Attacking the Messenger

August 26, 2018 in clergy sex abuse scandal, sexual abuse, Vatican 1 Comment Tags: Heidi Schlumpf, McCarrick, Pope Francis, Sean Winters, Vigano

As usual, the messenger who delivers unwanted news is attacked to discredit his news.

Heidi Schlumpf (I love Low German names) at the leftist National Catholic Reporter:

Many, including more progressive Catholics, questioned Vigano’s credibility, because he has been implicated in covering up alleged sexual misconduct by former St. Paul-Minneapolis Archbishop John Nienstedt.

Others pointed out that Francis had replaced Vigano as nuncio after he was involved in the papal meeting with controversial Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis during the pope’s visit to the U.S. in 2015. New York Times religion reporter Elizabeth Dias noted on Twitter that “Vigano and Francis have been political enemies.”

Michael Shawn Winters, also at the National Catholic Reporter, has an objective headline: “Vigano letter exposes the putsch against Pope Francis”:

Vigano’s tissue of misinformation will leave its mark. In the midst of a feeding frenzy, no one stops to ask basic questions and even journalists can forget to undertake basic tasks like asking for corroboration or looking at the questions a text such as Vigano’s poses. Here are a few of my questions:

Vigano says he must unburden his conscience now. Why now? If he felt as disturbed by the filth as he claims to have been, why did he not say anything publicly or at least speak to the bishops conference? I recall a few years back, at a meeting of bishops’ conference, sitting outside the ballroom in Baltimore chatting with a monsignor from the nunciature. He was waiting for Vigano who was in the executive session of the bishops’ meeting. Why did he say nothing then?

Vigano is a disgruntled former employee. Such people are always a bit angry. They are also often a bit unreliable. He was always a crackpot. But, make no mistake: This is a coordinated attack on Pope Francis. A putsch is afoot and if the U.S. bishops do not, as a body, stand up to defend the Holy Father in the next 24 hours, we shall be slipping towards schism long before the bishops meeting in November. The enemies of Francis have declared war.

(BTW can’t NCR afford accents?)

Notice Winters’ focus is not on the truth or falsehood of Viganò’s accusations, but on Viganò’s motives and character. A person may not have completely clean hands and may still tell the truth. In fact, those who know damning truths usually do not have completely clean hands.

Viganò has an agenda, and he focuses on the failures of Francis, who is, after all, the current pope, rather than on the egregious failures of John Paul II, who, after all, is dead. As for me – a pox on both their houses. Both popes failed sexual abuse victims, both allowed the evil to fester.

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Black Humor for Catholics

August 26, 2018 in homosexuality, sexual abuse, Vatican 2 Comments Tags: Catholic sexual abuse, Francis, homosexuality, Neuhaus, Vigano

Robert Conquest started out as a leftist who fought on the Republican side on in the Spanish Civil War. But he soon turned against communism on utter disgust.

“He wrote more calmly about totalitarianism than about the accomplices and the deniers of its crimes. Stalin was a thug, Lenin a maniac. But why did so many sophisticated, educated Westerners ignore or excuse what was happening? He harried and skewered fellow-travellers and wishful thinkers, reserving particular scorn for apologist historians such as Eric Hobsbawm. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan admired him. Critics called him a rabid anti-communist. He enjoyed teasing them, coining “Conquest’s Laws”—the first being that, generally speaking, everyone is “reactionary” on things he knows about.

When the Soviet archives opened, his meticulous work was utterly vindicated. His books were published in Russia, and he brought out updated editions in English. Mulling a new title for “The Great Terror”, his pal Kingsley Amis suggested “I told you so, you fucking fools”.

I am considering that as the title if I republish my book, Sacrilege: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church. The expletive would not be an insult, but merely a description.

I had forgotten Neuhaus’s reaction to my book, but the editors of Touchstone have a long memory, and sent it to me:

“Very different is Leon Podles’ Sacrilege: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church (Crossland). It is a rambling essay of more than five hundred pages on a potpourri of items picked up from the public media and the blogosphere, including, along with the kitchen sink, stomach-turning details of abuse, mainly with boys, and a scathing, if familiar, indictment from a conservative perspective of liberal depredations that brought things to this sorry pass. Regrettably, the tone is shrill, and even righteous anger does not justify the author’s suspension of caution and charity in attributing motives.”

I think that with Archbishop Viganò’s letter we know what the motives were.

Viganò may have temporarily delayed Francis’s plan to institute a gay marriage ceremony (a mere change in discipline not in doctrine, the pope will explain) but a homosexual network, the type who give pederasty a bad name, has a lock on the Vatican and on many dioceses, and they will shrug off Viganò as a right-wing ideologue – the same way that Stalin’s critics were dismissed.

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Why Some Suspect there is a Connenction between Homosexual Priests and Abuse

July 28, 2018 in clergy sex abuse scandal, homosexuality 10 Comments Tags: Binding with Briars, Donald Wuerl, pederasty, Pittsburgh, Richard Ginder

We will soon see the Grand Jury report on Pennsylvania. I wonder what it will say about Richard Ginder.

In Pittsburgh my wife’s mother was friendly with a politically conservative Catholic writer for Our Sunday Visitor, a Rev. Richard Ginder. My wife remembers that he suddenly stopped coming and was never mentioned again. My wife’s parents, including her father who was a judge, died before I discovered the truth about Ginder, so I never knew what they knew or had heard.

It turns out Ginder was of the “Vatican II… aggiornamento…take your clothes off” school.

Randy Engel summarizes the events:

The Ginder Case was played out under Bishops Hugh C. Boyle (1921-1950), John F. Dearden (1950-1958), John J. Wright (1959-1969), Vincent M. Leonard (1969-1983) and Anthony Bevilacqua (1983-1987). It clearly demonstrates how little the handling of criminal pederast priests has changed over the last seventy years in the Pittsburgh Diocese.

Father Richard Ginder was a native Pittsburgher born in 1914. He was a Basselin Fellow and held a master’s degree in philosophy and a licentiate in theology from the Catholic University of America. He was ordained a priest of the Pittsburgh Diocese in 1940 at the age of 26 by Bishop Hugh Boyle. Fr. Ginder taught for three years at St. Charles College in Catonsville, MD, and Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, MD. Later he became Censor of Books for the Diocese of Pittsburgh.

