Reflection on St John Chrysostom on the Anniversary of his Death, for the Eastern Christians Prayer Group, Fellowship & Aid to the Christians of the East

READING - Ephesians 4.1-7, 11-13

I, Paul, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, Who is above all and through all and in all.

But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift. The gifts He gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.

REFLECTION - by Father Mark Woodruff, Chairman of the Society of St John Chrysostom

At first sight, St Paul’s address to the new Christians of Ephesus on the western coast of what is now Turkey is about our faith in the Persons of the Holy Trinity and the gifts with which our baptism has equipped us to serve the building up of all humanity into the body of Christ. So indeed it is. But look again, and St Paul is saying that this first comes out of a lived experience of adversity (his imprisonment), sacrifice of self (humility), endurance (patience, and bearing with others) and redemption that take what is amiss and converts it permanently into good (love marked by forgiveness, and God’s calling that makes good on hope), because the body into which we are baptised is that of the Father’s Son nailed to the Cross, which He endured to bring our salvation into effect.

St John is a second St Paul. His eloquence and spiritual imagination flow through abundant writings. 1687 letters and sermons reveal a lively mind, beautifully communicating from his direct encounter with Christ, and faith distilled through adversity for His sake. His preaching gained him the title ‘Chrysostomos’, the Golden Mouth, not only because what he said warmed people’s hearts and convinced their belief and discipleship, but because it rang true coming from John. What Paul said of himself, is true of Chrysostom too: “In my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church.” How did this life take shape?

He was born in the third city of the eastern Roman empire, Antioch, in around 345. An outstanding literary, philosophy and rhetoric scholar with a successful public career ahead of him, in 374 he chose instead to live for God in the severely ascetical life of monk. It was not until 386 that he was ordained priest, when his exceptional oratorical skills were revealed in the straightforward practicality, vivid imagery and convincing moral appeal of his sermons, as well as the rich insight of his commentaries on the Scriptures. Having brought about the reconciliation of the sees of Antioch and Alexandria with old Rome after a loss of communion for seven decades, in 397 he was the outstanding candidate to be the new Archbishop of new Rome, the capital of the Christian Roman Empire, Constantinople. The people of Antioch did not wish to lose him, so to evade opposition to his election, he left in secret to be consecrated away from the public eye.

Immediately, the consequence of faithful preaching “in season and out of season” in Constantinople began. While his inspiring illustrations of the Scriptures and his clear preaching, applying Christ and faith to real life, endeared him to the people, he inevitably showed up the lax lifestyles and the moral injustices of the rich and powerful. The empress Eudoxia flattered herself that these barbs were aimed above all at her. A synod was trumped up to depose him for supposed unorthodox teaching. Her husband the emperor Arcadius then exiled him in 403 to Pontus on the Black Sea coast. The people of Constantinople were in uproar. An earthquake frightened Eudoxia to thinking it too was all about her. Promising amendment, she begged the emperor for St John’s recall to appease God. Yet within months she would erect a silver statue of herself outside the Great Church of Hagia Sophia. The Golden-Mouthed John, whose triumphant return made his words more potent than ever, kept speaking vividly about the contrast between the life in Christ shown in the Scriptures and the moral shortcomings of those in power in a supposedly Christian empire, this time singling out Eudoxia. The following June he was banished inland, to the remote edge of the province of Cilicia. There were riots in Constantinople, and the first Hagia Sophia was burned down. St John continued to teach his people by letters. He was also able to correspond with Pope Innocent I in old Rome, who sent a delegation to the emperor to convene a Council to reinstate the patriarch of new Rome. Chrysostom’s powerful enemies, however, convinced Arcadius that the archbishop had insulted the emperor by contacting the pope, and now posed a threat. So in 407 St John was banished to even more remote exile in Pityus, a port on the eastern edge of the Black Sea. 310 guards ensured no one prevented his removal once and for all. The journey was harsh because of the terrain and the elements, some of the soldiers were cruel, and Chrysostom, now about 60, was weak, not having enjoyed strong health since the extreme ascesticism of his time as a hermit. He did not make it beyond Cumana in Pontus, not far from where he had been exiled four years earlier, and he died on the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross on 14 September, saying, “Glory be to God in all things”.

