Thine Own Service

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Tag Archives: ordination

Divine Worship: For The Priest Himself

21 Thursday Apr 2016

Posted by Fr James Bradley in Liturgy, Ordinariate

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BSDW, Divine Worship, liturgy, ordinariate, ordination, priesthood

2016-04-21 07.41.08

The anniversary of my own ordination to the priesthood provides an occasion to offer a short post about the propers in Divine Worship: The Missal for one of the Masses for Various Necessities and Occasions designated For the Priest himself. This Mass formulary is given the additional title, in parentheses: “especially on the anniversary of ordination.” The majority of the propers for this Mass come from the Mass In Any Necessity, but the Introit, Collect, Prayer over the Offerings, and Postcommunion are proper to this formulary in Divine Worship. In the catalogue of masses in this section of the missal, this follows those For the Pope or Bishop and For the Election of the Pope.

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Homily for Ember Friday in Lent

19 Friday Feb 2016

Posted by Fr James Bradley in Homily

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ember days, fasting, homily, lent, ordination, priesthood

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Ordination of Priests in San Salvatore di Ognissanti, Florence, 2010

In the midst of the annual fast of the season of Lent it may appear somewhat peculiar for the Church to call us to additional prayer and penance in the form of the three ember days that punctuate the liturgical calendar. During a period of restraint, and of intensified prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, we might even consider it excessive to add further conditions to the spiritual wellbeing of the Christian faithful. The great wartime Archbishop of Milan, Blessed Ildefonso Schuster—no liturgical modernist he—went so far as to say: “It seems quite superfluous to speak of ember days in Lent … either these ember fast-days are a patchwork addition devoid of any particular significance, or else a place should be found for them apart from the paschal fast.” Yet here we are with this liturgical observance and, should we choose to observe it, a custom of fasting and abstinence that reaches back a thousand years. What is it then that, in her wisdom, our Holy Mother the Church is whispering to us in the words and actions that she asks us to perform this night, in these signs and symbols of love?

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Divine Worship: Lent Ember Days

16 Tuesday Feb 2016

Posted by Fr James Bradley in Ordinariate

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anglicanorum coetibus, BSDW, Divine Worship, ember days, lent, liturgy, ordinariate, ordination, patrimony

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Ordination of a Priest, Saint Mary’s Seminary, Houston TX

Having already discussed the general origin and development of Ember Days in their context in the season of Advent, this article will consider the second set of Ember Days in the liturgical year, those of the first full week of Lent, as they appear in Divine Worship: The Missal.

History of the Ember Days in Lent

To begin we must look at the specific purpose of the Ember Days in the season of Lent. Dom Prosper Guéranger notes that, in common with those in December, these Ember Days are oriented toward the bestowal of holy orders that traditionally took place on Ember Saturday, just before the Second Sunday of Lent. He comments that they are also “to offer to God the season of spring, and, by fasting and prayer, to draw down His blessing upon it.” The context of the Ember Days within the season of Lent is in fact a later development. Marking the natural season, rather than the liturgical season, the Ember Days began as celebrations of the season of spring in the first week of March, and were only fixed to days in Lent by Pope Saint Gregory VII in the eleventh century. Archdale King notes that the Ember Days in general “appear at the first to have no fixed date, the Pope announced their celebration some time in advance.” More than that, Josef Jungmann states that the idea of holding Ember Days in spring at all was, in fact, a comparatively late addition, introduced only after the development of those in summer, autumn, and winter. He writes: “We say quattuor tempora, but the most ancient sources of the Roman liturgy speak only of three such times … The fourth place, in spring, remained free, because there was already the great season of Quadragesima.” According to Jungmann, the adoption of the fourth set of Ember Days, in spring at first and then later specifically in Lent, may have brought about the transferral of the Mass formulary for the Ember Days in December to Lent, and the composition of new texts for the Ember Days in December with, as he puts it, “an Advent character”—an hypothesis he draws from the history of ordination practices in Rome.

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Divine Worship: Advent Ember Days

05 Saturday Dec 2015

Posted by Fr James Bradley in Liturgy, Ordinariate

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advent, anglicanorum coetibus, BSDW, Divine Worship, ember days, liturgy, ordinariate, ordination, patrimony

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Ordination of a Priest, Saint Mary’s, Charleston, SC

On the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday of the first week of the season of Advent, Divine Worship: The Missal gives three Mass formularies for the winter, or Advent, Ember Days. In the Book of Common Prayer, as in the calendar and missal of 1962, these fall in the last full week of Advent, following the feast of Saint Lucy on 13 December. They are days traditionally marked by fasting and abstinence, and from at least the fifth century they were also associated with the spiritual preparation for ordinations. Here we will briefly consider the Ember Days in general, and also the particular context of the Ember Days of Advent in Divine Worship: The Missal.

