The Blue Flower

I am dwelling somewhat on Dr Raymond Winch (1921-2000), because I think I have some understanding of his thought underneath the enthusiastic rhetoric of his desire to get western rites accepted by existing Eastern Orthodox Churches. This understanding was brought home to me by several nights of discussion with him, until I was so exhausted I had to repair to some grubby bed in a spare room. My need for sleep was one of my great regrets as the daylight began to appear through the windows. I remember the shelves of books and the lectern from which he said daily Office from the Monastic Breviary. He was truly a hermit, a medievalist Romantic, and almost a Starets in his own way.

From the first time I met him during Holy Week (western) 1988 until his death in 2000, I counted him among my personal friends. I usually dropped in to see him when I was travelling between the south of England and my parents’ home up north. I also enjoyed days in Oxford and especially in the churches, college chapels and the bookshops. Ray’s conviction in Orthodoxy was already fading in the 1990’s, and he did not encourage me to seek out any “solution” with Orthodoxy. It was frustrating to me that the idea would remain academic. Since then, there have been successful initiatives in the Antiochian Church in the USA, and the Russian Church outside Russia has something, of which there are some small congregations in England – quite comparable to ours in the Anglican Catholic Church. I abandoned any serious idea about Western Orthodoxy from about 1999. I try to be courteous with those who believe they have found the “true church”, but to me it is little more than hyperbole and ideology. I was sad for Ray towards the end of his life when he was attending Roman Catholic masses, but the “punch” had gone from him. He requested a secular funeral, at which I was not present, living as I was at the time in western France.

What seems most salient in his approach was that he was an academic and believed that learning as well as piety was an essential part of Christian culture. He was not interested in “evangelising”, founding a parish, getting ordained in this or that Church. He prayed, read and passed on his wisdom through discussion and dialogue, through friendship and concern for men younger than himself. There was never anything improper or lewd about Ray, at least in my experience.

He often referred to the work and experience of Joseph Overbeck in the late nineteenth century and, in the twentieth, by Alexis van Mendesbrugghe and Eugraphe Kovalevsky. He contended that the Roman Canon had no need of a descending Epiclesis, and that the Supplices te rogamus was perfectly sufficient for this purpose and theological meaning. The Roman Canon had no need of any reordering and that it was perfectly acceptable to Orthodox liturgical and sacramental theology.

He became Orthodox long before women’s ordinations in the Church of England, but in any case, he had been a Roman Catholic like Overbeck. The prospect of Anglicans wanting to become Orthodox was passed up as an opportunity. Ray attended the Byzantine Liturgy for many years, but with an increasing awareness that he was not in his own liturgical culture. He knew that post-Tridentine Roman Catholicism had little to do with the medieval Church even though the 1570 Pian missal was almost identical to the old use of the Roman Curia. He was often seen in the Oxford Union and Bodleian libraries until his death, researching mainly English church antiquities and ordinary parish life in the 14th and 15th centuries. He was no longer quickened by what he had found in Orthodoxy.

I have cheekily suggested that he was one of the last of the Oxford Movement, like Pusey and Keble, but the latter two were clerks in holy orders of the Church of England. In itself, it is a serious anachronism, but might be considered by analogy. It has confirmed me in my own educational approach, not having a regular pastoral ministry here in France as a priest. Far away from those wonderful libraries, where a new member swears an oath never to kindle therein any fire or flame, I have the advantage of the Internet and have access to an immense quantity of published texts and websites. My work as a translator leaves me with leisure time to read and study, and I believe my life is finding a certain regularity and order so that I can begin again to work as I did at University. This is a true ministry, and I largely owe it to Ray Winch.

There is little about Ray or the erstwhile Gregorian Club on the Internet other than what I have put up myself. However, we read in a recently published book, Orthodox Identities in Western Europe: Migration, Settlement and Innovation, edited by Ms Maria Hämmerli, Dr Jean-François Mayer, Farnham 2014, pp 281-282.

