have enabled us to remain on course even when difficulties have arisen in our theological dialogue that were greater than we could have foreseen at the start of our journey.

I am grateful, too, for the sincere efforts the Church of England has made to understand the reasons that led my Predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, to provide a canonical structure able to respond to the wishes of those groups of Anglicans who have asked to be received collectively into the Catholic Church: I am sure this will enable the spiritual, liturgical and pastoral traditions that form the Anglican patrimony to be better known and appreciated in the Catholic world.

Today’s meeting is an opportunity to remind ourselves that the search for unity among Christians is prompted not by practical considerations, but by the will of the Lord Jesus Christ himself, who made us his brothers and sisters, children of the One Father. Hence the prayer that we make today is of fundamental importance.

At the risk of sounding more Catholic than the Pope, I must say I'm disappointed in the rather diffident tone of that paragraph. What about the blessing to the Catholic Church of those who have come home to Rome, in what Blessed John Henry Newman called "the one true fold of the Redeemer" as a real example of true ecumenism? As the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham sums up its brief history:

This new structure within the Catholic Church is a generous and pioneering attempt to heal the wounds of sin and division between Anglicans and Catholics. The Holy Father [Pope Benedict XVI], speaking at St Mary’s College, Oscott, at the end of his 2010 State Visit to the United Kingdom, said the Ordinariate “should be seen as a prophetic gesture that can contribute positively to the developing relations between Anglicans and Catholics. It helps us to set our sights on the ultimate goal of all ecumenical activity: the restoration of full ecclesial communion in the context of which the mutual exchange of gifts from our respective spiritual patrimonies serves as an enrichment to us all”.

New Chesterton Biographies in The New Criterion

Last week I saw Father Ian Ker's new biography of Chesterton at Eighth Day Books (the greatest bookstore in the world, that's all, right here in Wichita, Kansas)*. It is a massive tome! Roger Kimball comments on Father Ian Ker's book and William Oddie's book, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy:

Some of his recent admirers have endeavored to fill the gap. A serious “Collected Works” by Ignatius Press got going in 1986 and, as of this writing, is nearing its fortieth stout volume. Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy, William Oddie’s recent study of Chesterton’s development, and G. K. Chesterton, the new brick-like 750-page biography by Ian Ker, the authoritative biographer of Cardinal Newman, are models of academic diligence. These stately tomes are bulletins in what seems to be a renaissance of interest in (to adopt Oddie’s shorthand) GKC. Both make large claims for their subject. Cardinal Newman was canonized last year; why not Chesterton next? Ker nominates Chesterton as “the successor of the great Victorian ‘sages,’ and particularly Newman,” and suggests that we place him in the pantheon of English literary critics alongside Dr. Johnson, Matthew Arnold, and Ruskin.

I can envision Chesterton in a niche next to Dr. Johnson and Arnold; seeing him next to Newman is more difficult. Worldliness is not necessarily at odds with holiness; I wonder, though, about ruddiness. (Quoth Chesterton: “And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine/ ‘I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get into the wine.’ ”) Chesterton was assuredly devout. But he fought as many social and political battles as he did literary or religious ones. And in that arena he did not always distinguish himself. One tort that has shadowed him for decades is the charge of anti-Semitism. Auden, in the preface to his anthology of Chesterton’s nonfictional prose, admits that, though he always enjoyed Chesterton’s poetry and fiction, he had avoided his nonfictional prose because of his reputation as an anti-Semite. Ker, in his extensive index, has a longish entry devoted to “Chesterton, anti-Semitism of, alleged.” The adjective is meant to be extenuating. Kerr’s (sic)conclusion is that “he was anti-Jewish just as he was anti-Prussian, but only in the sense that he associated Jews with capitalism and international finance, just as he associated Prussians with barbarism and military aggression.” Ker seems to regard this as an exoneration. I think Auden is right that Chesterton cannot be “completely exonerated.” . . .

Chesterton’s anti-Semitism shouldn’t be overstated. It existed, and was abetted by his brother and by Hilaire Belloc, who seemed to regard government corruption as a largely Jewish concession. But, as John Gross notes in his splendid pages on Chesterton in The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, anti-Semitism did not obscure Chesterton’s “fundamental decency.” “He hated oppression; he belonged to the world before totalitarianism.” And it is also worth noting that he was one of the very first in England to attack Hitler and Hitlerism.

