The Story of the Reformation Needs Reforming

The destruction of most of the libraries, music and art of England was not a religious breakthrough but a cultural calamity.

Prof Eamon Duffy in The Telegraph not so long ago:

 

For five centuries England has been in denial about the role of Roman Catholicism in shaping it. The coin in your pocket declares the monarch to be Defender of the Faith. Since 1558 that has meant the Protestant faith, but Henry VIII actually got the title from the Pope for defending Catholicism against Luther. Henry eventually broke with Rome because the Pope refused him a divorce, and along with the papacy went saints, pilgrimage, the monastic life, eventually even the Mass itself – the pillars of medieval Christianity.

To explain that revolution, the Protestant reformers told a story. Henry had rejected not the Catholic Church, but a corrupt pseudo-Christianity which had led the world astray. John Foxe embodied this story unforgettably in his Book of Martyrs, subsidised by the Elizabethan government as propaganda against Catholicism at home and abroad. For Foxe, Queen Elizabeth was her country’s saviour, and the Reformation itself the climax of an age-old struggle between God, represented by the monarch, and the devil, represented by the Pope.

Fear of Catholic Spain, the greatest power in Europe, gave Foxe’s story urgency. That fear escalated under the Stuart kings, for all of them married Catholics, and were suspected of favouring their wives’ religion. The prospect of a persecuting Catholicism imposed by an apostate monarchy fuelled Protestant anxiety. It led to Civil War, and the execution of King Charles I. Ironically, Charles was a loyal Anglican, but both his sons, Charles II and James II, did eventually embrace Catholicism.

In 1679 fear of Catholicism triggered a last orgy of persecution. The so called Popish Plot, to murder the king and seize the throne, was a paranoid fantasy concocted by Titus Oates, but it unleashed a wave of gruesome executions, including the judicial murder of the Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, Oliver Plunkett.

At the height of the hysteria, Protestant mythology achieved definitive form in a book that would shape the writing of Tudor history down to our own day. In 1679 Gilbert Burnet, a Scottish cleric, published the first volume of a massive History of the Reformation, an anti-Catholic narrative given scholarly credibility by the inclusion of dozens of documents gathered from public and private archives. Burnet would be the chief propagandist for the “Glorious Revolution” which deposed James II and set the Protestant William of Orange on the throne. His history rammed home the message that Catholicism and Englishness were utterly incompatible: Catholicism was tyranny, Protestantism liberation. “They hate us,” he wrote, “because we dare to be freemen and Protestants.”

It was a message the nation wanted to hear: Burnet was thanked by a special vote of Parliament. His work was supplemented by John Strype, another ardent “Orange” cleric, in a stream of biographies and collections of Reformation documents, many of them gathered from Foxe’s archives. Till well into the 20th century, historians of the English Reformation would rely on Burnet and Strype for their source materials, in the process perpetuating their late-Stuart take on the Tudor age.

The creation of the Public Record Office in 1838 made accessible thousands of documents from Tudor England, but didn’t radically alter this traditional spin on the Reformation story. The greatest Victorian historian of Tudor England was James Anthony Froude, who eagerly explored the archives, but read them through inherited spectacles. A Protestant to his fingertips, he hated clergy, doctrine, religious mystery and, above all, Catholicism. He saw the break with Rome as the beginning of Britain’s rise to imperial greatness, and the Reformation as a confrontation between two incompatible civilisations. Froude knew that the Reformation had been imposed to begin with on a reluctant nation, but he rejoiced that this had happened.

A disciple of Thomas Carlyle, he thought history was not for the little people, but was made by heroes. “Up to the defeat of the Armada,” he wrote, “manhood suffrage in England would at any moment have brought back the Pope.” Happily, there was no democracy in Tudor England, and the country had been saved from itself by the tyrannical Henry VIII, and if the abbeys were unroofed, and a few hundred priests butchered in the process, that was a small price for imperial greatness and the march of progress. Shorn of its more blatant jingoistic rhetoric, Froude’s Protestant version of the Reformation would be recycled in the writing of academic history late into the 20th century.

Historians no longer take that venerable Protestant version for granted, but it is still alive and well in the wider culture. It underpins, for example, Shekhar Kapur’s biopic Elizabeth. It was reiterated recently by the journalist Simon Jenkins when he wrote that “most Britons had, by the late 15th century, come to regard the Roman church as an alien, corrupt and reactionary agent of intellectual oppression, awash in magic and superstition. They could not wait to see the back of it.”

