Since my post on how I say the office, some people have asked me if that is the sum total of my prayers. The answer is, of course, No.
I look upon the Daily Office (in whatever language) as a sort of spiritual platform on which to build my prayers. The daily Mass is also a great help to concentrate my prayer of thanksgiving, though I know that many cannot attend Mass daily, and indeed there is no obligation for either lay people or priests to do this. But everyone can say some form of a daily Office, however short.
My next staple is the Holy Rosary. I know some people think of the Rosary as a mindless recitation of Our Fathers and Hail Marys, but I find on the contrary, that the constant repetition of the same well known prayers actually frees the mind and spirit to contemplate the mysteries of the Christian Faith. And the joy of the Rosary is that it does not depend on having a book in your hand: it can be said anywhere, in the street, in your car, on a bus. (By the way, it is safer in your car to use your God-given rosary of ten fingers rather than a set of beads!). Pope John Paul II made the Rosary even more precious by adding the five Luminous Mysteries to fill the gap between Our Lord’s childhood and his Passion. The immense value of our contemplating the Baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist; the Marriage in Cana of Galilee; the Preaching of the Gospel of the Kingdom; the Transfiguration on the Mountain; and the Institution of the Holy Eucharist, is that we take the humanity of Our Lord more seriously.
So I try to say the five decades of the appropriate day every day, and sometimes (if I am walking about a lot) much more, dedicating each decade for a particular person or need.
And from all this formal prayer comes one’s private and intimate conversation with God, which can take place at any time. There we abandon the spoken word and enter into a silence of loving awareness of one another’s presence. There we hold up our loved ones and their needs, the pains of the sick and needy, our penitence for sins, the thanksgiving and praise for our “Creation, Preservation and all the blessings of this life” as the General Thanksgiving puts it (a prayer we should use very often).
As you can see, some of this takes a lot of time, but I make no apology for saying that this is the priest’s first priority. Of course, a busy parish priest cannot give as much time to formal prayer as a cloistered nun, but if he practises most of what I have listed above, prayer will simply permeate all he does.
I am reminded of the busy doctor who went to a saintly priest for advice about his prayer life. The priest said to him: “You must pray for half an hour each day. Except when you are very busy – then you must pray for an hour”!
Today, I posted on my Facebook page that I was about to say the Mass of St Gregory the Great, but a quick-witted parishioner swiftly pointed out that I was wrong: I was about to say the Mass of St Pius X. (No relation to Malcolm, by the way).
The confusion arose in my mind because I say the Daily Office from the modern Roman Rite, which has a different calendar from the English Missal and the Anglican Prayer Book.
When I was ordained in 1967, I carried on my practice of at least 7 or 8 years’ standing of saying Matins and Evensong from the Scottish Episcopal Prayer Book. This lasted till I became Vicar-General of the Anglican Diocese in Europe in 1992 . I lived for a couple of years in the Clergy House of St Mary’s, Bourne St, in London, and there attended the morning and evening office every day. They had the odd practice of having the modern Roman office in the morning and the old Prayer Book office in the evening. So I met the new office, and rather liked it.
Then I went to be Dean of Gibraltar, and carried on saying the whole Roman office privately, while singing or saying Evensong daily in the Cathedral. I started to say the private office in Spanish, but the Gibraltarians did not speak Spanish (being proudly British) and so that rather petered out, since I had no one to practise with.
But when the Bishop asked me to be Archdeacon of Italy & Malta in 2000, and I knew I would be living in Milan, immediately I switched to saying the office in Italian as the best way I knew to learn the language, and I have never stopped. Well, that would have been true till last month, when I switched back to saying it in Spanish, since Spanish is the second language of the USA and the first of many countries to the south.
So my present illogical prayer life consists of Morning Prayer and the Office of Readings in Spanish; Mass in English, sometimes with the Roman Canon, sometimes the 1929 Anglican one; Midday Prayer in Spanish; Evensong publicly in English; and finally Compline (by heart) from the Scottish Episcopal Prayer Book.
It makes no sense, except to me – and, I hope, God.
After the “Go in Peace” and the Blessing, anyone not used to the old form of the Mass would think it was all over. But not so.