From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, Fr. Ginder was a popular syndicated priest-columnist. His byline appeared in such prominent Catholic publications as Our Sunday Visitor where he wrote the controversial syndicated column “Right or Wrong.” [Hah!] He also founded The Priest, a journal for Catholic clergy which he edited for 24 years and The Catholic Choirmaster which he edited for 13 years. He was also an accomplished organist and composer of sacred music.

Ginder claimed he discovered his “sexual identity” in 1949, nine years after his ordination. He said he regretted that over the next 25 years, he was never permitted to express himself on the subject of homosexuality in either OSV or The Priest. He did, however, give himself permission to act out his homosexual impulses with adolescent boys and young men.

Then in 1969, Ginder’s double life as a priest-homosexual pederast came to a grinding halt, not by any action of the diocese but by the Pittsburgh police.

As part of an intensive investigation, police officers raided Ginder’s private apartment in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh and found photographs of teenage boys performing homosexual acts with Ginder and possibly other priests from the diocese. The police also found diaries written by Ginder that described his (and, again, possibly other clerics’ and laymen’) homosexual activities with young boys and young men. Diocesan attorneys interceded for Ginder and he was released from jail and put on ten-years’ probation.

To recap – The Pittsburgh Diocese knew that Fr. Ginder was a homosexual hunter of underage boys, a criminal offense. The police had sufficient evidence to convict him. The diocese had enough evidence to petition the Vatican to laicize him. But Bishop Wright got him off the hook. He remained “a priest in good-standing.” And the entire sordid affair was covered-up.

Significantly, that very same year, 1969, Rome kicked Bishop Wright “upstairs” and brought him, and his young secretary, Father Donald Wuerl, to Rome. On April 23, 1969, Pope Paul VI appointed Bishop Wright, Prefect of the Congregation for Clergy. Five days later, Wright was made a Cardinal.

In 1975, a little more than halfway through his probationary period, Ginder published his semi-autobiographical book Binding With Briars – Sex and Sin in the Catholic Church, a defense of homosexuality and autoeroticism. As Ginder explains:

The Church does not hate gays. The Church hates sodomy. We are trying to change that opposition, to show that it is a mistaken hostility, that sodomy is licit, at least for gays …if homosexuals are sincerely persuaded that gay sodomy is permissible, then they have no need to build their own private little chapel within the Mother Church, to form an esoteric sect within the Christian commonwealth. Separatism, segregation, is not the answer. The answer is assimilation…Gays can be just as good Catholics as the rest and still have their sex. Don’t let them quit the Church …we need their help in forming a consensus. We need them on the team.

In the foreword of Binding With Briars, Ginder stated he celebrated Mass every day and that he believed in the tenets of the Nicene Creed as defined dogma, and that he loved his priesthood and his Church, but on the subject of moral theology, he took a sharp detour in terms of allegiance.

The priest attacked moral theology, “at least as it existed from Trent to Vatican II,” as a “stingy, pettifogging science,” that is “act-centered” rather than person-centered. Salvation lies in the “fundamental option” not in “individual acts,” he insisted. Not surprisingly, as an active homosexual/pederast, Ginder thought chastity and celibacy were highly overrated.

Fr. Ginder hailed “Gay Liberation” as being “the cutting edge of sexual liberation.” He favored both. He labeled pedophilia, that is, sex with children as “sick,” and distinguished “the child molester” from the “normal homosexual,” presumably a man like himself, who only engaged in sex with adolescent boys or peers.

In 1976, one year after the publication of Binding With Briars, Bishop Leonard, Wright’s successor, stripped Ginder of his priestly faculties. But he made no move to laicize the priest, so the hapless parishioners of the diocese continued to support the perp while the perp continued to seek out fresh meat.

I found the book. Engel’s quotes are accurate.

Here is Kirkus Review‘s 1975 review of the book. His pederasty goes unmentioned.

Richard Ginder has been a Roman Catholic priest “”in good standing”” for 35 years. He calls himself an “”open-minded conservative”” on dogma but in the area of moral theology he is a sexual liberal. He maintains–to put it mildly indeed–that the teaching of the institutional Church is overdeveloped in the area of personal sexual morality. Because of the Church’s preoccupation with chastity–the “”megavirtue,”” to the near exclusion of other more serious matters–war, ecology, violence, governmental integrity, sins against charity–countless Catholics have simply chosen to go their own way, often in bitterness and anguish. (Their testaments, especially since Vatican II, have come to constitute almost a genre in itself.) Father Ginder reviews the historical sources of guilt at bodily pleasure–if it feels good it must be bad–from St. Paul and the early Church Fathers down to the intransigence of Pope Paul VI’s Humanae vitae. Along the way credits go to the Scholastics, the Jansenists, the Irish clergy (truly sui generis) and the New England Puritans. But the value of his book lies not in telling us how American Catholics got so repressed–an oft told tale–but in its sexual specifics. He deals with the spectrum of sexual practices from fantasy to fetishism and with the exception of abortion (“”plain murder””) his advice, quoting St. Augustine is: “”Love God and do as you please.”” Direct, often amusing, and supportive, especially of gay libbers whom he calls the “”shock troops”” on the barricades.

_______

Perhaps Archbishop Donald Wuerl would care to explain his role in all this. “I know Nothink!” is not credible.

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Not Just a Catholic Problem

July 28, 2018 in clergy sex abuse scandal, homosexuality, Masculinity, Men in church, Protestantism No Comments

From my book:

Although Protestantism did not have the issues of auricular confession or clerical celibacy, its ministers sometimes were suspected of effeminacy, perversity, and over-familiarity with women.