Thus, like St Paul, a “prisoner in the Lord,” by the public humiliation and the physical afflictions he endured, he was indeed in his flesh “filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church”. Eudoxia and Arcadius failed to silence him or put the Church in its place. Instead, his faithful confession of Christ despite persecution, was “Christ’s gift” of an apostle and a teacher, who “built … up the body of Christ” towards our even deeper “knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.”

In the Orthodox Church St John Chrysostom is revered as one of the Three Holy Hierarchs, along with St Basil the Great of Caesarea and St Gregory the Theologian of Nazianzus. In the Latin Church they are venerated as three of the Greek Doctors of the Universal Church, on account of their decisive and compelling teaching on Christ and the Trinity, that remains formative of the faith and worship of the Church in East and West to this day. Indeed the form of the Eucharist most often celebrated in the Eastern Orthodox and the Greek Catholic Churches is the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, believed to have been abbreviated under his influence for the practical purpose of the greater engagement and spiritual enrichment of the people.

His feast in the West is kept on the day before his death on the 13th September, and in the East it is transferred two months later to 13th November. He is the patron of the city of Constantinople where its Christians are today reduced to several thousands, pressed on all sides by an almost entirely Turkish Muslim population and government, yet determined, “with patience” like St Paul’s, to preserve the living roots of Byzantine Christianity for 260 million Orthodox worldwide. (Byzantium is the older name for the city of Constantinople). He is also the patron of Christian educators, lecturers and preachers that “lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called.”

PRAYER

Troparion for November 13 in the Byzantine Rite

Grace shone forth from your mouth like a fiery beacon and enlightened the universe, bestowing on the world not the treasures of greed, but rather showing us the heights of humility. As you teach us by your words, O John the Golden-Mouthed, our father, intercede with the Word, Christ our God, for the salvation of our souls.

Kontakion for November 13 in the Byzantine Rite

From heaven you received divine grace; your lips have taught us all to worship the Triune God, O blessed John Chrysostom. It is fitting that we praise you, for you are a teacher, clarifying all things Divine.

Collect for September 13 from the Roman Missal

O God, strength of those who hope in You, Who willed that the Bishop Saint John Chrysostom should be illustrious by his wonderful eloquence and his experience of suffering: grant us, we pray, that, instructed by his teachings, we may be strengthened by his invincible patience. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son, Who lives and reigns with You in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.

Can the Ordinariates represent Christian Unity

This paper was delivered at the Third Receptive Ecumenism Conference at Fairfield University, Fairfield CT, in June 2014 and then substantially developed at the suggestion of Professor Paul Murray to set the discussion of historical origins, Anglican patrimony and ecumenism of life in the context of the crystallised and phased method of receptive ecumenical learning that he had set out in 2011 at Bose, for the inaugural session of ARCIC III.

It also draws on two earlier talks given to two "groups of Anglicans" in early 2010 - the first on the ecumenical significance and potential of the Anglicanorum Coetibus, and the second reflecting more on what constitutes the Anglican patrimony and the mutual enrichment of Anglican becoming Catholics and Catholics drawing from Anglican tradition in a forthcoming ecumenism of life together - and contribute to the ongoing ecumenism of the Catholic Church with the Anglican Communion.

The full paper can be downloaded here.

Commission on Religion and Belief Report: No help to pluralism, but surrender to the objectives of organised secularism

I am so dismayed by today's report from the Woolf Institute's Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life. A great deal to digest and clearly some of the reflections and proposals are constructive. But....

I did a hurried first read through this morning. In parts it buys into a liberal-secularist view that religion is private and the public square is neutral. Thus the default is 'no religion' and 'shared values' in which secularism can proselytise with state sanction, behaving like a religion but claiming it's not. But it's inconsistent: "non-faith worldviews" and religious worldviews ought to be studied as alternates - so are they religions or not? If one or each religion should be relativised in the public square and in education, why provide the secular-humanist religion or worldview the position of "working assumption" in all the areas and school subjects from which religion is not allowed to have any bearing? (I write with some experience of working with those who wrote cross-curricular RE resources that cut both ways, so that study of religion - a legal requirement now more important than ever - was not siloed or confined to one denomination).

