12 November 2017

S Willibrord's Little Rome

The Saints of England, God bless them, do seem rather to tug at our maniples these days as we struggle up to the Altar. There was November 8, preserving a shadow of the old Octave Day as we celebrated in the Ordinariate the very agreeable Feast of All the Saints of England. Last month, the cardinale volante Raymond Burke went to Puginopolis, aka Ramsgate, to seal the Shrine Relic of S Augustine into a splendid new reliquary. Recently we kept the feast of S Willibrord ...

At a time (597) when the Roman Rite was, fairly simpliciter, the Rite of Rome, the Augustinian Roman Mission planted Little Romes in England; places where the dedications of churches mirrored those of Rome; where the Liturgy was Roman; where the education was Roman. A second wave of missions took this Anglo-Saxon Romanita across to Northern Europe. Which is why S Willibrord, via Northumberland and Ireland, ended up being consecrated Archbishop of the Frisians by Pope S Sergius I, and setting up his cathedra at Utrecht.

Those Anglo-Saxon Churches were comfortably, even aggressively, papalist; which makes it all the more preposterous that (for example) an Anglican 'Society', designed to shelter those who disdained Pope Benedict's gracious ecumenical offer, should award itself the patronage of S Wilfrid! S Willibrord was similarly kidnapped much earlier by a group advocating close links between the schismatic Dutch 'Old Catholic Church' (now depressingly ultra-liberal, but possessed of orders regarded by Rome as valid), and the Church of England.

This link produced an initiative in the 1930s designed to circumvent the condemnation of Anglican Orders by the Bull Apostolicae curae of Leo XIII. By mutual interconsecrations, the 'Old Catholic' and English Anglican episcopates were ... this was the explicit intention ... woven together into one "so that even the strictest romanist will not be able to doubt Anglican Orders". The C of E, half a century later, gave up this ingeniously intricate attempt to render its priestly orders equivalent to those of the Catholic Church; it formally declared that its own orders were, after all that trouble, despite all the ink spilt rebutting Leo XIII, worth no more than those of Methodists and Lutherans! Yes; it is a strange body!

But the point of this rather rambling blogpost is to disentangle our own dear S Willibrord, the real Willibrord, from all those weird goings-on and to draw your attention to the wonderful pictures on the Internet of the Church of S Willibrord in Utrecht, which is being blessed and brought back to use this very day by His Excellency Bishop Fellay (a man who has risen in my esteem since he so wisely signed our Filial Correction). That superb, soaring church (not unworthy of Pugin) will be an inspiring restoration of Anglo-Saxon Romanita North of the Alps; a Little Rome up there among the foggy boggy mists of the Low Countries to console the Faithful as a pledge of the Faith's return in full and glorious expression to the queenly city upon the Seven Hills where an immigrant from the Middle East once made an act of Martyrium.

We must all make the most of our Little Romes!

4 comments:

El Codo said...

Father,when I was practising religion back in the 80’s,our little Anglican Church had nothing C ofE but it was all Roman rite with the Breviary for clergy. That is why I found the Ordinariate so peculiar,because I knew that my successors in Ecclesia Anglicana followed suit.In the early 90’s,we all swam the Tiber and were received as ordinary Catholics with the majority of the clergy being ordained in the Roman rite so that there was no ambiguity or doubt about their Orders.I still struggle a bit with the need for the Ordinariate ,especially since it has been in the UK such a flop for the laity.Ex Anglicans tend to be liturgically more educated and a little precious with it...but why not just join in with us great unwashed Catholics? Is it a middle-class disdain for the uneducated faithful? “Anglo-Catholics”...excuse the tautology...liked to be noticed but isn’t it time to settle down and just be Roman Catholics?

sacerdos viennensis said...

Willibrords tomb in Echternach! Blessings.
https://sacerdos-viennensis.blogspot.co.at/search/label/Willibrord%20von%20Friesland

Mary Kay said...

Thank you, my dear Fr. Hunwicke! I so much appreciate your post. And it makes me appreciate Bishop Fellay anew. Thank you so much!
Mary K. Jones (a friend from Gardone)

Banshee said...

The Anglican Ordinariate seems to have been a big success in the US, even though it is not everywhere. If every church movement bore that much good fruit, we would have the Church equivalent of <A HREF="the produce section at Jungle Jim's</a> supermarket!

I would say the same is true in the UK, as far as I can see. I would also say that given the hostile attitude of many Catholics who should know better, and the hard choice it represents to many Anglicans (all the harder because it takes away excuses), the Ordinariate is doing pretty darned well. You don't undo centuries of trouble in five seconds.