‘Gay Masses’ Abolished, Church Where They Were Held to Go to the Ordinariate
January 2, 2013 17 Comments
A big story has just broken on the Catholic Herald website:
Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster has announced that Masses in Soho organised for people with same-sex attraction are to end.
He also revealed that the church where the Masses took place will be given to the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham.
The fortnightly “Soho Masses” at Our Lady of the Assumption Church in Warwick Street were established by the diocese almost six years ago. They were intended to be “particularly welcoming to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered Catholics, their parents, friends and families”.
Archbishop Nichols said today that, while the Masses will stop, pastoral care of the community will continue at the Jesuit Farm Street church in Mayfair on Sunday evenings.
He also announced that Our Lady of the Assumption church will be given to the ordinariate in Lent. The archbishop said: “I hope that the use of this beautiful church, in which the young John Henry Newman first attended Mass, will enable Catholics in the ordinariate to prosper and to offer to others the particular gifts of the ordinariate.”
Read more here. Both these moves should be welcomed. The “gay Masses” were an embarrassment, a relic of old-style gay rights campaigning that scandalised large numbers of Catholics. To give this lovely 18th-century church to the Ordinariate is a huge boost for ex-Anglicans who are setting up their own structure, worshipping as Catholics in a style informed by Anglican spirituality. Archbishop Vincent Nichols should be congratulated. So should the Papal Nuncio, Archbishop Antonio Mennini, whom I’m sure strongly approves of these developments.
PS: My sources suggest that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has had a hand in this. Read this article by William Oddie for background.
It’s a lovely looking Church (if the above pic is anything to go by).
About Fr Stephen Smuts
Excellent news.
Amen. There is no such thing as a “gay mass.” All are welcomed at The Mass of the Savior as they struggle daily on their journey towards Him to accept the Truth of God, who is his beloved Son. The Mass is The Mass.
The real issue isn’t who is allowed to witness the liturgy. Anglicans, Jews, and agnostics can all sit in a pew and observe the celebration. Rather it is who is allowed to receive communion. So Anglicans, Jews, and agnostics are not supposed to receive communion.
The problem here is that by making the setting so…friendly and “welcoming”…one is in effect removing or whitewashing the sin of engaging in homosexual acts. There is no preaching or teaching that performing homosexual acts is wrong and, most importantly, in need of repentence, and also very importantly that those who are so doing and are unrepentent should not receive communion.
But we can never forget that this also always holds true for unrepentent fornicators, adulterers, thieves, drunkards, and assorted other sinners.
Would be interesting to have seen what percentage of the congregation received communion at the weekly liturgies. I suspect it would be quite high.
The church itself was a Catholic Embassy chapel – one of three that survive to-day where Mass was said legally during the Penal Times (the others are the Spanish – represented by St. James, Spanish Place, and the Sardinian, succeeded by St Anselm and St Cecilia). Assumption and St. Gregory represents the Portuguese and later Bavarian chapel. Cardinal Newman went there, and because the House of Wittelsbach is the senior descendant of the House of Stuart, the Royal Stuart Society has sponsored many requiems there. In a word, with its Penal Time, Jacobite, and Newman associations, it is a most appropriate choice for the Ordinariate.
Yes thay can be a fossilised 1920s Anglo catholic side show..and you can bet your bottom dollar there will be plenty of homosexuals there too!
That Church was an Embasssy chapel, when the Anglicanism that surrounded it, had no chasubles, incense, reservation or ritual and made no pretence to Catholicity..
For do I become your enemy that I tell you the truth
I would not worry excessively about the sideshow aspect – for those who like that kind of thing, there is Affirming Catholicism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_Catholicism). Those brave souls – clerical and lay – have accepted a sort of dry martyrdom; often enough at our hierarchy’s hands as much as those of their former prelates. Indeed, for just the reasons you mention, I think an Embassy Chapel from the Penal Times is indeed perfect for them, given the varying kinds of persecution they have endured and continue to endure.
I mean those who enter the Ordinariates, of course, NOT those in Affirming Catholicism!
Any minor persecution Anglo-Catholics experienced was self inflicted as they imported Roman ritual and doctrine in to the life of a Protestant church.They never captured the heart of Anglicanism and remained a peculairity.
