A Treasure To Be Shared

Members of the communities established by the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus rely on a multifaceted gift from God that actualizes in the receptive soul a magnificent life in Christ.  That gift through which God's grace, His very life, flows into the lives of men and women, includes a beautiful form of the Mass and the Office, pillars of the legacy that Ordinariate Catholics call the Anglican patrimony.  Among the Seven Sacraments instituted by Christ, one also finds a sublime form of the Sacrament of Matrimony located in the publication called Divine Worship: Occasional Services . The Ordinariate patrimony has received into the Church vital elements of the Catholic Faith preserved in the Anglican experience.  The Anglican patrimony has been assessed by members of the Anglicanae Traditiones Interdicasterial Commission with a mind to orthodoxy. The Commission "reviewed and winnowed centuries of Anglican texts dating back to 1549, then assembled the bes...

Vaughan Williams c. 1920 Photo: E. O. Hoppé, in  The Songs of Ralph Vaughan Williams by R. Bennett. [Wikipedia] At Denver Catholic:  https://denvercatholic.org/the-well-fought-fight/ The incorporation of Anglican hymnody into English-language Catholic worship is one of the great blessings of the past 50 years. And within that noble musical patrimony, Ralph Vaughan Williams surely holds pride of place among modern composers. And... Alas, like many other hymns, “For All the Saints” is an endangered species today, gutted by parish music directors and pastors who commit the grave sin of not singing a hymn in its entirety — or worse, who bowdlerize the lyrics to coddle the sensibilities of the Church of Nice. Such butchery is especially problematic with “For All the Saints,” which has a robustly martial character. Indeed, the entire text is a meditation on the struggles, and ultimate joys, of spiritual warfare: that “well-fought fight,” undertaken beneath the captaincy ...

Doctor Esolen, professor at Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts, New Hampshire, conducts an autopsy on the lifeless corpse of a bad lyric. https://www.crisismagazine.com/2019/the-bad-poetry-of-modern-hymnody Thanks be to God, we in the Personal Ordinariates, like our brethren in tradition-minded groups such as the FSSP and ICKSP, are blessed with the rightly ordered sensibility that music by composers of the highest order is required to be offered in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Even if a choir be of modest skill, the presentation of works of acknowledged greatness by such a group is far preferable to polished presentations of pop schlock. Of course, brilliance is not ignored in the Ordinariate. Au contraire! A loss of attention to beauty would permit banality and thus betray an important aspect of the English Patrimony, which is not to deprive people of the opportunity to worship God in the beauty of holiness (Ps. 96:9). De-Formed In the years prior to l...