While this overview covers most of the developments pertaining to the Western rite in (canonical) Orthodox Churches in Western Europe, it should also take into account efforts by various individual Orthodox faithful, although they have not resulted in the creation of parishes. One example was Raymond Winch (1921-2000), who converted to the Orthodox Church from Roman Catholicism, but kept a strong interest for the Western liturgical heritage. ‘His interest in the idea of a Western Orthodox rite originated in his previous dissatisfaction with the reform of the Roman Catholic liturgy following the Second Vatican Council. He founded in Oxford a Gregorian Club ‘for the restoration of Orthodoxy’s Western heritage’, for missionary reasons, but not only, according to the Statement of Principles: ‘Hitherto the great heritage of Latin Christendom has in some measure been preserved by those who are not Orthodox. Now it is being rapidly abandoned. We believe our heritage to be of great intrinsic worth. If it is not to be lost altogether, we Western Orthodox must make it our own once again. We wish to worship and live according to our own traditions – those of our saints’. The Gregorian Club did not envision separate Western Orthodox dioceses, but hoped for the unity of the Church, with one bishop in each place, over communities of different rites. The Gregorian Club did not last, but it had a few issues of a bulletin as well as some booklets printed, including what its founder envisioned as the ‘Canonical Mass of the English Orthodox’. [Footnote: ‘Rev. Anthony Chadwick, a priest of the Anglican Catholic church, has made this out-of-print text available online (Winch 2007).] A supporter of the Club published a study suggesting that the ‘historical point of departure [for a restoration of a Western Orthodox rite] must be the period before the schism, about 800-1000 – obvious, one would have said, yet none of the previous Western Orthodox restorers has taken this line’ (Coombs 1987: 60).

Ray, in 1989, organised some talks in Pusey House, and this leaflet found itself taped to windows of bookshops and libraries. Fr Martin Reinecke, a German priest, was at Fribourg at the same time as I was, also studying with Dr Jakob Baumgartner. I introduced him to Ray, and the idea came up about these talks. I prepared mine from my licentiate mémoire, which in abridged and revised form found its way into The Clark Companion to Liturgy edited by Dom Alcuin Reid (London 2016), pp 107-131. I was intrigued to be called Dom, but I was already a cleric in minor orders.

It was all a long time ago, but there were about 20-30 present at each talk, mostly people from the University, but a few friends from London too. The emphasis on Western Orthodoxy was practically gone, and it was now a question of working on our liturgical heritage regardless of which institutional Church we belonged to. This became a lasting principle for me, which formed the basis of this blog and my Sarum group on Facebook. Courtesy, absence of polemics, serenity for study and the use of our rational faculties. Briefly, it is the spirit of the university, of that fanciful community of canons that survived the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation and Vatican II!

His musings about this community were sometimes not very clear. I remember little about it, but he did imagine a college of canons as something like the Counter-Reformation Oratory and the university college – but for clerics. The foundational charter was so strong that it stood amidst the vicissitudes of the centuries. It rang close to a dream I had of finding a European diocese that hadn’t changed, perhaps in the French Massif Central or southern Italy. I found parishes like Le Chamblac (Fr Montgomery-Wright) and Bouloire, priests in Opus Sacerdotale, but nothing I could join in view to ordination and ministry. Anything that was “traditionalist” was reconstructed in the movement of Archbishop Lefebvre or a few conservative diocesan ordinaries like Cardinal Siri in Genoa. Msgr Wach’s Institute of Christ the King, with some Oratorian aspects but heavily baroque trappings came close, as did the Canons Regular of the Mother of God who have a magnificent monastery in Lagrasse, southern France. They too are reconstructions, though much less “military” than the SSPX.

I explored Western Orthodoxy from about 1988 until the following year. There were lovely ideas, but nothing accessible to me. To join a Church in the USA, I would have had to go to one of their parishes. Self-financing and with no guarantee, and with no basis for getting a Green Card. Yeah, I have heard that one before. It’s better to eat cake here in Europe, but I can’t blame a priest for imposing conditions. We do in the ACC.