Then, they are Catholic. The real peculiarity are those who claim to be “Catholic” but do not think it necessary to be in communion with the Pope. We know which groups those are.
A lot depends upon what you might term as “minor.” None of them were executed, to be sure – though some of their clerics were jailed under various Ritual Acts. But many lost careers (clerical and lay) and endured enormous amounts of calumny – similar to what many Traditional Catholics received after Vatican II, though none of us were jailed. Sans execution and prison, therefore, you may call what we received “minor” persecution, though some amongst us might disagree – especially, in England, some of the descendants of the Recusants who endured an unexpected second wave of persecution from our own bishops (the late squire of East Hendred, for example, might have told you a thing or two). The glaring difference between ourselves and the Anglo-Catholics, of course, is that in time we got a Pope who has begun relieving our disabilities. Some (myself as well) would point to this as a sign of the Divine foundation of the Catholic Church and the Papacy.
To be sure, there was nothing of that sort to be found in Anglicanism, which is why it shattered. And you may well be right in saying that “Catholicising” a Protestant body was an impossibility – whether or not it really was “impossible,” it didn’t work this time. But they certainly tried very hard, and for a while seemed to have some success. Many souls entered the Catholic Church via Anglo-Catholicism who never would have otherwise – so for them as individuals, it was a success. My views on this matter I have set forth elsewhere (http://anglicanpatrimony.blogspot.com/2012/05/coming-to-point.html).
As a devotee of the English martyrs and the recusants, and a fan of the Pilgrimage of Grace, the Risings in the West and North, and the Jacobites, I believe that the birth and subsequent career of the Church of England (and those of Scotland, Ireland, and in Wales) was a terrible thing with an enormous cost in blood and souls. But the Church teaches us that “the spirit blows where it will.” Indeed the Holy Ghost does; as a believer in Divine Providence, therefore, I cannot help but see that all that has gone before has been a preparation for this moment – for us and our contemporaries to make choices in, upon which our own salvation depends and by which that of others will be affected. I personally cannot alter the mistakes or defeats of the past, however much I rue them – I can, however, do the best I can now.
If the Ordinariates are successful, many more souls will be brought into the Church, the mainstream of Catholicism in the Anglosphere will receive a much needed catechetical and liturgical boost, and the conversion of said Anglosphere to the One True Church will be that more likely. If not, those things will not happen, the enemies the Church faces in future will be that much stronger and the lives as Catholics of our descendants much harder, and it will be our fault – as those we face are the fault of our fathers who failed before us. No doubt, in the face of that, the Holy Ghost will raise up something else for our successors to respond to – I pray that in that event they will do a better job than we shall have done.
AXIOS! MANY YEARS! May this Church be a Blessing to and for all Anglicans who recognize where they came from and where they must go to embrace the fullness of the Catholic Faith.
Congratulations to OUR LADY OF WALSINGHAM Ordinariate!
If you had a son, who was worried about seame sex attraction , would you send him to the Jesuits!
If I had a son who worried about same sex attraction, I would send him neither to the religious life, the military, or anywhere else he might experience temptation. Of course, if he really had that problem (so many who think they do when adolescents grow out of it, if not led into bad company), he would eventually have to learn to deal with temptation on his own, as do we all.
What I am referring to, is the fact the archbishop has sent the gay group to be ministered to, by Jesuits at Farm Street.
Aren’t the Jesuits long gone away from what St. Ignatius of Loyola intended? The decision to send the gay group to the Jesuits seems apt, since the Jesuits have a lot of homosexuals among them, teaching and advocating heterodoxy and liberalism. The real Jesuits who fought Protestantism and were martyred in spreading Christianity to the Americas and Asia would be ashamed of what is happening to their order.
From the Pope’s Marines to liberal Tea Room Queens. They drive their own order to decline, and they view this as a -positive- thing!
Ruining souls through cottoning to immorality is an old song for many of our bishops – even here in America!
“Moreover, he should show himself ready to reconcile the estranged, compassionately assist and serve those who are in prisons or hospitals, and indeed, to perform any other works of charity, according to what will seem expedient for the glory of God and the common good”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Jesus#Formula_of_the_Institute_of_the_Society_of_Jesus