Pictures of an Ordinariate Mass at the National Shrine in D.C.

Our thanks to Mr James Griffin of The Durandus Institute for Sacred Liturgy and Music for sharing with us these pictures (taken by Mr Alan Lopez) and this account of a Mass recently celebrated at the National Shrine in Washington DC in the Ordinariate Rite.

On August 3, the Durandus Institute for Sacred Liturgy and Music coordinated a solemn Mass according to the Ordinariate’s Divine Worship Missal at the crypt of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. The liturgy was a votive Mass of St John Henry Newman, celebrated to open the 2023 academic conference of the St John Henry Newman Association of America. A music program sung by the renowned DC-area men’s ensemble The Suspicious Cheese Lords additionally commemorated the 400th anniversary of the death of composer William Byrd (July 4, 1623) this year, with his “Mass for Three Voices”, and “Ave verum corpus” sung during Holy Communion.

The Holy Mass was celebrated by a priest of the Ordinariate, Fr Jason Catania, assisted by Fr Christopher Woodall as deacon, and Fr Armando Alejandro, Jr. as subdeacon. Fr Nathan Davis preached the sermon, and the director of the Durandus Institute, James Griffin, assisted as the 1st Master of Ceremonies.

The crypt of the National Shrine is an important site in the life of the Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter, since it was the place where, on the feast of St John Henry Newman, October 9, in 2011, the community of St Luke’s (an historical Anglo-Catholic church in Bladensburg, Maryland) and their rector was received into the full communion of the Catholic Church. The crypt has also been the site for the ordinations of several Ordinariate clerics. However, the Durandus Institute’s event marks the first time that the Divine Worship Missal has been used for a public celebration within the National Shrine.

The entrance procession is led by the verger.

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Divine Worship Mass for St John Henry Newman in Philadelphia

On Thursday, October 7, the Durandus Institute for Sacred Liturgy and Music assisted the Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter in organizing a Pontifical Mass at the Cathedral Basilica of Ss Peter and Paul in Philadelphia, celebrated according to the Divine Worship Missal in honor of St John Henry Newman. The Mass was offered by Bishop Steven Lopes, presiding from the faldstool in the presence of the Most Rev. Nelson Pérez, Archbishop of Philadelphia, who attended in-choir on the throne, and preached the homily. The Philadelphia Oratorians brought a relic of St John Henry, which was placed upon the altar for this Mass. This event was the beginning of a triduum of celebrations in honor of the great cardinal, continuing in Washington DC on October 8 with choral Evensong in the presence of Bishop Lopes at Saint Luke’s Ordinariate Church, and concluding on the feast itself, October 9, with a pontifical Mass and Te Deum, also at Saint Luke’s.

Fr Armando Alejandro, Jr. (who celebrated the recent Divine Worship Mass in New York City) served as deacon, and Josue Vásquez-Weber, Chancellor of the Ordinariate, as subdeacon. Seminarians of St Charles Borromeo Seminary and the Philadelphia Oratory served as ensign-bearers, while clergy of the Ordinariate acted as chaplains to Abp Pérez at the throne. James Griffin, director of the Durandus Institute, served as Master of Ceremonies. A number of distinguished guests joined in choir, including Fr Roman Pitula, rector of the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral in Philadelphia, Fr Robert Pasley, rector of Mater Ecclesiae Chapel and Chaplain of the Church Music Association of America, and priests of the Philadelphia Oratory.

The choir of St John the Baptist Ordinariate Church in Bridgeport, together with associate choristers of the Durandus Institute, sang Byrd’s Mass for Five Voices, Purcell’s “O God, thou art my God” at the offertory, and a gradual psalm in Anglican chant, under the direction of visiting conductor Dr Kevin Clarke (director of music at St Theresa’s Catholic Church in Sugar Land, Texas). The choir of St Charles Seminary, under the direction of Dr Nathan Knutson, attended in the chancel stalls and assisted with the singing of the Proper chants from the Graduale Romanum, as well as Heinrich Isaac’s “O food to pilgrims given” at Communion.

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Divine Worship Mass of Our Lady of Walsingham in NYC

Last Friday, the Durandus Institute for Sacred Liturgy and Music--which debuted with the Sarum Vespers of Candlemas Eve in Philadelphia, and assisted with the recent Pontifical Latin Mass of the Assumption in the Philadelphia cathedral--organized the first-ever Mass celebrated in New York City according to the Divine Worship Missal of the Ordinariates, formerly known as the “Anglican Use.” An assortment of Ordinariate, Dominican, and diocesan clergy, and about 250 of the faithful, came to the church of Saint Vincent Ferrer in Manhattan to attend this historic celebration of the feast of Our Lady of Walsingham, enhanced by a special program of sacred music--including the Communion Service from Herbert Howells’ Collegium Regale, Alec Redshaw’s “I sing of a maiden”, Anglican chant psalmody, and proper chants from the Plainchant Gradual by Burgess and Palmer. (The complete program can be see here.) We are happy to share a video of the complete ceremony, and pictures by one of our favorite photographers, Mr Arrys Ortañez. (Arrys informs me that he used a grainier filter than usual to give the photos a more dramatic feel, one which suits the Gothic style of St Vincent’s very nicely. Thanks also to Mr James Griffin of the Durandus Institute for the write-up).