I certainly wouldn’t attempt to run a club. I don’t have the “people skills”, any more than Ray did. A great idea fizzled out, because he wasn’t the right man for it. Someone else would have had other ideas… At the basis of all this is the reality of academic study and education as a form of Christian ministry, promoting our culture and basis of spiritual life and stability. The Gregorian Club was a pre-internet forum, and its purpose can be amply served by blogs and discussion groups. There is no need for anyone to be a member of anything – simply to learn, study and discuss.

There is something of Ray’s legacy in my work, and I’m proud of it. May he rest in peace and attend that Liturgy of which our own is but a dim shadow!

I have quite a few handwritten notes by Ray Winch which illustrate his view on the contrast between the Catholicism of his youth (1940’s and 50’s) and the medieval status quo. I remember the nights of discussion when I had to concentrate and be very patient of the slowness by which he exposed his ideas. He did tend to ramble – but always did return to the subject. He rarely looked me in the eye, and I would suspect he had Aspergers / high-functioning autism at the origin of his eccentric lifestyle and passionate knowledge and learning of philosophy and history. I seem to attract them!

He must have spent hours painstakingly writing things to send me, whether I was with the parish priest of Bouloire or at Triors Abbey with the monks. I do believe his memory can be honoured and served by publishing his essential message, that Catholicism without any other adjective is almost dead and only replaced with various ersatz expressions in Roman Catholicism and Anglo-Catholicism. Ray sought a “medium” for this aspiration in Orthodoxy, but alas it was an illusion.

In many ways, I try to continue his work in my own way of thinking about things via this blog and my Use of Sarum group on Facebook. We cannot go back in time, but we can seek to do better in recovering the older sense of Christian civilisation and culture. I don’t think we will succeed, but we can die trying! Ray did… He had a big influence on me, encouraging me to read Russian philosophy – which changed my entire outlook as a convert to Roman Catholicism, changed my views about George Tyrrell and Catholic Modernism (as opposed to Liberalism à la Bultmann, Harnack, etc.). He was a pure intellectual with little practical sense! But, in many ways, he was like a father to me during the short time I knew him.

I still have some letters to transcribe…

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Catholic Worship in the 20th Century

I am old enough to remember Catholic worship as it was in England before the more significant liturgical changes. Living in the suburbs of London, during school holidays I visited many Catholic parish churches. Often I attended liturgical services in Westminster Cathedral when I was usually the only layman attempting to follow their choir offices. I was a relatively well informed observer. Having access to a few useful books in the splendid public library at Croydon, I knew a little of liturgical history. I was about 15 when I obtained and began to make some use of the Off. Parvum. A little later I acquired an Horae Diurnae and then some odd volumes of the Brev. Rom. Thus it was with a relatively informed mind that I observed what I did. I knew that what happened in a Catholic church c. 1950’s was vastly different from what happened c. 1450’s: yet, strangely, the contents of the official service books had changed but little.

I have witnessed the Rosary officially recited aloud during Mass – and much of the like.

Three points, often overlooked:-

i) Services held in the open church were intended only for the public (called the faithful). Even when there were 2 or more assistant clergy, only the priest who was taking the service came into the church. The priests, it seemed, had no need of Benediction or to venerate the Cross on Good Friday, etc. etc.

ii) A good part of Sunday evening Devotions and Benediction was celebrated in Latin. On these occasions the faithful sung lustily and, I supposed, not without comprehension. (I have recently checked this matter with a few old men).

iii) Low Mass was not usually intelligible even to those who knew Latin. Most priests celebrated the entire service in a whisper even before a crowded congregation on a Sunday morning. The almost universal assumption was that the liturgy was not for the faithful.