The Whig Sydney Smith had observed there were three sexes, “men, women, and clergymen,”[1] and this witticism about a “third sex”[2] became a standing joke. All clerics had to face the “popular stereotype that men of the cloth were neither male nor female.”[3] The clergy were seen as exempt from masculine trials and agonies; they were part of the safe world of women. As one layman put it, “life is a football game, with the men fighting it out on the gridiron, while the minister is up in the grandstand, explaining it to the ladies.”[4] By the end of the nineteenth century, the weakness and effeminacy of the mainline Protestant clergy had become a commonplace of satire. Thomas Higginson commented on such men:

One of the most potent causes of the ill-concealed alienation between the clergy and the people, in our community, has been the supposed deficiency, on the part of the former, of a vigorous, manly life. There is a certain moral and physical anhæmia, a bloodlessness, which separates most of our saints, more effectually than a cloister, from the strong life of the age. What satirists upon religion are those parents who say of their pallid, puny, sedentary, lifeless, joyless little offspring, “He is born for a minister”…Never did an ill-starred young saint waste his Saturday afternoons in preaching sermons in the garret to his deluded little sisters and their dolls, without living to repent it in maturity.[5]

Lack of masculinity was a sign of a religious personality.

In nineteenth-century New England, ministers of the most important churches were “hesitant promulgators of female virtues in an era of militant masculinity.”[6] But the dominant churches of nineteenth-century New England had long been feminized. Not only was the proportion of women in the churches extremely high, both the milieu and the ministers of the church were far more feminine than masculine. Businessmen disdained the clergy as “people halfway between men and women.”[7] Ministers found the most congenial environment, not in businesses, political clubs, or saloons, but “in the Sunday school, the parlor, the library, among women and those who flattered and resembled them.”[8] Moreover, they were typically recruited from the ranks of weak, sickly boys with indoor tastes who stayed at home with their mothers and came to identify with the feminine world of religion. The popular mind often joined “the idea of ill health with the clerical image.”[9] In the vision of Unitarian minister Charles Fenton (1796-1842), playing Sunday school children have replaced stern Pilgrim Fathers and “adult politics have succumbed to infantile piety, Ecclesia to a nursery. Masculinity is vanquished in the congregation and, even more significantly, in the pulpit.”[10]

The supposed effeminacy of ministers also led to a suspicion that those who were unmarried were probably homosexuals or otherwise sexually perverse. In the Church of England the masculinity of Anglo-Catholics was frequently questioned[11] because they were celibate and fussy about ritual.[12] “Effeminate fanatics” and “womanish men” were some of the milder criticisms of these “not conspicuously virile men.”[13] Punch observed in “Parsons in Petticoats” that “reverend gentlemen ‘of extreme High Church proclivities’ are very fond of dressing like ladies” and gave them advice on how to protect “the muslin, or alpaca, or tarlatane, or poult de soie, or satin, or whatever it is their robes are made of.”[14]

If a minister was heterosexual, he was still immersed in a world of women. Orestes Brownson complained about the “female religion” that Protestantism had become.[15] Ann Douglas described the situation: “The nineteenth-century minister moved in a world of women. He preached mainly to women; he administered what sacraments he performed largely for women; he worked not only for them but with them, in mission and charity work of all kinds.”[16] When the founder of Wellesley College, Henry Fowler Durant, left the bar to become a minister and “forswore the conflict of the court to work for the Lord, he increasingly entered the realm of women.”[17] This realm contained many temptations. A church journal warned of the dangers of giving the clergy, who moved largely in a world of women, unrestricted access to women: “No man in the world has so few conditions imposed upon him at the threshold of society as the clergyman. His passport to social life is almost a carte blanche. Women of both states [married and single] and all ages are his companions, socially and professionally. The rules of social intercommunication between the sexes are, in his case, virtually suspended.”[18] Because of this intimacy, as The Pulpit observed in 1871, “there is no profession, class or avocation, so exposed to or tormented by the devil of sensuality as the ministry. The very sanctity of their office is an occasion of their stumbling. The office is confounded with its occupant, the sanctity of the former is made the possession of the latter. Now, the office is an invulnerable myth; its occupant is a man of like passions with other men.”[19] A Methodist Discipline warned ministers: “Converse sparingly, and conduct yourself prudently with women”; and a minister warned other ministers: “You are men, with the passions of men, exposed to the temptations of men, and in the name of God we charge you to remember this matter.”[20] Some forgot.

A worldly newspaperman, Nathaniel Willis, noted “the caressing character of the intercourse between the clergy and the women in their parishes whose affections are otherwise unemployed.”[21] Another newspaperman, George Thomson, thought that ministers had perfected the art of religious seduction: “So far from a sin, it seems to be an act of duty and of piety to submit to his desires, and when the object is once accomplished, the reward is a devout blessing and thanksgiving, that removes every scruple of conscience and the pleasing duty of comforting a beloved pastor is performed as an act of religious merit.”[22] Between 1810 and 1860, at least twenty clergymen were tried for immorality, and half were convicted. The Police Gazette had a regular column on clerical scandals.[23]

The response of the church authorities was to deny or minimize the accusations. Church authorities simply let the offender transfer to another church or another denomination. The Chicago Times criticized “the extreme laxity which has commenced to govern certain denominations in accepting candidates for holy orders, and the mildness with which lesser offenses that infallibly lead to greater ones are excused.”[24] The Chicago Times also editorialized: “The clergyman, like the physician, has extraordinary facilities for the commission of a certain class of crimes, and those facilities are such as to heap double damnation upon him if he is sufficiently diabolical to make use of them.”[25] William F. Jamieson, a nineteenth-century secularist, recounted scandals involving Protestant ministers, and echoed the criticism that had been made about Catholic clerical celibacy: “The pernicious notion that the imaginary influence called ‘divine grace’ could make the nature of men and women anything else but human nature, has been a prolific cause of crime in ‘holy circles’ because the barriers of self-restraint have been removed.”[26]

[1] Davies, “Curates,” 110.

[2] Lehman, Gender and Work, 20.

[3] Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 65.

[4] Carter, Another Part of the Twenties, 53-54.

[5] Higginson, “Saints and Their Bodies,” 7.

[6] Barbara Welter, “The Feminization of American Religion,” 22.

[7] Ibid., 42.

[8] Ibid., 43.

[9] Ibid., 89.

[10] Ibid., 19.

[11] See McLeod, “Anticlericalism in Later Victorian England,” 208-214.