In every Mass, the Last Gospel is then read. And funnily enough, the Last Gospel is usually the First Words of the Gospel according to John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”. This is what John thought was the best introduction to the Good News he was about to tell.
The first sentences are heavenly, set in the realm of Creation. The Word is the creator of all things; he is Life and Light for all mankind; the primeval darkness is conquered by his Light.
And then we zooms down to earth. “There was a man sent from God , whose name was John”. Wow! Talk about bathos! But then John the Evangelist has to make clear to his readers that this John (the Baptist) was not the Light he was talking about, but a witness to that light. And the Greek word for witness was “martyrion”, and not one of his first readers would be unaware of the awful fate of John the Baptist as the first Martyr/Witness to Jesus.
Then John goes on to make the vast claim the Jesus was “the true light that lighteneth every man that cometh into the world”. EVERY person – not just the Jews, but every nation was given light by the Word of God. St Paul says the same when he says that every person knows good through the natural law. Jesus was “in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not” – it’s like Christopher Wren being stopped at the door and being told that only authorised people could enter St Paul’s Cathedral! Imagine the verger’s red face – so imagine the Jews’ red face! “He came unto his own, and his own received him not”. Oops!
But then John says that those who did receive him, those who recognised their Maker and Redeemer, were given power. Their batteries were charged so that they had the divine energy of God. to become not slaves, not even friends, but Children of God, entirely through God’s free gift. A possibility for everyone!
Then comes the most wonderful sentence of all, when all the talk about the Word, the Logos, the great creative energy of God, says what no Greek or Hebrew philosophy had ever said: “THE WORD BECAME FLESH, AND DWELT AMONG US”. That is when we fall to our knees in adoration, as John himself had done with his brother James and their friend Peter on the Mount of Transfiguration. There (and here at the end of the Mass) “we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth”.
What more can the Congregation say than “Thanks be to God.”? Then we stagger into the world he made, hopefully trailing some of that glory with us.
What strange times we live in! Ireland’s Prime Minister has delivered a speech condemning the Church of Rome in a manner that would have been impossible a decade ago. Attendance at Mass is at an all-time low in Ireland. Meanwhile, the (Anglican) Church of Ireland reports steady growth, and that mainly from RC’s disgusted with their own Church for its complicity in child abuse.
And, on another front altogether, if only we had an Archbishop of Canterbury with a spine, he would be off to China to have top-level talks with the Catholic Church leaders there, inviting them to become part of the Anglican Communion. It seems to me that the Chinese Catholic church is at the very stage where the English Catholic Church was in the 16th century, thoroughly fed up with interference in its life by the Bishop of Rome. The Chinese Church leaders are ignoring Rome and choosing Bishops of their own (and being encouraged in this by the Chinese Government), while remaining Catholic Christians. That would have sounded familiar to Archbishop Cranmer!
With the vast majority of RC’s despising their Church’s laws on artificial contraception, and - in some countries – a majority against their Church’s laws on remarriage after divorce, clerical celibacy, a male-only priesthood, even conservative RC’s are beginning to say that their Church would be better smaller but purer in belief. This must surely leave a lot of impure Catholics around to be welcomed into the Anglican Church!
So perhaps the 21st century will benefit from a renewed Anglicanism which will, as always, be a non-Roman, Catholic church. A relaxed, English form of Catholicism, faithful to the Gospel of Good News for the poor, the needy, the unloved, might prove a much greater converting power than the legalistic concerns of the centralized, secretive, power-obsessed rule of old men, which is the reality of the Vatican.
How about Beijing for the next Lambeth Conference?!
I have found a new Curate for St Clement’s, and I am now selling shares in him. O.K, that’s not quite true! But I would like you to buy into him spiritually.
St Clement’s Vestry has encouraged me for almost two years to choose a new assistant priest, and I have looked at many applications and even interviewed some of them, but have not been convinced they were the right person.
During this time, we have been able to save the stipend of a curate, but as with every parish and indeed family, this has been a time when incomes have shrunk, and so we have been glad to make this saving. But the time has now come when, if St Clement’s is to continue its traditions of presenting the fullest Anglo-Catholic worship and service within the Episcopal Church, we must return to having two full-time priests.
And to make this possible, without our having to cut other parts of our budget, such as our wonderful music program, or to use our endowment funds, I have decided to make an appeal to the generosity of the Friends of St Clement’s, both our official Friends as well as our much more widespread unofficial friends throughout the world.
