19 Tuesday Jan 2016
Posted in Liturgy, Ordinariate
Tags
Anglican Use, anglicanorum coetibus, BSDW, Divine Worship, liturgy, ordinariate, pre-lent, septuagesima
In keeping with the tradition of the Book of Common Prayer and the Anglican missals, Divine Worship: The Missal and the calendars of the personal ordinariates provide for the observance of the Pre-Lent season, or Septuagesimatide. In this article we will discuss the historical nature of this season, and look at how it is observed in the liturgical provision of Anglicanorum cœtibus.
10 Tuesday Nov 2015
Posted in Ordinariate
Divine Worship: The Missal
In a recent interview with The Ordinariate Observer, Monsignor Jeffrey Steenson, the Ordinary of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter, was asked about Divine Worship: The Missal and its relationship to the Anglican patrimony. His response was instructive, and is perhaps a useful means of understanding how the communities of the personal ordinariates will receive anew those traditions and practices which sustained their life within Anglicanism, and which have prompted within them aspirations to full communion with the Catholic Church. He said: “Anglican patrimony can be defined by as many people that happen to be in a room at that time. The Holy See helped us to define what is genuinely Catholic in these Anglican texts. Left to our own devices, we could not have defined our patrimony, simply because it is too various and too diverse; every congregation has a definition of ‘what is’ the distinctive Anglican patrimony of those they represent. Anglican patrimony was principally expressed locally, not universally. The Holy See needed to come in and help us ‘see it.’”
04 Wednesday Nov 2015
Posted in Ordinariate
Ss Charles Borromeo & Thomas More, St Mary’s Seminary, Baltimore
As a sign of her conformity to Christ in the midst of the world, the Church maintains her own calendar of feasts and fasts, which mark not only the principal commemorations of the life of Christ, her Lord, but also the lives of the saints, and the turning of the annual cycle of the year. This respects, of course, the cycle of nature; a fact seen in the timing of the Ember Days and Rogations. But the calendar of the Church’s feasts, the liturgical calendar, also provides something of superstructure that guide the Christian through the year, in accord with the life of Christ and his saints, as what we might topically describe as a liturgical “pathway of accompaniment” toward sanctification in the sacramental life of grace.
23 Wednesday Sep 2015
Posted in Ordinariate
In his paper to the annual festival of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham in London on Saturday 19 September 2015, Archbishop J. Augustine Di Noia OP, Adjunct Secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, presented what might be understood to be the primary theological rationale for the liturgical provision of the personal ordinariates erected under the auspices of the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum cœtibus. Archbishop Di Noia is well placed to make these observations, both as one who was intimately involved in the evolution of the personal ordinariates (even before they came into existence) and latterly as the Chairman of the Interdicasterial Working Group Anglicanæ traditiones, which was formed in 2011 to compile the liturgical provision mandated by Anglicanorum cœtibus III.
03 Thursday Sep 2015
Posted in Ordinariate
Our Lady of Walsingham in Saint Bede’s, Williamsburg, VA
Following several years of work, it is a joy to learn today that Divine Worship: The Missal is to be published in time for Advent this year. This missal represents the definitive expression of the Anglican liturgical patrimony within the Catholic Church, primarily for the use of the communities and parishes of the personal ordinariates in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, and Australia. It is accompanied by Divine Worship: Occasional Services, which contains the rites for baptism, confirmation (including the reception of converts), marriage, and funerals.
23 Wednesday Apr 2014
Posted in Ordinariate
Saint John the Evangelist, Calgary
At the invitation of Father Lee Kenyon, I have just returned from a most remarkable and wonderful Holy Week at Saint John the Evangelist in Calgary, a church of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter. The parish was received into the Church in December 2011 with around 65 persons, and they have received the same number again since then, and attracted a large number of 20-35 year young adult Catholics from the area. Regular Mass attendance is now well over 100. The parish celebrates exclusively according to Divine Worship, the liturgy prepared for the ordinariates, and has a daily celebration of the Mass and the public recitation of Morning and Evening Prayer according to these rites. This includes Mattins sung to plainchant twice a week with homeschooled children who have begun to meet together in the parish to form a cooperative and to form the beginnings of a choir school.
The music at Saint John’s is supported by an amateur parish choir. The English Hymnal and the Canadian equivalent, The Book of Common Praise, supplement the complete propers sung in English to settings from Wantage and the English Gradual. The Ordinary of the Mass is sung to settings by Merbecke and Healey Willan, with great confidence and gusto by all. A good pipe organ assists with this, together with the singing of many the parts of the Mass as prescribed for a said or sung celebration.
08 Tuesday Oct 2013
Posted in Liturgy
Over the past few months I have been fortunate enough to assist at two parishes that retain the rite of sprinkling before the principal Sunday Mass. One of these is a parish that celebrates an Extraordinary Form Missa Cantata, the other is a church of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter.
Whilst the Rite for the Blessing and Sprinkling of Water appears in the Missale Romanum of the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite, it forms part of the celebration of the Mass in a way that is different from the older form and the new Ordo Missae for use in the Personal Ordinariates. The English translation of the rubrics in the Ordinary Form reads, “From time to time on Sundays, especially in Easter Time, instead of the customary Penitential Act, the blessing and sprinkling of water may take place”.
Here, then, there is certainly a clear sense that this act is a ‘memorial of baptism’, but it seems that some of the wider symbolism of the ceremony is missed by this relocation. For example, whilst the penitential nature of the rite is elevated – no bad thing – this happens at the risk of reducing the richness of the sprinkling’s baptismal symbolism, because we move from an act of communal renewal to one that is explicitly penitential. We cannot confess the sins of another, and so the communitarian nature of the action is diminished. The explicit link between the Lord’s Day and the renewal of the memory of baptism is also surely important, and this is somewhat lost if the ceremony is only to take place ‘from time to time’, or only during the paschal season.
04 Friday Oct 2013
Posted in Liturgy
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14 Wednesday Nov 2012
Posted in Liturgy
Last Friday, the Ordinary celebrated Mass according to the Book of Divine Worship at St Patrick’s, Soho Square. Here is a short clip from the Introit:
