Customary of Our Lady of Walsingham
May 11, 2012 2 Comments
Conchurl alerts us in a comment here on the anticipated Ordinariate’s interim approved texts:
The Customary of Our Lady of Walsingham will be be released on 30th June.
Per the description:
This is a daily prayer book for the Ordinariate – those former Anglicans who have recently become a distinct part of the Roman Church. In creating the Ordinariate, Pope Benedict recognised the treasures that Anglicans brought with them from their own tradition and this book is replete with the riches of Anglican patrimony. It contains material from the Anglican tradition, adapted according to the Roman rite including: * an order for morning, evening and night prayer throughout the year * an interim order of the Mass * spiritual readings for the Christian year * the minor offices * calendar and lectionary tables For use throughout the English speaking world, this unique volume will fill an immediate need. Eventually, an authorised version of the Mass for the Ordinariate will emerge from Rome, but that is many years away.
About Fr Stephen Smuts
I posted about this on another US blog a few days ago. Both Amazon and the UK Book Depository are taking pre-orders and offering a disount on the bookstore price. It may interest your readers to know that the book is jointly edited by Mgr Andrew Burham and Father Aiden Nichols OP.
Mgr Burhman is an Assistant Ordinary of the OLW Ordinariate and also Chairman of the Working Group of the Interdicasterial Commission of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Congregation for Divine Worship set up to approve liturgical texts for the Ordiariates. AS an Anglican was a cathedral chorister, he read Music and then Theology at St Stephen’s House in Oxford and had parish appointments before returnung to St Stephen’s House as Vice-Principal until he was consecrated as Bishop of Ebbsfleet in 2000.
Father Aiden Nichols OP is a very distinguished Catholic theologian who has been a great friend to the Ordinariates. He graduated from Christ Church, Oxford with a first in modern history and entered the Dominican order the same year. He spent the next seven years at Blackfriars, Oxford, during which time he was ordained to the priesthood. He then moved to Edinburgh, where he was a Catholic chaplain at the University of Edinburgh. It was at Edinburgh in 1986 that he received his PhD. Between 1983 and 1991 he was Lecturer in Dogmatics and Ecumenics at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum) in Rome. In 1990 he was awarded the degree of Licentiate of Sacred Theology from the Angelicum. From Rome he moved back to England and to Cambridge, where he began as Assistant Catholic Chaplain, then as an Affiliated University Lecturer (1998) and finally as Prior of St Michael’s (1998-2004). He still lives at the priory in Cambridge. He was the first John Paul II Memorial Visiting Lecturer at the University of Oxford for 2006 to 2008, the first lectureship of Catholic theology at that university since the Reformation.
Note that the order of Holy Mass will be “an interim order” because final approval of the text requires vey wide consultation – it is reckoned the process will take 3-5 years. It is likely that the use of the texts will be permitted initially by a decision of the OLW Ordinary and that the other Ordinararies will be able to decide whether to permit use within their respective jurisdictions with the utimate aim of having common texts for Ordinariate use world-wide.
I noted elsewhere several weeks ago that Fr Nichols involvement was a very good thing given;
a. His thorough understanding of Catholic Anglicanism as exhibited in his great work The Panther and the Hind and
b. He is respected and trusted by Traditionalist Catholics as can be seen by his recent visit to the Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer (Transalpine Redemptorists) on Papa Stronsay, where he celebrated Mass for the community.