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A Little Different

29 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by Fr James Bradley in Uncategorized

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Benedict XVI, discernment, ministry, ordination, priesthood, vocation

My first Sunday as a Priest without the aid of 20 servers, 2 deacons, 4 concelebrants, an assistant Priest MC, a polyphonic choir, a plainchant schola, a dulcian, 2 baroque guitars, and nearly 500 in the congregation. A little different? Yes. Downer? Certainly not.

This morning I celebrated the Solemn Mass and preached on the importance of supporting vocations work. We have such a great focus on vocations to the Sacred Priesthood in this parish that it’s difficult to know how to improve on things. My challenge was this: if we can think of something we’d rather our son/grandson/nephew did, other than be a Priest of Jesus Christ, then we need to think again about the importance of the Sacred Priesthood, and to engage more strongly with the image of Christ the Good Shepherd who willingly lays down his life for his sheep.

After Mass one mother told me I had to keep working on her sons – she clearly wants a Priest in the family: great! But it must be hard for a parent to hold an ideal which runs so contrary to what society expects. The world wants us to marry, to be successful, to earn money, to have our own house, to have independence. Christ wants more: he wants everything we have, everything we are, set apart. Set apart for what? The plebs sancta Dei, the Holy People of God, whom he calls his priests to serve without limits, searching out the lost and gathering all into the safety of sheepfold.

Sure, not everyone is called to the Ministerial Priesthood, but our baptism does call us all to give ourselves entirely the vocation Christ gives each one of us, and that supernatural fulfilment must genuinely be the desire of Christian families before we can regain a proper sense of what Scott Hahn calls ‘the glory of the priesthood’.

If you haven’t read the Holy Father’s message for the World Day of Vocations (which we celebrate today), you can read it here. You can also read his homily from the Ordination Mass he celebrated this morning in Rome and there’s a short video of the event here.

Many Are Called

25 Wednesday Apr 2012

Posted by Fr James Bradley in Uncategorized

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fatherhood, ministry, ontology, ordination, priesthood, scott hahn

During my ordination retreat I was able to catch up on a pile of books that have been sitting on my shelves waiting to be opened. Amongst these was a short volume by the American author and former Presbyterian minister, now Catholic layman, Scott Hahn. Anglicans have had little exposure (in my experience) to Hahn’s work, but I’m surrounded by people who rate him highly, so I was keen to see what he had to say.

The first thing is that, because he himself had been in active ministry within Presbyterianism, he understands the concept of ministry. He understands that the minister (Priest, sure, but we’ll get to that) has a job to do and that he does in fact have a function to perform. The beauty of Catholic teaching regarding the ontological nature of the Sacrament of Orders allows us to talk about function as a result of being. I am a Priest, therefore I need to be priestly. We shouldn’t be afraid to speak of function, but only when it is linked to this fundamental understanding of the Priest as new creation: a consecrated being set apart to minister as a sacrificing Priest of the New Covenant.

Hahn also recognises that, in terms of apologetics, we need to rediscover the glory of the Priesthood – in fact, this is the subtitle of the work. That glory, he says, comes fundamentally from the awesome fact that the Priesthood is apostolic, but also rooted in the understanding of humanity and of priesthood in the Old Testament. When we see this, when we see that the Christian Priest is truly secundum ordinem Melchisedech, we realise the historical significance of each priestly ordination, of each sacerdotal action.

Above all, though, Hahn’s understanding of the Priesthood is drawn from his own fatherhood. Together with his wife, Kimberley, the Hahns have six children, and this enables him to see the limitless paternal imagery in the Catholic Priest. It is a masculine vocation – not just in the sense of being for men (though it is), or that it’s about what some people describe as ‘muscular Christianity’, but in the sense of it being the full realisation of the potential fatherhood which is innate in all men.

What do I mean by this? Hahn explains that ‘[i]n the priest, we come to see fatherhood that goes beyond the biological dimension’. In other words, we see a supernatural fatherhood in which the Priest embodies, in a particular way, the fullness of fatherhood which is found in the relationship of God the Father with God the Son, caught up in the mystical union of the Most Holy Trinity. The Priest is the image of God the Father to himself, as he stands in persona Christi to Christ’s faithful people in the Church.

Fr Andrew Apostoli’s book, When God asks for an undivided heart, deals with similar considerations, but it is Hahn’s language of the fatherhood of the Priest which enables us to see that, through the gift of celibacy – which each day I grow to understand and appreciate more – the Christian Priest doesn’t ‘give up’ being a father, but rather embodies a perfect fatherhood which was shown to us by the perfect father-son relationship of the Holy Trinity, and – in a human sense – shown in the gentle fostering of the Christ child by St Joseph.

Scott Hahn’s book Many Are Called: Rediscovering the Glory of the Priesthood is available on Amazon.

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