[12] McLeod, Religion and Society, 154-155.

[13] Quoted in Reed, Glorious Battle, 211.

[14] “Parsons in Petticoats,” Punch, June 10, 1865, 239.

[15] Quoted in Welter, “The Feminization of American Religion,” 139.

[16] Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture, 97.

[17] Horowitz, Alma Mater, 43.

[18] Jamieson, The Clergy as a Source of Danger, 292.

[19] Ibid., 291.

[20] Quoted by Mathews, Religion in the Old South, 106.

[21] Cohen, “Ministerial Misdeeds,” 99.

[22] Ibid., 102.

[23] Holfield, God’s Ambassadors, 123.

[24] “Clerical Scandals,” Chicago Times, reprinted in The Latter-Day Saints Millennial Star 34 (1872): 557.

[25] Jamieson, Clergy as a Source of Danger, 289.

[26] Ibid., 190.

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McCarrick and a Clerical Homosexual Subculture

July 28, 2018 in clergy sex abuse scandal, homosexuality 3 Comments Tags: Andrew Sullivan, McCarrick, Shawn Winters

Cardinal McCarrick’s well-known proclivities have finally become public. The related issue of homosexuality in the priesthood has therefore received more attention.

Andrew Sullivan discusses McCarrick’s sexual abuse of both boys and adults, and concludes:

But one small note about this particular scandal: McCarrick was described by many as “Uncle Teddy.” But he had another nickname among his associates: “Blanche.” In that single appellation, you get a glimpse not of a church culture in which tortured homosexuals are struggling with love, intimacy, and celibacy, but one in which a fully developed subculture of camp was thriving, internally unapologetic, and psychologically warped. The cynicism and hypocrisy behind that kind of culture is a function of Catholic homophobia, of course. But it’s also reflective of a protective, insular, closeted clerical subculture in which sexual abuse was obviously able to flourish, and was clearly enabled. It has to end. And at some point, the core questions of homosexuality and celibacy in the priesthood need to be discussed openly, fully, in the plain light of day. I’ve been trying to enlarge that conversation for some time, along with many others. It’s now up to Pope Francis to untangle this knot that has long been strangling his church. There is no ducking it now.

Matthew, a commentator on Rod Dreher’s blog, recounts his experience:

I don’t know that celibacy per se leads to an increase in homosexuality or gay priests. But it certainly limits the pool. I don’t know if you read Andrew Sullivan’s column today but I feel that he hit the nail on the head. We also have to consider what the church (and society) said about homosexuality and same-sex desires throughout the 20th century. That has to be part of this discussion. Blaming gays without looking in the mirror won’t work. As for me personally, I am a very effeminate man. I cannot tell you how many times I was told growing up that I would be a good priest/minister because of how sensitive I am, and empathetic and that women loved me. Manliness (or some traits such as aggression) are not seen as ideals for ministry because they are not how “Jesus would have acted.” I think that is why this problem is so hard to fix.

One nephew who went to Harvard had a Catholic roommate who decided he was a homosexual. He agonized about coming out to his family but finally had the courage to do it. They were not shocked. “That’s OK, you can become a priest.” He fortunately had no inclination to follow that advice.

Michael Sean Winters at the National Catholic Reporter is having an anxiety attack that McCarrick may somehow taint the liberal bishops and cardinals whose promotion he championed, and that somehow gay priests will be blamed for homosexual abuse. There is in Winter’s mind obviously no connection between homosexuality and homosexual abuse.

There is much the church needs to do to confront the ecclesial cancer that is eating at its entrails. NCR’s editorial endorses some of those things, as do I. The McCarrick case especially points to the need for some process by which rumors are distinguished from allegations but also, somehow, looked into. But, as long as conservative writers are more interested in distorting the crisis for ideological purposes, we should beware what they counsel.

But even Sullivan says there needs to be an honest discussion about this.

The problem is not a scattering of homosexual priests who are sincere about their intention to remain continent even if they fail occasionally. The problem is a large clerical subculture of homosexuals who tolerate one another’s failures, even when it extends to boys and unwilling adults.

And beyond that is the problem that most men in the Western world regard religion as not really suitable for men, as somehow not being masculine. That is a complex question which I try to answer in my forthcoming book. But a priesthood marked heavily by homosexuality makes matters worse.

PS McCarrick has just resigned from the College of Cardinals: “You can’t fire me. I quit.”

PPS At least the letter of resignation purports to be from McCarrick. He has been moved to an unknown location away from prying reporters. Perhaps the Vatican fears that he might join the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and the songs would not be pleasing to all his bishop friends and enablers.

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Mount Calvary Music July 22, 2018

July 17, 2018 in hymns, Mount Calvary Church, Music No Comments

Mount Calvary

Eutaw Street and Madison Avenue

Baltimore, Maryand

A Parish of the Roman Catholic Ordinariate of

of The Chair of Saint Peter

Rev. Albert Scharbach, Pastor

Summer Schedule

9:00 AM Sung Mass

Trinity VIII

Common: Merbecke

Hymns

The King of love my shepherd is (ST COLUMBA) was written by Sir Henry Williams Baker (1821–1877). It is notable for its skillful meter, and its well-managed rhyme scheme of single and double rhymes, which control and shape the emotion very beautifully. Baker gave Anglican slant to Psalm 23, interpreting it as a psalm of love and care, but stressing these qualities as evidenced in the Eucharist. The spread table of verse 5 becomes the altar on which the elements are displayed, and the delight comes as the believer takes the ‘pure chalice’; the unction, or anointing (from 1 John 2: 27), while bestowing grace in a spiritual sense, also has suggestions of a rite. This verse spreads its meaning through the whole hymn, allowing the words of Psalm 23 to acquire an extra significance: so that the last verse suggests that the length of days of a person’s life can be spent, figuratively, ‘within thy house for ever’, in the service and under the influence of the church, and then later in heaven. The singer can reflect back, and conclude that the first verses suggest the ransomed soul, sought out in love and rescued from sin (Baker’s version of ‘he restoreth my soul’). The beautiful use of the shepherd metaphor in verse 3, as the shepherd carries the lamb gently on his shoulder, is an illustration of the tenderness of Baker’s work: these lines, were the last words spoken by Baker on his deathbed.