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Heavenly Liturgy and Earthly Compassion: The Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost

Jan Wynants, Parable of the Good Samaritan (1670)

Lost in Translation #13

The Collect for the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost paints an amazing scene, but only after one overcomes a number of linguistic challenges:

Omnípotens et miséricors Deus, de cujus múnere venit, ut tibi a fidélibus tuis digne et laudabíliter serviátur; tríbue, quáesumus, nobis: ut ad promissiónes tuas sine offensióne currámus. Per Dóminum nostrum.

Which I translate as:

Almighty and merciful God, from whose liturgy comes the fact that Thou art worthily and laudably served by Thy faithful ones: grant, we beseech, that we may run without stumbling to Thy promises. Through our Lord.

The Collect contains a grammatical rarity. In the Orations of the Roman Missal, a clause with ut and a verb in the subjunctive mood is almost always a purpose clause: “O God, give us X, Y, or Z so that we can have A, B, or C,” where ut would be translated as “so that” or “in order to.” Here, however, we have a “noun clause,” where the entire clause functions as a noun (specifically, as the object of the verb “to come”), and thus we have translated ut as “the fact that.” [1]

The Collect also contains a verbal rarity. Of the 111 times that the rich and nuanced word munus appears in the Orations of the Roman Missal, over 75% are in a Secret. [2] Munus appears less frequently in the Postcommunion Prayers and the Lenten Prayers over the People and least of all in the Collects. This is one of those outliers.

Most hand Missals translate munus in this Collect as “gift,” and that indeed is how the word is used most of the time in the Roman Rite. In the Secrets, for example, munera are usually the “material gifts destined for the sacrifice.” Every now and then, however, munus can mean “the rite itself which is performed with and over the gifts,” and I believe this to be the meaning that is operative here. [3] For the ancient Roman, a munus was a public, religious service (similar to “the rite itself performed over the gifts”), and that meaning, which ties into the serving mentioned in the noun clause, better fits the context here.
 
The Collect is essentially stating that God has a service, and from it flows our serving Him “worthily and laudably.” Or to use another word for a public, religious service (this time from Greek), God has a “liturgy” (leitourgia), and it is by virtue of His liturgy, the divine liturgy, that humans are able to worship Him properly. Paradoxically, even our ability to praise God and give Him gifts is a gift from God. The author of the Collect could have put the noun clause in the active voice (“the fact that Thy faithful serve Thee...”), but he instead chose the more unwieldy passive voice, which puts the focus on the action done rather than the faithful who are doing it. Even grammatically, the author of the Collect is emphasizing God and His agency in the liturgy rather than us.

The same truth is expressed in this Sunday’s Epistle, 2 Corinthians 3, 4-9, where St. Paul reminds the Corinthians that the Holy Spirit has made us, through no merits of our own, ministers of the New Covenant. Even though human hands have obviously played a part in its historical development, sacred liturgy, which participates in and anticipates the cosmic liturgy described in the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Book of Revelation, is ultimately not the “work of human hands”, but the product of the Holy Spirit and the ongoing action of Jesus Christ the High Priest. Divorcing the human from the divine in sacred liturgy is a fool’s errand, as foolish as trying to separate the humanly composed from the divinely inspired in the Sacred Scriptures.

The Collect, then, is offering an astonishing metaphysical map. It is not the case that liturgy is a primarily human phenomenon, the concept of which we then apply to what is happening in Heaven, albeit weakly and metaphorically. On the contrary, the realest of real liturgies is what is happening in Heaven at the altar of the Lamb who was slain and is now at His Wedding Feast; what we do on earth in our churches is the derivative act. But since it is derivative, our earthly liturgies are truly partaking of the Heavenly Liturgy right now. So many of the liturgical controversies of the last century could have been avoided if liturgists actually understood and believed the theology brilliantly encapsulated in these thirteen words of the Collect.

The same Collect asks God to enable us to run to His promises. Only two weeks ago we made essentially the same prayer: “Increase Thy mercy upon us, that Thou mayst make us, who are running towards Thy promises, partakers of Thy heavenly goods.” (Collect, Tenth Sunday after Pentecost) Both Collects link participation in the Heavenly with running towards divine promises. Here, however, we add an additional request: to run without stumbling (sine offensione). In the Vulgate, offensio is the word for the famous biblical “stumbling block,” that which causes one to sin or offend (see Ezech. 20, 7; 2 Cor. 6, 3; 1 Pet. 2, 8). May sin not trip us up, we pray, as we race to the prize promised us.