*Shameless promotion alert here/full disclosure: Eighth Day Books very kindly reviewed Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation when it came out and has included it in their annual catalog--

We present here a remarkable synthesis. At once a devout Catholic writing primarily but not exclusively for Catholics, a writer of limpid prose, and a skilled chronicler, Stephanie Mann shows how to write accurate and trustworthy history while unabashedly staking a claim about wrongs and rights and final judgment on matters. Her territory is the English Reformation and the subsequent fortunes of Catholics in England up through the twentieth century. It's a cavalcade of momentous persons and periods and movements, never losing its connecting thread of conflict between Church and State, and whether public order ever trumps freedom of faith and conscience. Find in this book vivid accounts of Henry VIII and the wives (three Catherines, two Anne's, and one Jane). There are lucid accounts of the reigns of Mary and her half-sister Elizabeth I, James VI, and Charles I. The English Civil War, the Puritans and Cromwell, and the Restoration are given due attention. But Mann isn't writing mere political history. She is at her best when describing the interfacing cultural and religious climates: the lukewarmness-dangerous to all sides-of the eighteenth century, the Oxford movement and conversion of Newman in the nineteenth, and the influence of literary and intellectual figures such as Chesterton, Benson, and Anscombe in the twentieth. With its extensive glossary of persons and terms, timeline of events, study questions and bibliography, Supremacy and Survival is a marvelous resource for teachers. But it is also a book for common readers, forcing the question to all of what kind of faith creates a willingness-sometimes even joyful willingness-to accept hanging, drawing and quartering and other hideous tortures, for its sake.

Also, I've worked at Eighth Day Books twice! (between full-time jobs)!

William Oddie on Evensong and Benediction

Having just quoted Newman's prayer from Evensong on the post about Sister Mary Christopher Luddens, I was happy to see William Oddie cite it in his Catholic Herald column:

O LORD, support us all the day long of this troublous life, until the shades lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, the fever of life is over, and our work done. Then, Lord, in thy mercy, grant us safe lodging, a holy rest, and peace at the last; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

A brief quote about that prayer:

You may retort, of course, that that’s not an Anglican prayer at all, it’s by Cardinal Newman, and that therefore I can’t claim that as part of the Anglican patrimony the ordinariate is bringing over the Tiber! Well, sorry, but it is an Anglican prayer: just like some of Newman’s greatest hymns (to this day sung just as much by Anglicans as by us) it was written not only when Newman was an Anglican, but also at a time when he was still quite clear in his mind that he could never become a Catholic. Its origins are in the splendidly oratorical final paragraph of a sermon he preached as vicar of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford (they don’t preach sermons like this any more):

But for us, let us glory in what they disown; let us beg of our Divine Lord to take to Him His great power, and manifest Himself more and more, and reign both in our hearts and in the world. Let us beg of Him to stand by us in trouble, and guide us on our dangerous way. May He, as of old, choose “the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty”. May He support us all the day long, till the shades lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done! Then in His mercy may He give us safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last!

Earlier in the article he reminds us of the sources Thomas Cranmer used to compile the Book of Common Prayer:

What the Pope, God bless him, has actually done is to re-appropriate a liturgy whose origins were in the first place entirely Catholic. As the Anglo-Catholic liturgist and divine Percy Dearmer (a friend of G K Chesterton) pointed out, the first Anglican Prayer Book “was not created in a vacuum, but derives from several sources. First and foremost was the Sarum Rite, or the Latin liturgy developed in Salisbury in the 13th century, and widely used in England. Two other influences were a reformed Roman Breviary of the Spanish Cardinal Quiñones, and a book on doctrine and liturgy by Hermann von Wied, Archbishop of Cologne.”

The Eucharistic liturgy which emerged was, of course, entirely defective from a Catholic point of view, simply invalid, and deliberately so: it was made brutally clear that this was not the sacrifice of the Mass. But Cardinal Quiñones’s attempt at streamlining the Breviary was adopted virtually in its totality. The Morning Office – a conflation of Lauds and Matins, and the Evening Office, and Evensong – a conflation of Vespers and Compline (thus containing both the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, both of course in wonderful Tudor English) – were thus irreproachably Catholic in their origins and content.