There are several reasons why any friend of St Clement’s should make a gift.
First, our worship, and especially the High Mass of Sundays and Feast Days, requires two priests. I know, from letters received and the vast number of hits to our website, how many other Anglo-Catholic churches look to us as a standard of excellence. And who would want St Clement’s to abandon this witness to the beauty of holiness?
That on its own would not justify the expense of a second priest. But the second reason for our having a curate is that parishes like St Clement’s have a moral obligation to train and educate young priests to go out and be the Rectors of parishes in the future. Our seminaries on the whole do a reasonable job in giving young clergy an academic knowledge, but they mostly do not teach what Monsignor Ronnie Knox called Priestcraft. And yet this is vital if we are to have priests who can administer the sacraments, preach the Gospel, and “rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep” and “eat and drink with publicans and sinners”, which were two of the job descriptions Jesus gave to his disciples.
And there is a third reason for us to have a curate at St Clement’s. We are surrounded by three Universities and a dozen colleges with tens of thousands of students attending them. Many are Episcopalians, away from home and church for the first time. They need a friendly church which will welcome them in and care for them, and I think St Clement’s could do much more in this field than we do at the present. And the same is true of the very many young professionals who have moved into City Center, and may be as rootless as the students, where church is concerned. We need to reach out to them too. This cannot, of course, be done by the priests alone, but one job I would like our new curate to do would be to encourage our lay members to plan a “Mission of Hospitality” to welcome such people into St Clement’s.
So, if you have just won the Lottery, would you please make out a very large check to pay for our new curate. But if you have not (yet) become a millionaire, please help us make a difference by sending a smaller check, thus giving a new priest the best training and parish experience that we can offer.
The Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament used to be a quiet, pious little society for Anglo-Catholics. Its aims were (and are) to promote devotion to the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar in the Anglican Communion. To this end, it made small grants to parishes all over the world to help them buy vestments, chalices, ciboria, monstrances etc.
The peace and quiet of the CBS has recently been rudely shattered. The Trustees voted to give one million pounds to the new RC body called the Ordinariate. This represents more than half the funds of CBS, and was done stealthily by five of the six trustees who had left the Church of England and become Roman Catholics and who changed the constitution to allow RCs to be members.
The membership of CBS was never consulted; in fact, meetings were cancelled so that they might not be consulted.
I’m glad to say that a veritable fire-storm has broken out in England. Large numbers of members have written to the Charities Commission, who regulate and investigate any illegal or dubious goings-on by trustees of charities. Similar letters are speeding their way to the Archbishop of Canterbury, the (RC) Archbishop of Westminster, the RC Bishop who is head of the new ordinariate, and even to members of Parliament. Various newspapers have taken up the scent (of the sewer, not the cologne!) and are homing in on the individuals who have perpetrated this underhand trick.
My own bet is that the normal RC Church will be so embarrassed by these deceitful Anglicans-turned-Roman, that they will pressurize them to return the money. If not, the CBS membership will certainly take the matter to the courts. Little old ladies who have given their widows’ mites so that Kenyans priests could have chalices are not going to watch meekly as the money goes to pay ex-Anglican priests on Anglican pensions – not to mention the ones with wives (part of their Anglican patrimony!) who earn considerably more than their husbands.
It can’t be very often that the Feasts of the Sacred Heart and of the Precious Blood fall on the same day. It is caused, of course, by the fact that the one – the Sacred Heart – is fixed by the moveable calendar which depends on the date of Easter, while the other – the Precious Blood – is always July 1 in the old calendar.
So this morning, I was not sure which of these Masses I should celebrate. They are both “Doubles of the First Class’ as the old calendar terms them, so that was no help. Then I remembered that we are keeping Sunday as an External Solemnity of the Sacred Heart, so I celebrated the Mass of the Precious Blood.
Both feasts are examples of that phenomenon, also exemplified by Corpus Christi and Holy Cross Day, of taking bits of what we commemorate in Holy Week out of that Week, so that they can be celebrated in a more festive manner. I was once in Bruges on July 1, and was very impressed by the procession through the streets of the relic of the Precious Blood that is venerated there.
