Monday 17 January 2011

The historical context

".......The task before Andrew and the others in the Ordinariate of our Lady of Walsingham is to translate into terms of Christian life, thought and worship, what that ‘not little’ grace has done, in the history of the Church of England – what it is that can be placed on the paten, put into the chalice, not for propitiation, in a spirit of repentance, but for the praise of God’s glory, in a spirit of thanksgiving. And this is the second sense in which we stand now on a cusp or boundary or threshold.
It will entail a very great deal of hard work. It is nothing less than the reconfiguring of Anglicanism by union with the Petrine centre and its criteria of orthodoxy....."
".........But there is more than that. There is bringing this new ecclesia particularis, this new ‘particular church’, into the movement for renovating the whole Church which we associate with the mind and heart of Pope Benedict, a movement which respects the Second Vatican Council but places it, by a hermeneutic of continuity, in the great Tradition as a whole. It is a movement towards the fullness of Catholicity, in which the fathers of the Oxford Movement can take effortlessly their place.

So, Father, let me leave you and this congregation with one final citation from the Blessed John Henry, ‘I have a work to do in England’ "
from the homily preached by Fr Aidan Nichols, O.P., at Fr Andrew Burnham's " first Mass in full union with the Catholic Church"  on Sunday, 16 January [the emphasis is mine]
Read it all here

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