Worship in an English Medieval Parish Church

I have accumulated abundant documentary evidence to prove that, in every parish church, Office was recited in choir every day. Additionally, on ordinary weekdays then was Placebo and Dirige. The services were arranged in two clusters, called in the vernacular, “Matins” and “Evensong”. The latter began “an hour before the setting of the sun”. During much of the year Matins would have begun before dawn. Then was a daily parish Mass while, at least in larger churches, was a High Mass. Contemporary illustrations of a solemn service, without servers but with one of the ministers holding a torch for illumination, are more accurate depictions than I had suffered. Apart from some town churches when special times were prescribed, chantry celebrations were chronologically geared to the parish Mass. (Here I disagree with Duffy about the purpose of squints.)

The laity attended Mass and Evensong on Sunday, as other great days. Those who had some leisure – particularly old men and young boys – were often in church for at least some of the choir offices.

Every parish had some clergy additional to the vicar. All vicars were to appoint, and pay, a clerk.

Clergy were trained by a kind of informal apprenticeship. A boy would receive the Tonsure, but he might not receive major orders until he was fully adult. Clerics in minor orders could marry and continue to serve as clerks, though they could not then proceed to the subdiaconate. (This system persists in present-day Cyprus: hence, besides, a priest, all churches have a psalmista and often a deacon.) Very many churches had chantrists who had “to help with service in the high choir”. Then were also, often, capellani (hired assistant priests).

Clearly, strict rubricism was impossible, eg. At Twyford an Ambrosian missal was in use. Clearly the psalter and much else would have been known by heart.

Some large parish churches had, additionally to the services proper to the day, a daily Mass B.V.M. “cum nota”. For this, boys were sometimes hired, or rewarded with teaching. I would guess that harmonized singing was often used on these occasions.

What follows does not, in the nature of things, permit of direct documentary proof: however, there insufficient evidence of diverse kinds to have convinced me.

1) Latin was far less of an obstacle than is popularly supposed. I believe that even the illiterate were able to follow the greater part of the services relatively intelligently. Certainly it was not only the men of Wales and Cornwall who would have found the familiar Latin far more intelligible than Cranmer’s London English. (I suggest that the imposition of the “vernacular” was motivated more by political than religious motives. There is a close parallel with what a faceless establishment is even more engaged upon.)

2) A measure of Latin literacy was widespread in the late middle ages. Having seen young boys teach themselves how to use complex computers, I have little doubt that an intelligent boy with access to the choir books would have required little assistance to learn to read. Our Cicero and Virgil, etc. would have usually required grammar schools and universities. It was the humanists who condemned Latin to death. Accidentally, I have stumbled upon incipient public libraries of non-liturgical books at St Paul’s, St James Garlickhythe and in Hereford. I guess that more might be found for the searching.

Fragments

I. Many men who write about medieval life may be excellent at dealing with the documents, etc., but make absurd mistakes because they are not at home with that about which they are writing. I could provide many examples. Here is one from Life in a Medieval College [cathedral vicars] by F. Harrison (1952) with a foreword by the Most Rev’d Cyril Garbett.

p. 56 “Immediately after the hour offices have been sung in the choir … the meal shall begin … The meal shall be taken at 3 pm. Supper shall follow at 5 pm at cinque de le clok”.

p. 57 “After Prime, the vicars may drink Benedictine once only”. The author notes numerous occasions when the vicars drank Benedictine (sic).

You will understand immediately how he has come to suppose that the vicars had their only two meals separated by two hours. But, so far I have not seen why he should make the mistake of supposing that the vicars drank little but Benedictine.

II. Another writer supposes that, where the liturgy at Saturday required three High Masses on the same day, the last Mass was celebrated in the chapter house. One can guess how he comes to make that mistake. [Chapter houses did not have altars as a rule.]

Yet another writer explaining that, though the people would have not understood the Mass because it was in Latin, they would have had some idea about the feast or season “from the colour of the vestments”. This, of course, is a gross anachronism.

