‘Came the Cardinal,” wrote our correspondent Marian Curd in 1954, describing the Archbishop of Westminster’s visit that December to crown the image of Our Lady at the Church of the Assumption on Warwick Street in the heart of London. A few weeks short of 70 years later, as the organist patiently rehearsed with the brass players, the open tabernacle on the gradine and a seventh candle behind the altar crucifix presaged the arrival of Cardinal Griffin’s successor, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, to celebrate a Mass of Thanksgiving for the 300th anniversary of Catholic worship on this historic site.
Mgr Keith Newton and Michael Hodges write elsewhere in this special report about the church’s long and distinguished history; it has taken on a different lease of life since it was given to the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham in 2013. Back in 1954 our correspondent noted “the huge number of silver votive offerings, mostly heart-shaped, which adorn the walls, sending off winking reflections of the brilliant lights and candles”. Still they wink and twinkle; thank-offerings of generations both living and departed, for favours received in body, mind and spirit.
Meanwhile, Mgr Michael Nazir-Ali writes about the Ordinariate itself, which was founded by Pope Benedict XVI as a way of helping groups of Anglicans struggling with the vagaries of life in the Church of England or elsewhere in the Anglican diaspora to enter into communion with the Holy See without discarding certain aspects of their own rich theological and liturgical heritage. It is appropriate, too, then, that the co-patron of the Ordinariate’s mother church in the UK should be St Gregory, who sent St Augustine to England to revive and rekindle, as the old prayer has it, “the faith of the Holy Roman Church”.
A varied crowd of men and women, young and old and very old, of a variety of ethnicities, leaving behind the noise and bustle of the West End, took to their knees as the light faded outside on the evening of the feast of St John Henry Newman: convert of converts and co-patron of the Ordinariate. Among them were Sir Edward Leigh MP, Father of the House of Commons, Fra’ Max Rumney and a host of other dignitaries. As the servers worried about candles, and Knights of Malta took their places at the front of the nave with members of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre and Knights of St Gregory behind them, the gallery began to fill up with those unable to find a spot in the nave.
The bell rang, and the choir struck up with <em>Ecce Sacerdos Magnus</em> – to the enormous setting by Anton Bruckner – as Cardinal Nichols made his way to the sanctuary, preceded by a dozen-and-a-half concelebrants. He and the two deacons wore vestments of cream damask with gold braid, with the arms of the Ordinariate embroidered at their hems. Opposite the Cardinal during Mass sat Bishop David Waller, the relatively newly-appointed Ordinary, in a gold chasuble of Byzantine pattern, wearing his <em>mitra simplex</em>, and next to him Mgr Philip Whitmore, formerly Rector of the English College in Rome and now running the neighbouring parish of St James’s, Spanish Place.
The collect of the Mass included shades of Newman’s own gems: “O God, who bestowed on the Priest Blessed John Henry Newman the grace to follow your kindly light and find peace in your Church; graciously grant that, through his intercession and example, we may be led out of shadows and images into the fullness of your truth.” In his homily the Cardinal reflected on the lessons that Newman, the formerly timid and awkward Oxford don turned cardinal and saint, has to teach the whole Church. He kept his counsel, perhaps wisely, as to whether Rome is any closer to declaring Newman a Doctor.
The thurifer was kept busy – with some deft footwork at the offertory – as the Cardinal celebrated in the modern Roman Rite, rather than in the Ordinariate Use with its Cranmerian cadences and snippets from the Church of England’s <em>Book of Common Prayer</em>. Nevertheless there was a distinctly Anglican feel to the proceedings, thanks to the choice of music.
The ordinary of the Mass was Herbert Howells’s Communion Service for King’s College, Cambridge: his “<em>Coll Reg</em>” setting. The psalm was sung to traditional Anglican chant, while William Harris’s great anthem for double choir, “Faire is the Heaven”, with words by the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser – he of <em>The Fairie Queene</em> – did duty for the anthem during Holy Communion.
Bishop Waller thanked Cardinal Nichols for coming to join the celebrations, describing his presence on what he called “a double celebration” as “a great joy”. Three out of four hymns were Newman’s own: the congregation heartily belted out the last, “Firmly I Believe and Truly” (with indulgent brass accompaniment), as the procession slowly made its way out of the church. The parish priest, Fr Mark Elliott Smith, took to the organ to play the Final from Vierne’s Symphony No.1, before a packed reception in the church hall: decent wine, tasty food and an abundance of good cheer.
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