But in multicultural England, the inherited Protestant certainties are fading. It is time to look again at the Reformation story. There was nothing inevitable about the Reformation. The heir to the throne is uneasy about swearing to uphold the Protestant faith, and it seems less obvious than it once did that the religion which gave us the Wilton Diptych and Westminster Abbey, or the music of Tallis, Byrd and Elgar, is intrinsically un-English. The destruction of the monasteries and most of the libraries, music and art of medieval England now looks what it always was – not a religious breakthrough, but a cultural calamity. The slaughtered Popish martyrs look less like an alien fifth column than the voices of a history England was not allowed to have.

 

Church of the Holy Sepulchre Comes Alive at Night in Jerusalem

In the Huffington Post:

Jerusalem –  After the last tourists leave the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem’s Old City at nightfall, a little-known but centuries-old tradition unfolds at one of Christianity’s holiest sites.

Clerics from the three largest denominations represented in the church – Greek Orthodox, Armenian and Roman Catholic – gather each night for special prayers reserved for the men who take care of the site where Christians believe Jesus was crucified, buried and resurrected.

Starting at midnight, clerics and monks sing and pray for hours, their chants echoing through the cavernous chambers of the Holy Sepulcher’s darkest rooms.

“The door of the church is closed, no pilgrims, no tourists, it’s very quiet,” said Father Isidoros Fakitsas, the superior of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate at the church. “It’s amazing to feel the liturgy with no people, only the monks.”

Isidoros said he has attended the services for 21 years.

The preparations require a rigid routine. Before the first prayers of the new day, the Christian shrine needs to be cleaned, and maintenance work has to be done.

The clerics sweep the floors, replace oil lamps and clean candle holders, after thousands of pilgrims visited throughout the previous day. Occasionally a small number of devoted pilgrims help them with the cleanup and are permitted to stay and pray inside the church all night.

The early morning mass is a tradition associated with monastic life, said Father Eugenio Alliata, professor of Christian Archaeology at the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum in Jerusalem. “Mostly monks and religious people want to pray not only all the day, but also all the night, or part of the day or part of the night. It is part of the desire to pray without ceasing because prayers to God must be given all the time, day and night,” Alliata said.

Father Fergus Clarke, the guardian for the Franciscan community inside the Holy Sepulcher, said the night prayers require a certain amount of personal sacrifice, but also bring greater spiritual fulfillment. “That’s a wonderful vocation … to be able to do something like that, to know that while people are sleeping, others are praying,” he said.

The night liturgies inside the Holy Sepulcher are regulated by a consolidated tradition: The Greek-Orthodox start to celebrate mass inside Jesus’ Tomb at 12:30 a.m., before handing over to the Armenians and then the Franciscans. The Greek Orthodox liturgy at the tomb is the longest, lasting for about three and a half hours; the Armenians then take over for an hour and a half and the Franciscans for another half hour.

The night service is subject to some variations. On the feast of Saint Matthias on the morning of May 14, for example, Catholics lead a procession to Jesus’ tomb during the Greek Orthodox liturgy.

Sounds collided with one another that night. The celestial voices of Armenian priests rose from their wing of the Church as the sound of a Franciscan pipe organ came from the opposite direction.

Competing for attention is nothing new in the ancient church. The three main denominations that share the church jealously guard their turf, and an air of mistrust lingers as each group makes sure no one else crosses into their space.

While the Tomb of Jesus and the main passages of the Holy Sepulcher are considered common spaces, the three main religious communities each own a part of the church: The Chapel of Saint Helen, near the place where Jesus’ cross is said to have been found, belongs to the Armenians; the Greek-Orthodox Church has ownership over the largest part of the church, including the Altar of the Calvary, where Jesus’s cross was raised; the Franciscans own the Chapel of the Crucifixion where Jesus was crucified, along with the northern part of the Church, where according to tradition Jesus appeared to his mother.

The church was first built by Roman Emperor Constantine in 325, at the site where the tomb of Jesus was believed to have been found.