Then, surprise, surprise: the proposal directed against Catholic schools as if they were divisive, when the history with its aftermath is of Catholics being the ones to be excluded. This will ensure that all children go to schools in which teachers and governors promote secular humanism as the basic position against which to interpret religion. What will be the point of the Church of England's schools having no relation to church worshipping life, or the bringing to bear of its values on wider society through its historic positive task of the formation of young citizens; and, in a worrying repeat of history in which Catholics are once again threatened with the restriction of their liberty to play a full part in civic life and public services, what will be the point of Catholic schools that are prevented from providing education and upbringing for their own children as well as welcoming children of other faiths and none (which they do)?

Perhaps the commissioners would like to add up the purchase price of the Anglican and Catholic bought and owned premises of all the schools receiving state funds for providing education just like any other, and then compute if they can afford to buy the Churches out. No? I thought not.

Three other observations:

1. Once again there's Bishop Harries' hoary old proposal that at traditional civic services, other religions can celebrate elements of their worship in Christian Churches. He earlier proposed that the Koran be read in Bristol Cathedral before the judges' service. I don't see the New Testament being read out in mosques. There's a question of mutual respect and integrity here. It is unacceptable that Islamic claims, which cannot be extricated from the inherent assertion that Islam is senior to Christianity having surpassed it, have a place for public proclamation in churches. The Christians in other parts of the world having their lives and homes, churches, towns, hospitals, schools and monasteries wrested from them would find this incomprehensible.

2. The coronation service with its central rite of anointing is derived from the inaugural rites of the reign of the Byzantine Christian emperor, with other elements derived from the ritual for making a king in ancient Israel. By nature it cannot be an interfaith service: it is a rite of consecration to God after the pattern of Christ the King. By all means have a non-religious inauguration (we already have: it's called an Accession Council followed by Proclamation of the new Sovereign, the day following the demise of the Crown) - we could have swearing in at Westminster Hall too, but why would that need any religious elements? Leave the anointing and crowning to be what it is (incidentally the last of its kind left).

3. Have people forgotten that 5 years ago, Pope Benedict XVI gave two stunning addresses on (a) Christianity and other faiths in their shared responsibility to society to faith leaders at St Mary's University, Twickenham, and (b) the vital need for the mutual conversation and bearing upon each other of faith and reason, religion and society to civil leaders at Westminster Hall? One of the authors of the commission's report, one Rowan Williams, was present as Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, and seemed to welcome it. Yet - unless I am doing an injustice - it does not seem to have been taken into account or cited in the text or appendices. This is a glaring omission as it has been the most high-profile and widely covered treatment of religion in society in the UK in the last decade. Indeed the Pope was saying and magnifying what the Anglican bishops were saying at that moment, and were not being heeded on. Yesterday's news is tomorrow's kindling, it seems.

Finally, I cannot see how the place of people's personal religion and identity, or that of entire large bodies of various kinds of believers, or the rights of secularists or humanists as identifiable minority organised constituencies, are strengthened by the weakening of others. Even if people don't go to Church much, or don't believe in Christ and his sacrifice like they once did in this country, Christianity is the defining shaper of its history and identity for 1500 years at least. Only 60 years ago, Winston Churchill described our "finest hour" as the defence of Christian civilisation against the malevolent forces of pagan and atheist Nazism and Fascism. Now the great and the good want to dismantle everything that once defined us. This will not help Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus or non-Anglicans to have a greater stake in civil society: it will hand all the say to the secularist thought police who have been dominating our education system, trades unions and local government institutions for decades, forbidding Christian practice behind the pretence that it 'might offend' someone.

Of course, they haven't addressed at all one of the big problems in England for historically excluded Reformed (the Old Dissent) and Catholics (the Recusants) alike: the constitutional establishment bonding the Crown, the armed forces and the Church of England, in which other churches and religions are not permitted fully to participate. As much as I am in favour of the each one of these in their respective offices severally, this exclusive bond at the heart of the British constitution and society really needs addressing - but who would dare?

The Revd Dr Joe Cassidy, Canon of Durham, Principal of St Chad's College, and sometime member of the Society of Jesus, RIP

The wonderful, kind, excellent and inspiring Canon Dr Joe Cassidy, principal of St Chad's College, Durham has died after a heart attack that he and we all thought he was steadily recovering from. May his memory be eternal! Joe has been vitally important not only for those who were at St Chad's in his time, but also for us who there before and had been worried so many times that it might not survive. Friends will know that my achievement during my time at Durham was hardly illustrious, but I loved St Chad's for everything it gave me, including a formation and a challenge that bore fruit later and that have shaped me from that day to this.