I think I told you about the author Hamilton-Thompson, who had obviously used a Missale Romanum to describe the ceremonies of Holy Week in a medieval parish church. Unfortunately, he had taken a book published in the 1960’s! Hamilton-Thompson is now a Reader in Medieval History somewhere!

Can it be that I sometimes make mistakes like those above? I hope that friends would tell me at once. I know that I am a poor proof reader. Thus, let pass frumentum for fermentum and Romae for Romanae.

You ask “Can you also show evidence of common people going to Matins … and Evensong…?” Yes, I can. Matins, Mass and Evensong was standard observance of Sundays and other solemnities. I sent you my transcript of the Synodal Statutes of Quinel of Exeter [quoted below]. “…presentes essent ad horas canonicas faceant campanus pulsari quarum sonitu populus excitatus, dum ad ecclesiam divinum officium audiendi et orandi causa accedit…” Quinel was not the only bishop to leave record of this matter. Also, there are references to attendances at Matins and Evensong in vernacular literature. It would seem that on ordinary days, Evensong consisted of Vespers, Placebo and Dirige if one Nocturn with Miserere (ie. Lauds) several other psalms for the dead called Commendatio. This latter was ps. 138, ps. 118 [twice a day!] with a responsory. So far I have not found a specific mention of Compline.

You write “… England’s religion is money, comfort…”. I totally agree with you. I would add that cowardice has become the national vice. No man will risk anything for any cause whatsoever. I am deeply ashamed to be English.

Vale,

Ray

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De Divino Officio Nocturno Pariter et Diurno

Ministri ecclesiarum, qui ecclesiasticis sustenantur stipendis, prompte debent esse et solicite circa divinum officium paragendum, ut in vina domni virilita laborantes preter stipendia temporalia que hic percipiunt eterne retributiones denarium meriantur percipere post laborem. Quos circa ipsum officium propheticus sermo instruit et informat dum per profitum dicitur: “In matutinis meditabor in te, etc” et alibi: “Septies in die laudem dixi tibi etc.”

Hinc est quod singulis ecclesiarium ministris invertute sancte trinitatis iniungimus, ut secundum formam concilii generalis divinum officium nocturnum pariter et diurnum corde et voce simul studiose celebrent et devote, plane et plene absque sincopa psalmendo seu cantando singula que incumbunt. Caveant igitur psalmentes ut in medio versiculi pausant pusillium, nec unus sequentem versiculum prius incipiat donec alta plene dixerit precedentem, et sic psalmendo sese intelligant ut dom voce unus psalmit animi affectu alta simul psallere vidietur. Et quia canonice hore secundum temporum interstitia in eccleses parochialibus sicut in cathedralibus et collegiatis nequiant decantare, et precipimus ut presbeterii parochialis ab ecclesiis suis recedere non presumat donec festibus diebus ante missam vel post canonicas horas decantaverint, vel saltem legerint absque canto cum dies non fuerit feriandus: proviso quod missam sacerdos prius non celebret quo usque matutinas et primam suo exsolverit creatori. Precipimus etiam quod parochiales presbeteri omni die preteream in pascale tempore et festis sanctorum novum lectionum et in vigiliis eorum dicant Placebo et Dirige et Commendationem: Hec tamen tempora non excipimus dum tamen id velint facere ex devotione.
Preterea audivimus quandoque quod presbeteri, quamquam fuerint absentes forte ex illicita causa, tanquam presentes essent ad horas canonicas faceant campanus pulsari quarum sonitu populus excitatus, dum ad ecclesiam divinum officium audiendi et orandi causa accedit, presbeterium non inveniens, a clerico presente querit ubi sit et responsum accipient: Non est hic, iam recassit: et sic parochiani elusi recedunt, et ecclesia debit is defrandatur obsequis.

……

Alii vera capellani conductitu diebus dominicis et aliis solemnitatibus non prius celebret donec missa parochialis fuerit celebrata.