Constantine’s structure was destroyed in 1009 by Muslim Caliph al-Hakim. A 12th century restoration by the Crusaders gave the Holy Sepulcher its current appearance.

Life inside the Holy Sepulcher is regulated by a complex maze of norms that are often subject to different interpretations, said Father Samuel Aghoyan, the Armenian Superior of the Holy Sepulcher. At times, tensions have even spilled over into violence, with monks pushing and punching each other.

“We keep almost awake at night here to see that things are done properly, on time, that no one will trespass the other’s right by doing things that he’s not supposed to do,” said Father Samuel.  ”So we have to be careful and watch what we do or what they do.”

 

Coming to a Point

Writes Charles A Coulombe:

On my desk is an old Anglo-Catholic Prayerbook, published sometime in the 1920s by the Church Literature Association, and bearing the signature “Evan R. Williams, Oxford, 1951.” Acquired in a second-hand store, it would not be too surprising to find out that it had belonged to the late Fr. Williams, sometime rector of St. Nicholas, Encino, whom I knew slightly. He had quite a wild background, had known T.S. Eliot while at Oxford, and had the rare ability to use the Missale Romanum at the Anglican Mass, translating from the Latin as he went.

Both the book and the man who may have owned it summon up for me the Anglo-Catholicism of about 1880 to 1960, a time when it looked as though the entirety of the Anglican Communion might one day be Catholicised. This was the era that produced the great Anglican missionary and slum priests, the religious orders and devotional societies, and social and political theorists and writers ranging from Conrad Noel to T.S. Eliot. The Anglo-Catholic Congresses and groups of dioceses from South Africa to the Biretta Belt of the Midwest showed forth the power of the movement which, in America at any rate, had its high noon with the torpedoing of the union discussions with the Presbyterians in 1946. In England it was bound up with all sorts of sorts of exotic things: Young England, the Arts and Crafts Movement, Neo-Jacobitism, Anglo-Catholic Socialism, and the “Merry England” Ideology. For the more esoterically-minded, there were C.G. Harrison’s work, Charles Williams’ Order of the Co-Inherence, and Dom Robert Petitpierre’s work with exorcisms. In, with, and under conventional Anglicanism a whole Anglo-Catholic parallel universe had been carved out; if some of its denizens seemed a trifle bizarre, there could be no arguing with the solid doctrinal foundations of the Advent Papers and the American Congress Booklets, the fervour of apologists like C.S. Lewis and such philosophers as George Grant, or solid architectural masterpieces like Nashdom Abbey (to which went the myrrh offered by the Queen at Epiphany to be mixed with the incense the monks prepared) and the renewed shrine at Walsingham.

To-day, of course, unless one is a part of the Affirming Catholicism crowd, it all seems in retrospect no more solid than a soap-bubble. The implosions of Nashdom Abbey and the formerly world-wide reach of the Cowley and Mirfield Fathers pale in comparison not only to the failure to Catholicise Anglicanism as a whole, but for the latter to retain adherence to any sort of “mere Christianity” at all – at least on the part of its leadership in the British Isles, North America, and Australasia.

Although there was always a certain amount of flummery in Anglo-Catholicism, there was an awful lot of real good in it – indeed, that very “Anglican patrimony” of which Pope Benedict XVI speaks. I believe that Anglo-Catholicism has not failed, for all that its concrete expressions and its influence have withered. Rather, it seems to me that a process is moving, in a way well expressed by C.S. Lewis’ Dr. Dimble in That Hideous Strength: “…if you dip into any college, or school, or parish – anything you like – at a given point in its history, you always find there was a time before that point when there was more elbow-room and contrasts weren’t so sharp; and there’s going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are more momentous. Good is always getting better and bad getting worse: the possibilities of neutrality are always diminishing. The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder.”

In the novel, of course, this referred to there being ever less room for “neutral” magic in the world. For our purposes, however, it is a fine description of what has been happening to Anglo-Catholicism over the past six decades. Again, unless one cares to “Affirm Catholicism,” then bit by bit there has been ever less room within the official structures for the Anglo-Catholic. By the same token, resistance groups within the Canterbury Communion and the Continuum become ever more Evangelical; the ecclesiology of the alphabet soup bodies in the latter becomes progressively more incomprehensible and Episcopi Vagantes-like. In the midst of this dilemma has burst Anglicanorum coetibus.