After many years of cyclical decay, restoration, implosion, improvement and perennial uncertainty, one wondered how on earth St Chad's could last as a credible academic body with a distinctive Church tradition in a higher education institution, itself facing the challenges of modernisation and harshly competitive economic realities. Then along came Joe. Scarcely a term went by without news of a new record being broken - highest retention/completion rates, no 1 of the Durham colleges for applications, highest number of firsts and 2:1s, new eminence in the SCR, an MCR, financial stability, ambitious new building projects, expansion, 6% reduced energy consumption more than any other college in the university, and - at last - a positive engagement with the alumni that tapped into our ready response with enthusiasm, resource and renewed pride. It was an honour to be drawn into Joe's St Chad's project, and to note that the vital element of what made St Chad's what it was "in our day" was still there - a community of people living, learning and working together, and still rooted in the inspiration that had founded it as a place for those who didn't fit in, or couldn't afford to go, anywhere else, namely its distinctive and even at times ever so slightly eccentric Christian Church tradition.

I once told Joe that Chad's was now so good that it would have been impossible for me nowadays even to hope to be given a place. His reply was gracious, humbling and disarming; and I cast my mind back to the interview with Fr Fenton on the floor with his back out, and then the searching hour with Fr Johnson under the glare of his desk spotlight back in 1976, leading me to resolve to go nowhere other than that ramshackle, sideline of a place - with its prefab chapel and John Cosin woodwork, and an organ scholar but no organ - in which it was clear to me that real humans lived and where I might hope to become one. Joe has understood and maintained this sense of personality in the College, which is why he is loved, thanked, admired and sorely missed now that it has become the magnificent beacon that it is today. I strongly suspect that, had he been Principal in the late 1970s, I would have worked very much harder than I did, not just to do the best I could in the environment he animated, but also because he was so intently interested in the minds of other people and wanted the best from them, and for them.

Joe - thank you for giving us back something precious in St Chad's that we had either lost or had not quite had the first time around. And may your memory be eternal!

Hymns: The Sound of Communion

This paper first appeared in Anglicans & Catholics in Communion, Special Edition of The Messenger of the Catholic League, April-August 2010). It was published again in two parts in Bulletins 272 & 273 of the Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland, Volume 20, 2012.

It considers the place of English metrical hymnody in the Mass of the Roman Rite, and the science of their selection and deployment. The title is a phrase of Rowan Williams'.

The article can be read and downloaded here.

Istanbul to Great Dixter and Gardening Back Again

Imagine driving through the junction of London’s M25 and M3 motorways. Then imagine, in place of the fields and woods, it is at Canary Wharf, surrounded by a high-rise new financial district with towers of luxury flats. Next imagine between the sliproads are as much as you can get in of Kew, RHS, Darwin’s Downe, Ryton, Chelsea, Edinburgh and Great Dixter gardens. Imagine, too, after some demise in great-house gardening following the Great War, it has taken 80 years to start them up again and re-awaken Britain’s interest in growing plants. Welcome to Istanbul’s Nezahat Gökyiğit Botanic Gardens, a green lung on the city’s Asian side, which Fergus Garrett (CEO and Head Gardener, Great Dixter) and I visited in November 2014.

Here on 32 hectares in eight traffic islands linked by tunnels and bridges, amid 50,000 trees and shrubs are conserved the native plants and flowers of Turkey, from each of its diverse habitats that give Britain most of what we grow in our gardens here. One island is for the 2,000 species of Istanbul province. The large Anatolia island has mountain, high plateau, Black Sea and Mediterranean, salt and arid habitats, each requiring mineral-rich regional soils and stone to cover land left bare after motorway construction. The latest project is a volcanic mountain tulip meadow.

Fergus spent his earlier years on the Bosphorus and so Turkey springs up everywhere across Dixter, from the geophytes to the verbascums and the giant fennel familiar at a glance, to the lesser known flowers he has trialled from seed. If you ask, “Would they make the transition; how are they propagated; where would they thrive?”, you see the bond with Turkey is not just for more exuberance at Great Dixter, but transferring knowledge that strengthens the conservation of plants and biodiversity everywhere.