So now I have the Sacred Heart for Sunday and will preach on this doctrine. Soldier’s spear – blood and water – Baptism and Holy Communion – blood the symbol of life – Christ’s blood in the chalice passing on the life of God to us.
I know this is a new word, but I use it for the re-ordination which is being imposed on priests of the Anglican Church who have decided they want to be Roman Catholics, but say they want to keep their Anglican liturgical heritage.
I have never heard such nonsense in my life. (Oh well, I suppose I have, when I heard President Nixon’s resignation speech). Many of these guys have never used an Anglican Liturgy in their life, and those who have, did it under compulsion, or because the Bishop was visiting.
The Church of England received 14 Roman Catholic priests last year, according to a Parliamentary report, but there was no triumphalism by the C of E. Compare this with the trumpet-blowing by those who have joined the RC Church by what has been called the back-door of the Ordinariate.
I wish all Anglican priests who have chosen this sort of Uniate Church well, and pray for their future RC/Anglican ministry. It won’t be easy.
Deacons being ordained in Notre Dame, Paris
I think it was Monsignor Ronnie Knox who first used the term “Priestcraft” in a positive way, delivering it from Protestant usage for the slippery ways of Papistical Jesuits creeping into England to re-enslave the people freed from the tyranny of Rome by the glorious Reformation.
Mgr Knox used the word to mean all the duties and skills of the priestly vocation, especially those of a parish priest with a pastoral job. I was lucky enough (or old enough) to go to a seminary where such skills were taught under the title of “Pastoralia”. This ranged from sermon classes to the more exotic skills of how to hold the baby at Baptisms, how to fill in the marriage registers, how to give the chalice to a lady in a wide-brimmed hat (You lift the brim!).
There was a more serious side to Pastoralia than such trivia. We had seminars on taking Communion to the sick; on hearing confessions; on marriage preparation; on regular visits to the homes of parishioners (“A home-going priest makes a church-going people”); on tragedies and sudden deaths – in fact everything where the priest is called upon by his people to minister to them.
I’m sorry to hear from many American friends that this kind of teaching (and it went on as part of a two-year course) is seldom given in modern seminaries. They are far more interested in academic matters. If this is so, it is a sad thing. But it can be supplemented by a young priest’s training in his first parish.
This is one reason why I am sure St Clement’s should always have a curate. Here, a deacon and then a priest can learn the full range of liturgical duties in the daily Masses and Offices and the Sunday High Mass. He will in time be allowed to hear Confessions; he will visit the sick and housebound, the hospitals and senior citizens residences, and many of the congregation in their own homes. He will make contact with the students in the three universities and several colleges that surround St Clement’s. He will, hopefully, end up after two or three years here, able to take on any pastoral job offered him.
I have had curates in Edinburgh, Inverness, Stockholm and Milan, and tried my best to show them what Priestcraft was all about. And I have enjoyed watching all of them, as they went forth and put it all into practice.
A wedding in Milwaukee and a Solemn Mass in Chicago, concelebrated by two Bishops and two dozen priests – that’s a special weekend.
The wedding was between Joe, a young member of St Clement’s, a musician and teacher, and his fiancee Maureen, a pilot in the US Air Force. The ceremony was in St James’s, Milwaukee, and I married them according to the same rite as the one Prince William and Kate had in Westminster Abbey. The big difference was that their wedding was embedded in a Nuptial Mass, so that their first act together after they were united was to receive Communion. (My traditionalist friends will be happy to hear that, although I used the church’s free-standing altar, I never went behind it, but celebrated facing east!)
The next day, however, I concelebrated the Mass with Bishop James Mongomery, formerly Prince-Bishop of Chicago (He and Cardinal Cody and Mayor Daley the Elder ran the city before President Obama was a twinkle in his father’s eye) facing the huge congregation in the Church of the Atonement in Chicago. This was in honour of Bishop Montgomery’s 90th Birthday, and was a wonderful occasion. Many of the concelebrating priests had been ordained by Bishop Montgomery, and the other Bishop was Frank Griswold, his successor in Chicago and then Presiding Bishop.
Now, after all these excitements (which, I forgot to mention, included FOUR formal dinners!) I’m back to the simple little Gospel services of St Clement’s – and bread and cheese.