The birth of the Ordinariates here and in Great Britain has been accompanied with a great deal of pain; Australia’s is just aborning, and South Africa and elsewhere are further off. The attempt to mesh quasi-congregationalist Anglo-Catholics with Roman local hierarchy is often fraught with misunderstandings and missed communications. It seems to have everything, humanly speaking, against it. Yet, in the long-term, the Ordinariates appear to be the only available formula for Anglo-Catholicism to survive – and more than that, to thrive, to return to its once and proper place in evangelisation.

Moreover, on the Roman side, this development comes at a critical time. Sixty years ago, when Anglo-Catholicism was at its most confident – and many Anglo-Catholics were as convinced that they did not need Rome any more than they did their local Broad – or Low-Church Bishop – so too was the Catholic Church. But that same period has been a humiliating one for us as well. It is not merely the growth and flowering of the pedophile scandals, awful as they have been. Far greater has been the near universal “Hermeneutic of Rupture,” denounced by Benedict XVI in his message to the Curia of December 2005. In his letter to the bishops accompanying the 2007 motu proprioSummorum Pontificum which “liberated” the Tridentine Mass, the Pope declared that “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful.” But as a practical matter it has been – not only in liturgy, but in catechetics and popular devotions – in the greater part of the Latin Rite. To fight this, he has, among other things, strengthened the motu proprio with a hard-hitting clarification; but documents are not sufficient. This is why he has worked so hard to make a settlement with the Society of S. Pius X – a pre-existing and world-wide network of traditional Catholic communities – and why he sees the Anglican patrimony as so important for English-speaking lands. The current situation against which he and like-minded clergy and laity are struggling is a terrible scandal, to be sure: as I have said, a terrible humiliation. But without humiliation there is no humility, and without humility, no holiness. Six decades ago, both sides would have been too proud to come together.

It may well be that the same can be said for the Polish National and European Old Catholics of the Union of Utrecht – the latter proud to reject the supposed “innovations” of Vatican I, only to fall prey to so many liturgical and doctrinal alterations as to become unrecognizable to their 19th century forebears. The PNCC and the small Scandinavian Lutheran and German Old Catholic groups who have joined with her in the Union of Scranton may one day be more amenable to union with Rome in the light of that humiliation – and Rome may thusly be better able to deal with and for them.

So too with the East. To be sure, Communism and the horrors in the Near East (which latter have sent so many Christians – Catholics and Orthodox alike – fleeing west) were and are horrible things. But Constantinople, Moscow, and the rest have begun to see that Rome is their only real ally in the struggle against secularism, and certainly the Holy See is very much aware of this. The humiliations all have suffered may well be a catalyst to becoming aware that it is no longer possible to be separate and yet triumph over the enemies of Christ. We have lost the luxury of indifference that has characterised so much of our joint history. It may be, despite the hurdles that remain, that Benedict’s vision of restoring the kind of unity between East and West that prevailed during the First Millennium may come to pass in a shorter time then could have been imagined 60 years ago.

Those outside the visible communion of Rome who nevertheless love the Sacraments and wish to struggle for the Kingship of Christ are, through the course of events, being forced ever closer to her; those within that visible bond who do not are similarly being leached out. The Anglo-Catholics who enter the Ordinariates will be able to be truly the same sort of Anglicans as were Alfred the Great, S. Bede the Venerable, Julian of Norwich, and indeed, Ss. John Fisher and Thomas More, and the English recusants. By the same token, however, the heritage of Charles I and Bishop Ken, Cram and Eliot, Sayers and Lewis and all the rest will be made available to the entire Latin Rite, and indeed the Church as a whole. In this way, the ability of Catholics to re-evangelise the English-speaking world will be immeasurably strengthened. Indeed, all history is coming to a point.

 

Anglicanism and the Western Christian Tradition

The Catholic League:

Ten years on from the successful exhibition at the Vatican Museums to mark half a century of warm ecumenical relations between the See of Peter and the Church of England, here is the online presentation of the first part (made possible with a grant from the Catholic League), charting Anglicanism’s communion of origins with the Latin Catholic Church of the west and thus their shared commitment to fullness of communion.

Anglicanism and the Western Christian Tradition

Check out the the document. It’ll make for some nice Sunday reading.