Likewise the Gardens in Istanbul are about awareness of Turkey’s own forgotten horticulture, the exceptional richness of its habitats and the urgency of protecting the natural environment. While Istanbul’s annual Tulip Festival depends on imports from Holland, whole hillsides risk being industrially stripped of wild tulips for commercial export. So Dixter is helping to restore the balance: two students from Istanbul were invited over in January to learn how bulbs are prepared and planted out, and so restore skills to the region they first came from. Already when you go to Nezahat Gökyiğit Gardens, you can’t miss the new succession-planted border – and those trademark Dixter pot displays.

Mark Woodruff, a Friend of Great Dixter, works for the Monument Trust, which helped secure the future by purchasing Dixter Farms, now home to our scholarship students and the Education Centre.

From the Friends of Great Dixter Newsletter, March/April 2015

Last of the Leopards: Sicily's Fading Nobility, in the Weekend Telegraph Magazine, No 71, 4th February 1966

Princess Alexandra di
Lampedusa,
widow of the writer of
The Leopard
 

Last of the Leopards: Sicily's Fading Nobility

Story by Godrey Blakeley,
Photographs by Elliott Erwitt

Lenten Acclamations To Genevan Psalm Tunes

The following article was invited for "Views from the Choir Loft" on the CC Watershed liturgical music resource and publisher website (February 11, 2015)

DURING THE 1980s, a great friendship developed between the Catholic Diocese of Bruges (Brugge, in Belgium) and the Anglican Diocese of St Edmundsury & Ipswich, facing each other on opposite sides of the North Sea, four hours away by ferry. Not only were there friendly ecumenical visits and dialogue (it had been in Belgium in the 1920s that Cardinal Mercier had conducted the Malines Conversations to explore the possibility of reunion, through an “Anglican Church, united not absorbed), but also spiritual exchanges: Bruges houses the shrine of the Holy Blood, with its world famous Procession each Ascensiontide, and the Anglican Cathedral in Bury is adjacent to the site of the Shrine of St Edmund King & Martyr, England’s first patron saint. In 1989 I heard about a retreat for English priests (Catholic and Anglican) arranged every year at the Benedictine Abbey of St Andries at Zevenkerken, just outside Brugge. Famed for its school and history of theological scholarship it had been a medieval foundation, closed under the French Revolution that swept the old Austrian Netherlands and refounded in an independent Belgium as part of the Beuronese monastic renewal and mission movement. It was also a centre for the Liturgical Movement. A monk of Maria-Laach Abbey in the Rhineland was the architect, and the community formed the Benedictine Belgian Annunciation Congregation along with two other monasteries associated with the Liturgical Movement, Keizersberg (Mont-César at Leuven, to which Lambert Beauduin belonged) and Blessed Columba Marmion’s Maredsous. Those with old missals and chantbooks will recognise the Abbey of Zevenkerken more easily as the editorial seat for the liturgical works of the Desclée press: the Abbaye de St André les Sept-Églises, at Bruges (the nave, aisles and chapels of the remarkable Abbey Church correspond with the seven principal basilicas of the city of Rome).

Following the permission of vernacular language at worship in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, northern Belgium translated the liturgical books into Flemish, the local version of Dutch spoken by the majority. This coincided with the decline of French as the main language of public life, St André les Sept-Églises became Zevenkerken St Andries; and the Abbey’s relationship with the historical Liturgical Movement as part of a French-speaking world changed. Now it was part of Flemish-speaking Church with close relations to the Catholic Dutch to the north in the Netherlands. What was striking to an English visitor was the vigour of the psalmody, in a liturgical translation from the early 1970s, Het Boek der Psalmen, a collaboration of Dutch and Flemish Benedictines and Cistercians, set to newly composed simple tones in the eight modes, with antiphons. Anyone knowing the Coverdale psalter in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer could become familiar with the import and rhythmic structure of the Dutch text.