Here is the Cardiff Festival Choir.

I heard the voice of Jesus say (KINGSFOLD)was written by the Presbyterian Horatius Bonar (1808–1889). The first verse is based on Jesus’ words in Matthew 11:28-31, the second on his encounter with the Samaritan woman by the well (John 4:10-14) and the third on his famous saying ‘I am the light of the world’ (John 8:12). The hymn is very direct and personal and offers a great sense of consolation and assurance to the weary soul.

Here is the Choir of Manchester Cathedral.

There’s a wideness in God’s mercy (IN BABILONE) is by Fredrick Faber (1814–1863). Faber was born an Anglican and reared a strict Calvinist. After attending Oxford, he took orders as an Anglican priest and began his ministry as a rector. Influenced by his friend John Henry Newman (1801-1890) who converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism in 1845, Faber also converted to Catholicism that same year.

There are echoes of William Cowper in this hymn. Cowper (1731-1800), one of the hymn writers that influenced Faber during his Anglican youth, was an ardent Calvinist. His most famous hymn “God moves in a mysterious way” (which we sang last week) also has the sense that God’s sovereign power and understanding are far beyond human capabilities. Faber expresses this in stanza three: “For the love of God is broader than the measure of man’s mind.”

Cowper concludes his hymn with a similar idea. After exploring the immeasurable and incomprehensible nature of God’s acts, he concludes: “God is his own interpreter, and He will make it plain.”

The ultimate theme of Faber’s hymn is based on the premise and paradox that a sovereign God, unlike earthly rulers, demonstrates welcome, kindness, grace and mercy. All we need to do is have a simple faith that “rest[s] upon God’s word.”

Here is the parish choir of Our Lady of Refuge in Brooklyn. Here is an organ piece on the tune.

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Mount Calvary Music: June 24 , 2018

June 19, 2018 in hymns, Mount Calvary Church, Music No Comments

“His name is John”

Mount Calvary Church

Eutaw Street and Madison Avenue

Baltimore, Maryland

A Roman Catholic Parish

The Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter

The Nativity of John the Baptist

June 24, 2018

Summer Schedule

One mass at 9:00 AM

Organ Prelude

Hymns

On Jordan’s bank (WINCHESTER NEW)

Comfort ye, comfort ye (PSALM 42)

For all the saints (SINE NOMINE)

Organ Postlude

_______________________________

On Jordan’s Bank is a translation of a Latin hymn by Charles Coffin (1676—1749 Paris), who was a French teacher, writer, Jansenist, and Rector of the University of Paris. The translator, John Chandler (1806—1876) was an Anglican clergyman who translated hymns of the early church and hymns from the Paris Breviary of 1736, in which this hymn appeared.

The text sums up the message of John the Baptist, encapsulating each of the important themes of the Forerunner of Christ: announcement of grace, expectancy for the coming Messiah, and renewal in preparation for the coming of the King. The first stanza calls God’s people to give attention to the coming Christ. The second calls people to receive God’s presence and God’s cleansing from sin. The third is a profession of faith in Christ. The fourth is a prayer for God’s continued grace in our lives and in our world—a response to God’s redeeming Word. The fifth is a doxology of praise.

Here is the Southwell Minster Choir.

Comfort ye, comfort ye my people is a versification of Isaiah 40:1-5, the passage that opens the final large group of prophecies in Isaiah 40-66. Many of these prophecies express consolation and hope that Judah’s exile in Babylon is almost over. That is certainly the tone of 40: 1-5-words of comfort forecasting a new reign but also words that call for proper preparation–that is, repentance. Johannes Olearius (1611–1684) originally versified the passage in German in honor of Saint John the Baptist Day and published it in his Geistliche Singe-Kunst (1671). It was translated by Catherine Winkworth (1827–1878), who was the foremost translator of German hymns into English.

Here is a version with the tune from the Genevan Psalter, 42.

For all the saints was written by William Walsham Howe (1823—1897), Anglican Suffragan Bishop of London. After the great “Hall of Faith” passage in Hebrews 11, the writer to the Hebrews calls the saints who are still on earth to emulate those who have gone before: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us …” (Hebrews 12:1). What were the accomplishments of this “great cloud of witnesses?” They “… conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises, … quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness …” (Hebrews 11:33-34). But “Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword” (Hebrews 11:36-37). And such was the fate of John the Forerunner.

The stanzas of the hymn For All the Saints describe the common life of all the saints: the credit due to Jesus Christ for drawing us all to Him, the strength and guidance we continue to draw from Him, our joint communion in Christ, the continuing struggle against evil, and the coming day when the dead shall rise and we shall all worship together before God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. No matter what path each of us travels, we all will enjoy the same glorious eternal life.

Here the St Edmundsbury Cathedral Choir.

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Mount Calvary Music: Trinity II: June 10, 2018

June 7, 2018 in hymns, Mount Calvary Church, Music 1 Comment

God Confronts Adam and Eve

Mount Calvary Church

Eutaw Street and Madison Avenue

Baltimore, Maryland

A Roman Catholic Parish of

The Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter

Trinity II

June 17, 2018

8:00 AM Said Mass

10:00 AM Sung Mass

Note: Sunday June 17 begins summer schedule:

One mass at 9:00 AM

Organ Prelude

Ach Gott und Herr, Johann Gottfried Walther

Hymns

Praise to the Holiest in the height

There’s a wideness in God’s mercy

A mighty fortress is our God

Organ Postlude

Ach Gott, vom Himmel sieh darein, Johann Pachelbel

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Prelude

Ach Gott und Herr, Johann Gottfried Walther

Here is Carlos Cappellaro playing.

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Hymns

Praise to the Holiest in the height is an 1865 hymn by John Henry Newman (1801—1890). The hymn is a profound meditation on 1 Corinthians 15: 20-47, in which God in Christ, the second Adam, restores the world which had been lost by the sin of the first Adam. He does so by his Incarnation: his becoming human is an even higher gift than grace. In human form he undergoes the ‘double agony’ (the agony in the garden, and the suffering on the cross) which will teach and inspire, and demonstrate the power of ‘generous love’. The actions of the Incarnate God are appropriately enclosed within the ‘praise’ motif of the first and last verses.