The rather frenetic quality of this Collect also matches the tone of this Sunday’s Gospel (Luke 10, 23-37). When one loves the Lord God will all of one’s heart, soul, strength, and mind, one is indeed sprinting flawlessly to God. The Good Samaritan in the Parable is not literally described as running, but it is difficult not to picture him hustling, rushing to the man's aid, binding up his wounds, and finding him shelter. And there is an additional dimension as well. The Church Fathers saw in the Good Samaritan a figure for Christ: the oil and wine which he poured into the wounds of the injured man symbolize the sacraments poured into our souls wounded by sin, and the sacraments are, of course, what we receive in the divine liturgy. May the heavenly goods in which we partake endow us with the same compassion for our neighbor as that of the Good Samaritan.

[1] My thanks to Dr. David White for help with this clause and his insight into the use of the passive voice.
[2] Sr. Mary Ellebracht, Remarks on the Vocabulary of the Ancient Orations in the Missale Romanum (Dekker, 1966), 163.

[3] Sr. Mary Ellebracht, 163, 164.

A Recent Ordinariate Mass in North Carolina

On Sunday, July 5th, St Barnabas Catholic Church in Arden, North Carolina, hosted the first Mass to be celebrated in that area according to the Ordinariate Rite in Divine Worship: The Missal. Because of the ongoing COVID restrictions, the Mass was held outdoors, but the organizers did good job in setting up a very nice temporary altar. A group of the local faithful hopes this will be the first step to the establishment of a permanent Ordinariate parish, and so priests of the Ordinariate will be traveling to the area to offer the Mass in this form over the course of the summer. To learn more or sign up for local updates, call or text Joshua Johnson at 828-748-6251 or email him at johnsotics@gmail.com; our thanks to Mr Johnson for sharing these pictures of the Mass with us.

Getting ready - tradition will always be for the young!

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Ordinariate Rite Masses for Our Lady of Walsingham, September 24

Tampa, Florida

On Monday, September 24th, Fr Edwin Palka of Epiphany of Our Lord Catholic Church in St Petersburg, Florida, will offer Mass according to Divine Worship: The Missal for the feast of Our Lady of Walsingham, in pastoral response to some canonical members of the Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter. This will be the first Mass of its kind in the Diocese of St Petersburg. While Epiphany of Our Lord was designated as the center for the Traditional Latin Mass by Bishop Emeritus Robert N. Lynch in 2015, the celebration of the Mass according to the rite used in the Ordinariate is in absolute continuity with the mission statement of the parish, which is (in part) “to encourage all men to be fully, faithfully, joyfully and unapologetically Catholic in all aspects of life; and to bring about, through the mercy of God and the intercession of the Blessed Mother and all the Saints, the conversion of sinners and the salvation of souls.” It is our hope that this Mass will contribute to the sanctification of our parish and diocese, and whose grace will lead the Church Universal to greater unity. The church is located at 2510 East Hanna Avenue; the Mass will begin at 7 pm.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

On the same day, September 24, the Cathedral Basilica of Ss Peter and Paul in Philadelphia will host a solemn Mass offered according to Divine Worship: The Missal for the feast of Our Lady of Walsingham. Fr David Ousley, pastor of St. John the Baptist Church in Bridgeport, the Ordinariate parish in the Philadelphia area, will celebrate the Mass, with the assistance of Fr Eric Bergman as deacon and homilist, and Fr Albert Scharbach as subdeacon. The faithful will be able to hear sacred music from the Anglican tradition, including Oldroyd’s Mass of the Quiet Hour, motets by Elgar and Stainer, Anglican chant, and a chancel choir rendering English adaptations of the Gregorian Proper antiphons. Clergy and seminarians are most welcome to attend in-choir. The Mass will begin at 7pm, and be followed by a reception; the basilica is located at 1723 Race Street.

Ottawa, Ontario

St Therea’s Catholic Church in Ottawa, Ontario, will keep the same celebration in the Ordinariate Rite, also starting at 7 pm. The church is located at 95 Somerset Street West.

Recent First Masses and Ordinations

We are very happy to share with our readers the following photos of a first Mass in Slovakia, ordination in England done for the Ordinariate, and two Masses in New York, one of which was celebrated by a new priest. It is the season for ordinations and first Masses, and we will be happy to receive more such photos if any of our readers care to send them in.