But Dutch, like French, is familiar with another and very historic way to sing the psalms: the metrical psalms of the Genevan Reform. It was Dom Lambert Beauduin who realised that the singing of psalms and the reading of the Scriptures in divine worship was the greatest bond between Catholics and Protestants; at the monastery he founded at Amay (now at Chevetogne) he not only provided for the celebration of the Slav-Byzantine rite but also increased the readings from Scripture at the offices to intensify desire for recovering unity with Christians of the post-Reformation traditions by a demonstrable and liturgical enrichment of Scriptural fare, especially from the Old Testament. While the psalms at the western offices at Amay were of course in Latin, by the time of the liturgical changes after Vatican II, across Belgium and the Netherlands there emerged a new possibility to make use of the 400 year old liturgical patrimony of the Protestants – not only reading the Scriptures in the vernacular but also singing psalms in famous metrical versions, integral to Dutch-speaking religious and musical culture, and even familiar to Catholics. Thus at Lauds, Vespers and Readings at Zevenkerken, one of the psalms is a metrical version sung to an exhilarating tune from Geneva or Strasbourg. It made me think that such singing as this must have been why the Reform in Geneva was at first so exciting—no organ, no choir, no harmony, but a strong and rhythmically engaging monody in which all participated as one Body and internalised the words of the Psalms, not in their translated Scriptural form but as memorable verses.

The melodies struck me as especially powerful because, despite being a Church musician (I was precentor of the Anglican St Edmundsbury Cathedral at the time), I hardly knew them. The English tradition of metrical psalms is different, employing different metres more suited to the way the language works in metred verse. Perhaps the most famous is “The Old Hundredth” Psalm, All people that on earth do dwell, which has outlasted its update. Another is The Lord’s my Shepherd, well known in Scotland but all but forgotten in England until Princess Anne chose it for its tune and descant at her wedding. So, despite the Dutch-French-Swiss psalms and their tunes being so appealing, it was not easy to imagine how to make us of them in English worship. Those that had not died out were associated with an old-fashioned way of singing hymns, already losing ground to new kinds of worship songs. Thanks to one of those retreats at Zevenkerken, within a few years I made my journey to the full communion of the Catholic Church and was ordained priest in 1995. I continued to take part in the retreats alongside my old Anglican friends in this Belgian Catholic Benedictine abbey and the metrical psalms of the Dutch Reform, gladly appropriated by the Dutch and Flemish Catholics, approached me in a new way.

Having grown up in a liturgical Church where there is a great deal of singing—the classic English hymns, the ordinary of the Eucharistic rite, and the canticles and psalms of the Office—it dismayed me that the reforms in the Catholic rite had hardly engendered the restoration of the Mass as normatively a solemn sung celebration as I had been used to in the Church of England or, for that matter, the Catholic places of worship I had visited on the Continent. In England, as in Ireland, Low Mass had given way to a spoken mass with hymns (and not the best of what the English religious culture had to offer by any means, let alone appropriately selected and deployed) and new worship songs: not even the proper chants either in Latin or English (I had been used to the propers in English translation arranged to Gregorian chants, but suggesting we used these, even provisionally or as ancillary to the songs, was dismissed as belonging to the past). I was most dismayed by the gradual/responsorial psalm almost invariably being said by a reader instead of sung with the leading of a cantor. And with nearly always the same tune for the Alleluia (the simple beauty of the chant from the office at the end of the Paschal Vigil now debased from overuse all but every day), Lent was no relief because the Gospel Acclamation was rarely sung by a cantor, let alone with the involvement of the people.
     
It struck me then that those wonderful Reform tunes beloved at Zevenkerken could at last be put to use in English Catholic worship. So I adapted the texts of the Lenten Acclamations in the Lectionary for each of the three years into metrical form and harmonised four of the tunes. I make no claims for the verses, but at least they have been used to make singing the Lenten Acclamations possible.

Here is the link to the resource, from which it can be downloaded:

* * Website • Lenten Gospel Acclamations to Four Genevan Psalm Tunes

Long divisions that plague the Church: Article about Orthodox-Catholic unity in The Tablet