Like the hymn Firmly I believe and truly, it forms part of The Dream of Gerontius, which describes the passage of the soul through death. It is sung by the angels as the soul approaches judgment. Jesus, who is true God and true man, undergoes for the human race the “double agony,” the one in the garden and the one on the cross. In his Discourse 16, Newman placed equal emphasis on Jesus’ Agony in the Garden and on His Crucifixion as central to understanding the work of redemption. In the garden Jesus felt the full horror and degradation of all the sins and guilt and sorrows of the world. Newman also intimates that we his brethren should learn from Him to do our share in bearing the burden of the sins of the world.

Here is a large congregation singing it.

There’s a wideness in God’s mercy was written by Frederick Faber (1814—1863). He was born an Anglican and reared a strict Calvinist. After attending Oxford, he took orders as an Anglican priest and began his ministry as a rector. Influenced by his friend John Henry Newman (1801—1890) who converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism in 1845, Faber also converted to Catholicism that same year.

Drawing inspiration from the hymns of John Newton, William Cowper and the Wesleys during his Anglican youth, he recognized that Roman Catholics lacked a tradition of more recent metrical hymnody in English. He took it upon himself to remedy this. By the time he died, he had contributed 150 hymns, all composed after his conversion to Roman Catholicism.

There are echoes of William Cowper in this hymn. Cowper (1731—1800), one of the hymn writers that influenced Faber during his Anglican youth, was an ardent Calvinist. His most famous hymn “God moves in a mysterious way” also has the sense that God’s sovereign power and understanding are far beyond human capabilities. Faber expresses this in stanza three: “For the love of God is broader than the measure of our mind.”

Here is a simple rendition.

A mighty fortress is our God is from the German translation of Psalm 46 by Martin Luther. Leading Catholic liturgical scholar and musician Edward Foley calls Martin Luther “a model pastoral musician… a proponent and composer of music from the people and for the people, as evidenced in his chorales.” Speaking specifically of Ein feste Burg—the German title for “A mighty fortress” – and after pages of careful analysis, Fr. Foley notes that this chorale “appears to be a paradigm of liturgical ‘people music.’” Luther’s “craft is affirmed by its ageless singability” — high praise from a Catholic scholar, indicating not only the quality of Luther’s work, but also its ecumenical popularity.

Here is Peterborough Cathedral, dedicated to the Christians of Iraq. The Arabic letter

stands for Nazarene, the Arabic name for Christians. Itis painted on their houses so that they can be recognized and martyred.

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Postlude

Ach Gott, vom Himmel sieh darein, Johann Pachelbel

Here is its played on a modern tracker organ, similar to ours.

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Mount Calvary: Corpus Christi June 3, 2018

May 31, 2018 in hymns, Mount Calvary Church, Music No Comments

Mount Calvary Church

Eutaw Street and Madison Avenue

Baltimore, Maryland

A parish

of the Roman Catholic Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter

Corpus Christi

8:00 AM Said Mass

10:00 AM Sung Mass

Prelude

Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele, S. Karg-Elert (1877-1933)

Hymns

Deck thyself, my soul, with gladness

O food of men wayfaring

Hymns in procession

O saving Victim

Humbly I adore Thee

Father, we thank thee who hast planted

Benediction

Now my tongue the mystery telling

Holy God we praise Thy name

Anthems

Tantum ergo, Eric Spengler

O sacrum convivium, Eric Spengler

Postlude

Le Banquet Céleste, Oliver Messiaen (1908-1992)

Common

Missa Orbis Factor

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Mount Calvary Music: Trinity Sunday, May 27, 2018

May 22, 2018 in hymns, Mount Calvary Church, Music No Comments

The Trinity, by St. Andrei Rublev

Mount Calvary Church

Eutaw Street and Madison Avenue

Baltimore, Maryland

A Roman Catholic Parish

The Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter

Rev. Albert Scharbach, Pastor

Trinity Sunday

8:00 Said Mass

10:00 Sung Mass

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Prelude

Wir glauben all’ an einen Gott, Johann Ludwig Krebs

Hymns

Come, thou almighty King (MOSCOW)

Come, risen Lord, and deign to be our guest (SURSUM CORDA)

Holy, holy, holy, Lord God almighty (NICAEA)

Anthems

Te Deum Patrem ingentem, Luca Marenzio

Benedicta sit Sancta Trinitas, Palestrina

Postlude

Allein Gott in der Höh’ , J.S. Bach

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PRELUDE

Wir glauben all’ an einen Gott, Johann Ludwig Krebs

Here is Ulrike Theresia Wegele on Gabler-Orgel of the Basilica in Weingarten.

Johann Ludwig Krebs (1713-1780) was a composer whose career spanned the end of the Baroque and beginning of the Classical era. In many respects, it typifies the problems many musicians had in coping with the drastic change of style this implies. Since he was an exceptionally skilled writer of counterpoint, he might have ended up with considerably wider fame if he had been born 20 years earlier.

From 1726 to 1735 Johann Ludwig Krebs was enrolled at the Thomasschule in Leipzig, where J.S. Bach was Kantor. While in Leipzig, J.L. Krebs was one of J.S. Bach’s private keyboard pupils, and from 1729 to 1731 he copied performing parts for various church cantatas by J.S. Bach. Bach held him in high regard, punning on both their names (Krebs [crab or crayfish] and Bach [brook or stream]) by saying “He is the only crayfish in my stream.” It is not surprising that many of his works, especially his organ compositions, are very much like those of J.S. Bach.

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HYMNS

Come, Thou almighty King (MOSCOW)

Come, thou almighty King by the prolific composer anonymous dates from before 1757, when it was published in a leaflet and bound into the 1757 edition of George Whitefield’s Collection of Hymns for Social Worship. The text appears to be patterned after the British national anthem, God Save the King.