 

Prison Makes Way for the Holy Land’s Oldest Church

The Biblical Archaeology Society reports:

Despite the great deal of fanfare surrounding its discovery, the third century C.E. Christian prayer hall discovered at Megiddo looks like anything but an archaeological tourist site. Likely the oldest church ever found in the Holy Land, it is located under the Megiddo prison, leading the spectacular discovery to be covered up again until the site can be developed properly. Plans have been made to relocate the prison just over a mile to the west, but the construction of a tourist site around the church has not yet begun. An international tender seeking out an investor to construct and manage the tourist site is expected this week, and will serve as a major step in making the site available to the public. Project manager Gad Yaakov expects 500,000 tourists to visit the site in the first year alone, and expects the numbers to rise over the following years. Bids on developing the site for tourists must be submitted by June 5.

The structure featured mosaics with Christian symbols such as fish and a dedicatory inscription “to God Jesus Christ.” Dated to around 230 C.E., the find was considered important enough to Israel President Moshe Katsav that when he visited Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican in November 2005, he took pictures of the newly discovered mosaic floor with him to present to the pontiff.

This mosaic from the Megiddo Prison Church is one step closer to the public eye. This week’s expected tender for development bids is a major step in creating what will surely become a major Biblical and archaeological tourist site.

Read more about the tender for development.

 

Medieval Crozier and Ring Excavated in Britain

While the archaeological charter of this blog is usually of the Syro-palestinian kind, this is way too cool to pass by.

Unexpected medieval treasures have been discovered in a grave at one of the UK’s most beautiful abbeys along with the bones of the abbot they belonged to – probably a well-fed, little exercised man in his 40s who suffered from arthritis and type 2 diabetes.

The discoveries were made at Furness Abbey, on the outskirts of Barrow in Cumbria, a place that in its day was one of the most powerful and richest Cistercian abbeys in the country.

Archaeologists found a silver-gilt crozier (a kind of staff of office) and a jewelled ring in remarkable condition. “This is a very rare find which underlines the abbey’s status as one of the great power bases of the middle ages,” said Kevin Booth, senior curator at English Heritage.

The discoveries were only made because stabilisation work was needed at the abbey, with wooden foundations giving way and cracks appearing in the walls.

During excavations by Oxford Archeology North to investigate the seriousness of the problem, members of the team came across the undisturbed grave of the abbot together with his personal paraphernalia.

Curator Susan Harrison said it was particularly surprising because the grave had not been disturbed by 16th-century post-dissolution robbers, nor Victorian and Edwardian gentlemen antiquarians. Everyone had missed it until now.

The crozier is unusual and the first to be excavated in this country for 50 years. It has a central gilded silver plaque which shows the archangel Michael slaying a dragon with his sword.

The ring – quite large, probably for a man with big or chubby fingers – is likely to have been given to the abbot on his consecration. “It is an unusual ring,” said Harrison. “The bezel is a pyramid shape and is pointed – it would stick in to your finger. You would have felt it when you wore it and it might have been a reminder of the piety of the office.”

It is also possible that the ring might have held a relic in place on the abbot’s finger.

An examination of the skeleton has shown he was big, overweight, probably aged between 40 and 50, arthritic and “had a decent way of living”, said Harrison. There is also evidence that he had later-onset diabetes.

Harrison said the finds were exciting and would help us learn more about Cistercian burial practices in general and Furness Abbey in particular.

The abbey, an inspiration for both Wordsworth and Turner, was founded in the early 12th century by Stephen, later king of England. By the time Henry VIII ordered its dissolution in 1537 it was the second richest in England. The crozier and ring will now go on display at the  abbey over the spring bank holiday.

See? Told you. Very cool.

 

France’s Incredible Oak Chapel

France’s oldest tree, serves as the base for two chapels.

More here.

HT

 

Is this Britain’s First Christian Burial?

Anglo Saxon grave reveals 16-year-old girl laid to rest with a gold cross

The Daily Mail reports:

Laid to rest in her best clothes and lying on an ornamental bed, she was probably of noble blood.

Quite how the 16-year-old Anglo Saxon girl died and who she was remain a mystery.

But she was buried wearing a gold cross – suggesting she was one of Britain’s earliest Christians.