In 1923, a schoolteacher priest of Lyon started devoting his spare time to helping the 10,000 refugees from Bolshevism camped and lodged around the city and its suburbs. It was his first encounter with a Christianity that was not Roman Catholic. Thus he learned the friendship of receiving as well as giving, finding great respect for the Orthodox clergy and people in their moment of destitution, as his heart opened to their faith and the beauty of their worship. He was astonished to find Catholics from the old Russian Empire who were not Latins, but Eastern Christians who maintained their unity with the Bishop of Rome with roots to before the Great Schism. Over the next decade, Paul Couturier became convinced of the need for Christian unity, and in 1935 he took hold of the Catholic Church Unity Octave, founded in 1908, and developed it into a “Universal Week of Prayer for the Unity of Christians in the charity and truth of Christ”. Inspired by the holiness of the Orthodox, beyond this world he imagined an “invisible monastery”, in which all could unite in prayer to God in Heaven, in the hope of seeing the same union realised in the Church here. He took for his motto the saying of Metropolitan Platon Gorodetsky of Kiev: “The walls of separation do not rise as far as Heaven.”

In answer to 105 Weeks of Prayer so far, considerable grace has been bestowed. All along, the 1,000-year separation between Christians of East and West has spurred us to overcome sinful division, and yet seek unity with integrity, respecting the faith that each professes. Thus the World Council of Churches, partly founded to promote reconciliation for all humanity after the degradation of the Second World War, enjoys the full membership of the Orthodox Church alongside the Churches that developed after the Western Reformation. The World Council and the Catholic Church are joint members of the even older Commission on Faith and Order, one of whose tasks is the organisation of each year’s Week of Prayer. For 50 years, the great families of Churches have undertaken ­searching theological dialogues, even if new challenges have been emerging. These have gone far towards profound mutual awareness of our belief and teaching, repeatedly consigning estrangement and rivalry to the past.

The same desire for unity, something more than ecumenism, is replicated in thousands of concrete examples of our Churches’ shared projects and resources in the service of the Kingdom in wider society, spiritual life in common through prayer, pilgrimage and study, and proclamation alongside each other of the same Christ before the world. Over the last year, it has been remarkable to see Christians of all kinds take Pope Francis to their hearts and sustain him with their prayers. It has been especially striking to hear Orthodox clergy and people observe how in contemporary society, with its secularising pressures and the globalisation that has sent the West east and the East west, our various Catholic and Orthodox Churches live beside each other, and how we need to rely on each other more and more. In this country, for instance, the steady development of English-speaking Orthodox Churches, together with the considerable influx of Eastern Christians from Russia, Ukraine and Romania, means that local Orthodox and Catholic priests are getting to know each other better, share similar concerns on family life, teach Christian ­discipleship in the Church from a similar ­outlook on the world, and seek to work more closely together, for instance, on the education of children, church schools, chaplaincy in ­hospitals and prison, and the education and formation of adults and priests. Only last week, Pope Francis gave his blessing to the Catholic Committee for Cultural Collaboration between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, which supports Orthodox laypeople and clergy studying in Catholic academic institutions. In its fourth year, the Centre for Eastern Christianity at Heythrop is a significant means for just such encounters for mutual learning here in England.

During Pope Benedict’s pontificate, the Moscow patriarchate picked up on his call for a New Evangelisation and pledged itself to an alliance with the Roman Catholic Church in what it called the struggle for the soul of Old Europe. The installation of Pope Francis was attended by many Orthodox representatives, led for the first time by the Ecumenical ­Patriarch, Bartholomew of Constantinople, whom he addressed as “my brother Andrew”. Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, the head of the department for external affairs of the Moscow patriarchate, has since returned to Rome to speak at a conference jointly arranged with the Pontifical Council for the Family. In the last few weeks, when asked about the prospects for a papal visit to Russia, he confirmed that the problems first to be resolved are not dogmatic, but rather ones which, he says, need clarification through dialogue.

But the way ahead is not all clear. Patriarch Bartholomew has just convoked the heads of the Orthodox Churches to discuss plans for the next preparatory commission ahead of the forth­coming Pan-Orthodox Synod scheduled for 2015. Bartholomew is concerned that in the present world the Orthodox Church as a whole needs to work more closely together and discuss how, beyond their respective homelands, the different Orthodox Churches relate to the other in the diaspora, as well as to the other Christian Churches. The invitation came at the same time as Moscow released its long-awaited position statement on the Ravenna document from the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches in 2006. This ­examined the role of primacy in the universal Church and thus the role of the Roman papacy. It looked behind the theories ­developed over 1,000 years of separate ­development, in search of how it functioned historically in the first 1,000 years of ­communion. Yet the modern Russian Church’s memory post-dates this shared experience and its own perspective is of “home rule” from Moscow. Thus the statement sees the universal Church as a communion of self-governing Churches, in which the Bishop of Rome possesses no overall jurisdiction but simply a primacy of honour. The statement has won strongly worded ripostes from the ecumenical ­patriarchate, identifying an exclusive ­nationalism and self-marginalisation on Moscow’s part that has no place in Orthodoxy. As one senior Orthodox ecumenist has observed, “Before we can talk to you Catholics about union again, we Orthodox need to come to agreement among ourselves.”