At first, this hymn was sung to the same tune as “God Save the King.” On the American side of the Atlantic, we use the same tune for “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”

Supposedly during the American Revolution, while British troops were occupying New York City and appeared to be winning the war, a group of English soldiers went to church one Sunday morning in Long Island. The setting was tense. The occupiers demanded the congregation sing, “God Save The King” in honor of King George III. The organist was forced to begin playing the tune – but instead of singing “God Save the King,” the congregation broke out in “Come, Thou Almighty King.”

Here is a lively version, which you probably will never see at Mount Calvary, although it would get the attention of the children. Here are somewhat more subdued Presbyterians. Here is a Baptist megachurch version. Here are the Corban University Chamber Orchestra, Concert Band and Concert Choir in a somewhat Hollywood take on the hymn. Let us give thanks for Mount Calvary.

The tune is MOSCOW by Felice Giardini (1716-1796). He was a chorister in Milan Cathedral and was a pupil of Paldini before studying the violin under G. B. Somis. It was as a violinist that he became well known, both as an orchestral player and a soloist, particularly for his prowess as an embellisher of melody. After a period at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, he travelled throughout Germany and France before arriving in London where, according to Charles Burney, he made his first appearance in May 1750. His first successes were immense, but he later suffered severe financial losses with the Italian Opera whose management he had undertaken in 1756. Returning to the violin to make his living he played in orchestras all around Britain, notably at the Three Choirs Festival (1770-76), and in London he played for the Pantheon Concerts (1774-80) and again for the Italian Opera (1782-83). Facing greater competition in from figures such as Wilhelm Cramer and Salomon, Giardini was able nevertheless to preserve his position in London, but by 1784 he had grown embittered and quarrelsome. On leaving London in that year he lived in Naples, intending to retire from public music-making; but always restive in temperament, he came back to London in 1790 as a harpsichordist, where he promoted comic opera at the Haymarket. This was a failure, and so he took his troupe to Moscow where he died in 1796 in a state, apparently, of acute poverty and distress.

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Come, risen Lord, and deign to be our guest (SURSUM CORDA)

Come, risen Lord, and deign to be our guest, by George Wallace Briggs, celebrates the presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. It is unusual in its opening, which begins conventionally enough, inviting Christ to be present, and then skilfully rejects that first line (with ‘Nay’) in favour of a deeper and more significant meaning. Stanzas 1 and 4 allude to the part of the Emmaus story (Luke 24:28-35) in which the two disciples invite Jesus to be their guest, but then Jesus becomes their host. Stanza 2 focuses on our partaking of the sacrament and stanzas 3 and 4 on the oneness we share with all believers in this world and in heaven.

Here is the St. Andrew’s Choir.

Briggs was a Canon of Worcester Cathedral and a distinguished British hymn writers and hymnologist. Six of his hymns appear in the Episcopal Hymnal of 1940. He was the author of one of the prayers used at the time of the famous meeting of Churchill and Roosevelt on H.M.S. Prince of Wales in 1941 when the Atlantic Charter was framed.

The tune SURSUM CORDA is by Alfred Morton Smith (1879-1971). He was born in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, and studied at the University of Pennsylvania (B.S. 1901) and Philadelphia Divinity School (B.D. 1905; S.T.B. 1911). An Episcopalian, Smith was ordained a deacon (1905) and a priest (1906). After a short time in Philadelphia and Long Beach, California, he served at St. Matthias Church, Los Angeles, for ten years. He was a chaplain in the U.S. Army during World War I, returning to Philadelphia in 1919, where he spent the remainder of his career. He retired in 1955. In 1963, Smith moved to Drium Moir, Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, and in 1968 to Brigantine, New Jersey, where he remained until his death.

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Holy, holy, holy, Lord God almighty (NICAEA)

Holy, holy, holy, Lord God almighty is by Reginald Heber. This is the best known of Heber’s hymns, written for Trinity Sunday. It was first published in A Selection of Psalms and Hymns for the Parish Church of Banbury (Third Edition, 1826) and subsequently in Hymns written and adapted to the Weekly Church Service of the Year (1827), published after his death.

It is a reverent and faithful paraphrase of Revelation 4:8-11 and John’s vision of the unceasing worship in heaven: as such, it is a fine example of Heber’s care to avoid the charge of excessive subjectivity or cheap emotionalism in his hymns, and so to win support for the use of hymns in worship within the Anglican Church. Beginning with the thrice repeated ‘Holy’, it proceeds to find images for the Holy Trinity that attempt to capture its elusive magnificence. Particularly notable is ‘though the darkness hide Thee’, which expresses the awareness of God in mystical terms through the via negativa.

The hymn was a particular favourite of Tennyson’s, who told Bishop Welldon that he thought it the finest hymn ever written, considering the difficulty of the subject and the devotion and purity of its diction. It was sung at Tennyson’s funeral in Westminster Abbey.

Here are the Mormons singing it, with significant alterations in the text: Deity instead of Trinity. And here are the Presbyterians with the orthodox version.

Reginald Heber, D.D. (1783—1826). His father was rector of Malpas and squire of Hodnet, Cheshire. He was educated at Whitchurch Grammar School, privately at Neasden, and at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem ‘Palestine’ (later set to music by William Crotch) in 1803. He was elected a Fellow of All Souls College in 1805, and after travelling in several countries including Norway, Sweden and Russia, he was ordained (1807). He was vicar (and lord of the manor) of Hodnet, Shropshire, 1807-23, during which time he wrote his hymns. He was also Bampton Lecturer at Oxford and preacher at Lincoln’s Inn; editor of The Whole Works of Jeremy Taylor; and one of the original staff of the Quarterly Review as a friend and fellow-contributor with Scott* and Southey.

After some hesitation, he agreed to be consecrated Bishop of Calcutta in June 1823, arriving in India in October of that year. His see covered all of British India and he pursued a caring and energetic episcopate, sometimes hindered by fever but travelling widely through all parts of India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). He founded Bishop’s College, Calcutta, and ordained the first Indian to take Anglican orders. After confirming forty-two people at Trichinopoly, South India, he died suddenly of a seizure while bathing. He was seen as an heroic martyr in the cause of missionary work, and his example was an inspiration to many others in the 19th century.