Her well-preserved 1,400-year-old grave has been discovered by Cambridge University scientists, who described the find as ‘astonishing’.

The burial site at Trumpington Meadows, a village near Cambridge, indicates Christianity had already taken root in the area as early as the middle of the 7th century.

It was not long after St Augustine, a monk in Rome, was sent by Pope Gregory the Great to convert the English in the year 595.

Starting in Kent, his team of 40 missionaries slowly worked their way around the country and he became the first Archbishop of Canterbury two years later.

But progress is thought to have been slow and sometimes difficult, and Christians and pagans co-existed for many decades.

The new find gives an insight into this transition period as she was also buried with a knife and glass beads to use in the next life – a pagan tradition of ‘grave goods’ which goes against Christian beliefs. Dr Sam Lewsey, an expert in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, said: ‘This is an excessively rare discovery. It is the most amazing find I have ever encountered.

‘Christian conversion began at the top and percolated down. To be buried in this elaborate way, with such a valuable artefact, tells us that this girl was probably nobility or even royalty. This cross is the kind of material culture that was in circulation at the highest sphere of society.’

The grave is one of 13 Anglo Saxon ‘bed burials’ to be discovered. Usually reserved for noble women, they involved being laid to rest on a wood and metal frame topped with a straw mattress. Such burials are not found after the 7th century.

The girl’s inch-wide gold cross, studded with cut garnets, has been dated to between 650 and 680AD.

It was probably sewn into her clothing around the neck and may have been worn in her daily life.  Four graves were found at the site, the others containing an individual in their 20s whose gender is unknown, and two girls in their late teens, who had no religious signs.

It raises the question of whether the woman buried with the cross had an official role in the fledgling Christian church.

Wow, this is very interesting.

There is more with photos aplenty here.

 

Church of England: More New Women Priestesses than Men

More female priests are joining the Church of England than male ones for the first time ever, it can be disclosed as it takes another step towards the introduction of women bishops.

The Telegraph has the rest (if you can bear it) here.

Sooner or later they will find out that while they can dress up and play the priest, they are never going to be real priests. Yes, the feminist innovators will lead people further and further from the Truth. Why not simply trust in God, follow His ordained design, and be what you are: women?

For it is not to teach that you women . . . are appointed. . . . For he, God the Lord, Jesus Christ our Teacher, sent us, the twelve, out to teach the people and the pagans. But there were female disciples among us: Mary of Magdala, Mary the daughter of Jacob, and the other Mary; he did not, however, send them out with us to teach the people. For, if it had been necessary that women should teach, then our Teacher would have directed them to instruct along with us.

- Didascalia 3:6:1–2 [AD 225]

Epiphany

Today is Epiphany:

… or Theophany, meaning “vision of God”, which falls on January 6, is a Christian feast day that celebrates the revelation of God the Son as a human being in Jesus Christ. Western Christians commemorate principally (but not solely) the visitation of the Biblical Magi to the Baby Jesus, and thus Jesus’ physical manifestation to the Gentiles. Eastern Christians commemorate the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River, seen as his manifestation to the world as the Son of God.

Eastern Churches following the Julian Calendar observe the Theophany feast on January 19[4] because of the 13-day difference today between that calendar and the generally used Gregorian calendar. For Roman Catholics in many countries, the feast is celebrated on the Sunday that falls between January 2 and January 8…

The Church in Jerusalem Epiphany Prayer:

O God Who by a star guided the wise men to the worship of your Son we pray you to lead to yourself the wise and great of every land that unto you every knee may bow, and every thought be brought into captivity Through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Epiphany Hymn of St. Ambrose:

Most High God! Thou that enkindlest the fires of the shining stars! O Jesus! Thou that art peace and life and light and truth, hear and grant our prayers.

This present day has been made holy by thy mystic baptism, whereby thou didst sanctify those waters of the Jordan, which of old were thrice turned back.

It is holy by the star shining in the heavens, whereby thou didst announce thy Virginal Mother’s delivery and didst, on the same day, lead the Magi to adore thee in thy crib.

It is holy too, by thy changing the water of the pitchers into wine; which the steward of the feast, knowing that he had not so filled them, drew forth for the guests.

Glory be to thee, O Lord Jesus, that didst appear on this Day! And to the Father and to the Holy Spirit, for everlasting ages.

Amen.