Missing the ‘gesimas

One of the reasons that it took Johnny Cash to wake me up for Lent this year, I am sure, has something to do with the disappearance of the ‘Gesima Sundays - that is, the three Sundays running up to Lent, including Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima.

Johnny Cash Convicted Me

Because I spent Sunday afternoon compiling music for a class I will be teaching this coming week, I have had the good fortune of being forced to listen to the monks of St-Benoit-du-Lac, a Patriarchal Liturgy from Moscow, and the strains of Ambrosian Chant. Somewhat less fortunately, I have also had to listen to a piece or two from the pen of John Michael Talbot, whose use of first person personal pronouns must surely surpass history’s sum total before him. But it is a comparative exercise, so I had no real choice.

Culture and Religious Integration

One of the great joys that comes with being Catholic is the disintegration of barriers between what constitutes one’s regular life and what constitutes one’s religious life. My experience is such that my children attend the local Catholic school, play football (soccer) with their school friends, go to the Friday night ‘junior club’ with the same set of friends, and depending on the year, meet up with those friends yet again for First Communion preparation. In this respect, participation in the Mass must seem to them a mere extension of everything else they do; not an added Sunday morning inconvenience, but part of a holistic world of which family and friends together partake.

Apologia pro mutatione mea, pt. VII.

Becoming a Catholic after one has lived life as an Anglican is not an easy thing to do. The belief of many Catholic-minded Anglicans is that whatever the Catholic Church might express in the Catechism and the Missal, the appalling way in which so many of her priests celebrate the Liturgy, the lack of attention paid to the content of homilies, and the rebellion of so many Catholic adherents on so many crucial questions, contradicts, and ultimately undermines, her declared intentions.

And so I had always believed.

Return from Rome

No, I have not re-joined the Anglican Church. I have just returned from a weekend in Rome, where I spent far too much on Italian beer, wine, and food, and not nearly enough on books and ecclesiastical souvenirs.

Apologia pro mutatione mea, pt. VI.

There can be nothing in the world so likely to put a serious theological inquirer off the nature of Anglicanism than the mother of worldwide Anglicanism - the Church of England - herself. Before leaving Canada, I could not have imagined it possible that such a noble ecclesiastical experiment as Anglicanism could go so horribly wrong as it had among Blake’s mountains green. For all the brilliant minds that the Church of England had produced through the centuries, and for all the admirable examples of Christian faith and practice, it quickly became clear to me that this community might possibly have been destined to foster a few individuals in Catholic life, but it could never know any kind of real communion of belief.

Apologia pro mutatione mea, pt. V.

There is enough to say about my Anglican past that I could probably dedicate an entire work to it. I am conscious, however, that it is all too possible to descend into unhelpful polemic, and so to undermine one’s own argument in the process. Besides, there is so much good material available on the history of Anglicanism and its theology that there is really no need for me to reiterate things. Works of particular relevance to me included that of Aidan Nichols, who, in The Panther and the Hind: A Theological History of Anglicanism, first caused me to realise that there might be more than one reading on the subject of Anglicanism than I had so far encountered. Like the Zahl book, whatever criticisms one could make of Nichols’ writing, it would still have to be admitted that he proffers significant points to ponder. Above all, I realized that everything I had heard of the Protestant - and of the English - Reformation, was heavily biased.