On Sunday, June 24th, the feast of St John the Baptist, Fr. Ľubomír Urbančok, a newly ordained priest of the Archdiocese of Trnava in Slovakia, offered his first Mass at the pilgrimage shrine of St Anthony in Báč, close to the capital of Bratislava. This was the first solemn Mass by a new priest at the shrine since the post-Conciliar reforms. The image over the altar became famous in the beginning of the 18th century after a badly injured man was miraculously healed in front of it, and even more so after the Madonna was seen to cry bloody tears in 1715. The shrine is well-known in Slovakia also because it was the place of imprisonment of many bishops during the communist persecution, some of whom are now venerated by the Church, such as the Bl. Bishop Vasil Hopko.

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An Ordinariate Mass in Rome

This morning, the Roman basilica of Santa Maria in Campitelli hosted a Mass celebrated according to Divine Worship, the Ordinariate Missal, by a group of American and English clergy and seminarians. This was an especially appropriate location both for today’s feast, and for this particular rite. The ancient Roman church dedicated to St Mark the Evangelist is about a five-minute walk away, in the area where a Roman tradition says he lived and wrote his Gospel, based on the stories told to him by St Peter. Santa Maria in Campitelli, originally known as Sancta Maria in Porticu, was the first cardinalitial title of Henry Cardinal Stuart, scion of the last Catholic ruling family of England. It has served as a place of prayer for the return of England to union with the see of Peter since his death in 1807, a beautiful choice of church to celebrate a Mass that unites the Roman and Anglican liturgical traditions.

The music included the Communion Service No. 2 from the 1940 Hymnal by Healey Willan, propers from the Plainchant Gradual by Palmer and Burgess, the Processional Hymn The Eternal Gifts of Christ the King, JM Neale’s translation of St Ambrose’s Aeterna Christi Munera, a psalm setting by Edward Elgar, and plenty of beautiful organ music. It is very much to be hoped that this tradition flourish within the Ordinariate certainly for its own sake, but also as a model to Catholics throughout the world for improving the quality of music at Mass generally!

The prayers before the altar and the collect for purity (derived from the Roman prayers of preparation before the Mass.) 

The first incensation.

Thanks to Mr Michael Shami for sharing some of his photos from the organ loft with us.

The deacon reads to the people the summary of the Law.

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The Vigil of Pentecost According to Divine Worship in Oxford

The Vigil of Pentecost will be celebrated according to Divine Worship, the Missal for the Personal Ordinariates, at Holy Rood Catholic Church in Oxford, England, on Saturday 3 June, starting at 5 pm. The music of the Mass will be Mozart’s Spatzenmesse, and Loquebantur variis linguis by Thomas Tallis.

The history of the Pentecost Vigil, its lamentable suppression and partial restoration, are well known to our readers. There may be some interest in the form of the Vigil given in Divine Worship, which provides two forms for it. The first is the Extended Form, the second is simply the Mass of the Vigil by itself, as is the case in the Ordinary and Extraordinary Forms. The Extended Form may be celebrated before or after First Vespers, but there is no provision in Divine Worship for the combination of Vespers and Vigil.

The Vigil begins without ceremony. At the sedilia, the priest reads a short exhortation, a ‘traditional language’ version of that found in the Ordinary Form. Four Old Testament Lessons are read, with their Tracts, and a Collect after each one. There are four Lessons in the Ordinary Form, but this was not uncommon in other Uses of the Roman Rite, including Sarum. The texts for the Lessons and Tracts are those in the Ordinary Form: there do not seem to be Gregorian melodies for the Tracts, which are derived from the responsorial psalms set for the Ordinary Form Vigil. The collects, however, are almost all different. 1) is found the Sarum Missal, where it is the collect that concludes the Vigil, prior to the blessing of the font; it is given in A. H. Pearson’s translation; this collect is the Collect of the Mass in the Ordinary Form; 2) is the same as the Ordinary Form’s collect; 3) is identical to the pre-Pian Roman Vigil, and follows the same reading, from Ezekiel 37; 4) is a collect from the Church of England’s proposed 1928 Book of Common Prayer, for the Mission of the Church, derived from Acts 17:26, and found in other liturgical collections throughout the Anglican communion.

After the Lessons, the priest and ministers proceed to the altar and lie prostrate before it. After a period of silent prayer, they kneel, while the Litany of the Saints is chanted, as at the Easter Vigil. This was the practice in churches where there was no font to bless. Then, omitting the Introit, Mass continues. The possibility of the administration of the sacraments of initiation is explicitly foreseen, and is to take place after the homily. This may include baptism, reception, and/or confirmation. If these do not follow, the renewal of baptismal promises takes place (here called “the Memorial of Holy Baptism”), either at the font or done from the chancel. Sicut cervus may be sung if a procession goes to the font. Then, omitting the Prayers of the People and the Penitential Rite (which, in Divine Worship, comes at this point), Mass continues with the Offertory. The propers of the Mass are the same as the Extraordinary Form Vigil Mass, excepting the alleluia, which in Divine Worship is Emitte Spiritum, and the Offertory, which has the same incipit, but is shortened.