In London, the Ordinariate Begins to Bear Fruit
The children from the Sunday School fill up the first couple of benches, and when the rector leads the singing of the Angelus, their young voices pipe up eagerly in the response: “The angel of the Lord brought tidings to Mary/And she conceived of the Holy Spirit.” As things finish, there is the usual crowded gathering in the big Parish Room for coffee and tea. There is lots of talk. The Harvest Thanksgiving produced a groaning table of gifts, with bulging bags stacked under and around it, too – all will go to the local project for the homeless. Somebody is asking about the confirmation class. And is the parish ladies’ group meeting as usual this Monday?
If all this has a faintly Anglican
sound to it, that’s fine. Anglican patrimony: that’s what Pope Benedict XVI
said could be brought along when he made the offer to clergy and laity within
the Church of England in 2011: come into full Communion—come and be made
welcome in the Catholic Church, and bring with you all that you can of your
traditions, your heritage, your patrimony.
So far, some 80 clergy and about 1,000
laity in Britain have responded to the invitation made by Pope Benedict in Anglicanorum Coetibus. The Ordinariate
of Our Lady of Walsingham came into being in 2011 with three former Anglican
bishops forming its leadership. The following year two other ordinariates were
established—the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter in the United States and
Canada, and the Ordinariate of the Southern Cross in Australia.
The Ordinariate of Our Lady of
Walsingham has groups in various parts of Britain. In London, two churches have
been given over to the ordinariate by the Catholic bishops: one in Warwick
Street—a building with an extraordinary history going back to the days when
Catholics could only worship in chapels linked to foreign embassies—and one on
the south bank of the river Thames, near London Bridge.
It is this Church of the Most Precious Blood,
a late 19th-century building next to the railway viaduct, not far from Borough
Market, that is now the spiritual home of a thriving ordinariate parish
community. Father Christopher Pearson was formerly the vicar of the Anglican
church of St Agnes, at Kennington. He and a number of parishioners responded to
the Holy Father’s call, and after due process—a time of reflection, decision,
and instruction—were formally received into full communion with the Catholic
Church and confirmed. A while later, Father Christopher was ordained deacon and
then priest in St. George’s Cathedral, Southwark. They all worshipped for a
while at St. Wilfrid’s Catholic Church in Kennington, not far from their old
home at St. Agnes. And then the Church of the Most Precious Blood becoming vacant
with the planned departure of the Salvatorean Order, which had been running the
parish, and it was given into ordinariate care.
But that does not tell the whole
story. There have been so many adventures along the way. Media coverage of the ordinariate
has been, to put it mildly, mixed. The
Times ran a headline announcing that the Pope had “parked his tanks” on the
Anglican lawn. There had been hopes that Anglican clergy seeking full communion
with large groups of parishioners might be able to continue using their
churches—perhaps under a sharing arrangement. No such possibilities were
allowed. Nor did the Catholic bishops of England and Wales seem enthusiastic:
while there was official goodwill, and ordinations were celebrated at
Westminster Cathedral and elsewhere with glorious music and a packed
congregations, there was an apparent reluctance to help get things moving.
Ordinariate groups found that they were, at best, offered a time-slot for Mass
in a local Catholic parish. Ordinariate clergy were generally absorbed into the
mainstream of Catholic life, working as chaplains in hospitals and parishes,
and caring for their ordinariate groups, but without buildings of their own.
The offer of two churches in
London brought a new chapter. Precious Blood Church is effectively modeling
what an ordinariate parish can be. And it is working. This corner of South
London is rich in history: the Saxons fought a crucial battle on London Bridge,
Catherine of Aragon stayed in a house nearby when she first arrived in England
(a plaque marks the fact, and also that Sir Christopher Wren later stayed in
the same house while supervising the building of the new St. Paul’s), and
Catholics and Protestants both endured ghastly conditions in the nearby Clink
Prison at various stages during the Reformation. The parish of Precious Blood
was created at the end of the 19th century for the growing Catholic population,
many of whom worked on the nearby railway (London Bridge station is a major
terminus for Kent and the southern London suburbs). Two great war memorials in
the church list the names of large numbers of young men of the parish killed in
the First World War.
Today, the area is changing:
housing here can command exorbitant prices, and the nearby Shard is London’s
tallest-ever building, owned by a Gulf state and exuding an air of opulent
supremacy. The old working-class way of life of corners of South London such as
this has changed. Television, fast food, immigration, computers, family
break-up have all combined so that this is not the community that existed when
Precious Blood Church was first built, not when it withstood bombing in World
War II, nor in the London of the 1960s and 70s.
But there is still a community
here, and enough of a community feeling to offer a sense of faint wariness when
the ordinariate arrival was announced. Not for long, though. Within a very
short while the whole thing had morphed together into something greater; today,
whether it’s coffee-after-Mass or the new heating system being installed along
the church floor, or the big Corpus Christi Procession that wound its way
through the local streets, or the recently-restored sacristy with its splendid
Victorian ceiling (rediscovered during renovations, with a fine lantern
window), it is working, and working well.
Americans might be interested to
know that among parish events this year was a talk by Raymond Arroyo of
EWTN—far too many people for the Parish Room, so it was held in the church, and
it was a great success. A regular Sunday School now attracts good numbers of
children. A new organ has been installed. A new shrine honoring Bl. John Henry
Newman—patron of the ordinariate—was blessed by the archbishop recently. An
illustrated lecture on Newman by Dr. Andrew Nash packed the church out again.
The most recent celebration was
another ordination, of two more former Anglicans, which was followed by a
reception in a nearby art gallery, the Parish Room being again inadequate. As I
write this, Precious Blood will be hosting a gathering of young people who are
doing a Pilgrimage Walk through London, a reunion of walkers who took part in a
summer Walk to Walsingham.
What of the future? The success
of Precious Blood Parish ought to encourage other bishops in other dioceses to
offer churches to the ordinariate as the opportunity arises. It is tragic to
hear of churches being closed; this happened recently in another part of
England, where an ordinariate priest and group were ready and willing to take
on a building, but it was sold instead to local Muslims. Bishops perhaps need
courage to recognize the huge new possibilities following Pope Benedict’s
courageous invitation: somehow the idea that things can’t be that good, that
decline must be inevitable, that God wouldn’t usher in new ideas and new hopes,
seems to die hard.
Two small stories on which to
end, although they both indicate not an end, but a beginning. When Father
Christopher Pearson was exploring the choir-loft at Precious Blood Church,
among the clutter of years inevitably stacked there, he found a statue, faced
turned to the wall in a dusty corner. It was a statue of a woman, and, assuming
it to be Our Lady, he swilled it round. But it wasn’t Our Lady; it was St.
Agnes—a much less usual figure to find in a corner of a church, and patroness
of his former, Anglican parish. It seemed symbolic. And then some weeks later,
when the basement of the rectory was finally being tackled, and stacks of old
books and magazines and papers were being sorted, a set of beautifully-bound
works of John Henry Newman was revealed on a shelf. On the flyleaf of the first
book was a hand-written dedication: “To the Revd C. Pearson, from JHN.” And a
Reverend C. Pearson, at the start of the 21st century, is now again a pastor at
the church, with JHN as patron.
I think Pope Benedict would be happy to know about all
this: I hope he is aware that the ordinariate is working, and that the future
looks bright.