But the Russian Orthodox Church – by far the largest – sees itself as the natural leader in Orthodoxy and thus, for all practical purposes, the crucial interlocutor with the Catholic Church as its peer. It sees a contrast between successive Popes’ call for ­“communion, not jurisdiction” and how the Eastern Catholic Churches are perceived to be managed by a department of the Latin Roman pontiff’s Curia. Like many Orthodox, it is looking to see if Pope Francis’ curial reform will alter the role of the Congregation for the Oriental Churches in those Churches’ ­governance and relationship with the Bishop of Rome. Will they be self-ruling like Moscow? Could there be synodality between pope and patriarchs?

At the same time, Moscow’s self-understanding as the leader of all the Eastern Christians in its region – including the Belarussians and the Ukrainians – makes for an uneasy relationship with the reality of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church. Persecuted by Stalin and forced to conform to the Russian Church or go underground for four decades, it is once more threatened with legal deregistration, amid the Ukrainian Government’s difficulties with a substantial yet peaceful pro-Western protest movement that it falsely links to the Greek-Catholic bishops. At the same time, the Moscow Patriarchate stresses that the alliance it desires with the papacy is with a firmly Roman Catholic Church.

With so many considerations and principles for all sides at play, the unity we pray for is not going to come easily. But the desire for Catholic-Orthodox communion is perhaps stronger than ever and in May it will take Pope Francis and Patriarch Bartholomew to pray for it with all their heart and strength in Jerusalem.

Mark Woodruff,
The Tablet, 18 January 2014

The Universal Prayer of St Peter Canisius

A short essay on this vernacular sixteenth century re-emergent form of the Prayer of the Faithful within the classic Latin Roman rite, popular for 450 years in the German-speaking Catholic Church, with a translation and three suggested workings for use in either the Ordinary or Extraordinary Forms of Mass.

Download the article here, to read the background and liturgical versions. Here is the translated prayer itself, with the groupings of intentions as St Peter Canisius intended, allowing for a response from the faithful after each, and with the introductory invocation and the concluding prayer to be said by the celebrant priest:

The Universal Prayer of Saint Peter Canisius

Almighty, eternal God, Lord, heavenly Father, look with Your eyes of undeserved compassion on our sorrow, misery and need.

Have mercy on all the Christian faithful, for whom Your only-begotten Son, our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, was content to give Himself into the hand of sinners and shed His precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross.

For the sake of the Lord Jesus, most gracious Father, avert our well-deserved punishments, present danger and future threats, harm and outrage, arms and warfare, dearth and misfortune, sickness and sorrowful, miserable times.

Enlighten and strengthen in all goodness our spiritual leaders and earthly rulers, that they may do everything to further Your honour as God, our salvation, the common peace, and the welfare of all Your people.

Grant us, O God of peace, a true unity in faith, free of all division and separation. Convert our hearts to true repentance and amendment of life. Kindle in us the fire of Your love; give us hunger and zeal for justice in all things, so that we, as obedient children through life unto death, may be pleasing to You and find favour in Your sight.

We also pray, O God, as You willed that we should pray, for our friends and enemies, for the healthy and the sick, for all Christians in sadness and distress, for the living and the dead. 

To You, O Lord, be entrusted whatever we do, whatever our path, our work and our dealings, our living and dying. Let us delight in Your grace here in this world, and attain the next with all Your chosen ones, to praise, honour and extol You in unending joy and blessedness.

Grant us this, O Lord, heavenly Father, through Jesus Christ, Your beloved Son, Who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

My Brother Andrew - Article in The Tablet on Catholic-Orthodox Relations in the forthcoming papacy of Pope Francis

http://www.thetablet.co.uk/article/163991