His position as a highly-regarded figure helped to dispel the idea that hymns were associated with Methodists and extreme Evangelicals. His hymns are those of a poet of the Romantic period.

The tune NICAEA is by John Bacchus Dykes (1823-1876). A graduate of Cambridge, where he was very active in music, he became precentor at Durham, where he established choir discipline (the choir was reckoned to be one of the finest in England under his stewardship) and proper dress (which included cassocks and surplices). He then became vicar of St Oswald’s where he was involved in a number of controversies.

As a high churchman he embraced the ‘consubstantial’ view of the Eucharist (rather than the ‘transubstantiation’ of Wilberforce), a sacrament he promoted with alacrity at St Oswald’s; and he felt a kinship with Keble’s teachings on the early church (rather than Newman’s understanding of the doctrine of the church). He resisted attacks on the low-church evangelicals and dissenters but, during the controversy on the writings of Bishop Colenso, called unequivocally for his deposition. Perhaps the saddest episode of his ministry was in his last years at St Oswald’s when he entered into a dispute with the Bishop of Durham (Baring) in 1873. Forbidden to wear coloured stoles and to turn eastwards during the celebration of Communion, Dykes considered this an unreasonable attack on high churchmen and ritualistic practices in the Durham diocese. With numerous allies, he defied his Bishop, who refused to license further curates to St Oswald’s. An appeal to the Court of the Queen’s Bench was made in January 1874, but, not wishing to interfere in ecclesiastical matters, the judges dismissed Dykes’s case. He was much disappointed by this ruling and published an open letter to Baring, Eucharistic Truth and Ritual, in August 1874. About the same time, Alfred Curtis, rector of Mount Calvary, was engaged in a similar battle with Bishop Whittingham of Maryland.

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ANTHEMS

Te Deum Patrem ingenitum, Luca Marenzio

Te Deum Patrem ingenitum,
te Filium unigenitum,
te Spiritum Sanctum Paraclitum,
Sanctam et individuam Trinitatem,
toto corde et ore confitemur,
laudamus, atque benedicimus:
tibi gloria in saecula.

Thou, God the unbegotten Father,
thou, the only begotten Son,
and thou Holy Spirit, the Comforter,
the holy and undivided Trinity,
with all our heart and mouths we confess thee,
we praise thee, and bless thee;
to thee be glory for ever.

Here is the Progetto Musica.

Italian composer and singer Luca Marenzio (ca. 1553-1599) was considered by many Renaissance musicians to be the chief archetype of the expressive 16th-century Italian madrigal style. This anthem is from his Motectorum Pro Festis Totius Anni, 1585

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Benedicta sit sancta Trinitas, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525-1594)

Benedicta sit sancta Trinitas
atque indivisa Unitas
confitebimur ei quia
fecit nobiscum misericordiam suam. Alleluia.
Benedicamus Patrem et Filium
cum Sancto Spiritu.

Blessed be the holy Trinity,
and undivided Unity:
we will give glory to Him,
because He hath shown His mercy to us. Alleluia.
We bless the Father and the Son
with the Holy Spirit.

Here it is from Puebla, Mexico.

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Postlude

Allein Gott in der Höh’ , J. S. Bach

Here is Daniel Bruun, who looks to be about fifteen years old.

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The Hurt Feelings of a Cardinal

May 16, 2018 in Catholic Church, Chile, clericalism, sexual abuse 1 Comment

Francisco Javier Errázuriz Ossa

I have refrained from commenting on the sexual abuses cases in the Church, because there is little more to say that I have not already said.

But the Karadima case shows that the top hierarchy in the church still has brains rotted by clericalism.

From USNews:

The retired archbishop of Santiago is denying he covered-up for an abusive priest in Chile, but is acknowledging the priest’s popularity and ability to produce seminarians weighed on his decision-making.

Cardinal Javier Errázuriz wrote a letter May 10 to his fellow bishops denouncing the “defamation” he has been subject to and defending his handling of the case at the center of Chile’s sex abuse and cover-up scandal.

This is what Errázuriz did and didn’t do:

In Errázuriz’s letter, obtained by The Associated Press, the emeritus archbishop insisted that he was only following church law in waiting so long to launch an investigation into the Rev. Fernando Karadima. Only in 2009, some five years after he received the first complaint, did he start the process.

Five years before he did anything.

Errázuriz wrote that it had been “difficult” to reach the Vatican-required standard of being convinced that the accusations were “at least likely,” given Karadima’s popularity.

Errázuriz has previously admitted he didn’t believe the victims initially, and has subsequently called one of them a liar and “serpent.”

“They were accusing a priest with a great pastoral calling, whose preaching enriched more than 30 young people who were ordained priests and four priests who were consecrated bishops,” Errázuriz wrote. “They also accused a priest who inspired a youth association that propagated his fame.”

While sex abuse victims have long accused the Vatican and Catholic hierarchy of protecting predator priests — especially those who attract new vocations and donations — it’s rare for a bishop to freely admit that such considerations weighed on whether or not to believe an allegation.

In addition to the delay in starting an investigation, the survivors point to a letter Errázuriz wrote in 2006, well after receiving the first allegations, in which the archbishop reassured Karadima he wasn’t being “punished” by agreeing to leave his parish.

“You want to be a saint, and this is how saints do it,”Errázuriz wrote, giving Karadima talking points on how to spin his departure from his community as simply a retirement. Karadima would later be convicted and sentenced by the Vatican to a lifetime of penance and prayer for his sex crimes.

Another letter, from 2010, shows Errázuriz persuading a Karadima protege to explain that the hush money given to an accuser should be explained as a charitable donation, or “work of mercy,” so as to not arouse suspicion.

It’s clear there was never any crime or cover-up” on his part, he wrote. Errázuriz said he wanted to set the record straight — and had been urged by unnamed supporters to do so — because “I’ve been publicly defamed in recent weeks, branded as a delinquent, criminal” by Karadima’s victims.

Poor Cardinal Errázuriz — his feelings are hurt. His cover-up was not a cover-up because, well, because.

Unless Francis takes severe action against Errázuriz, all bishops will get the message (whatever Francis says) that the Vatican will tolerate cover-ups and lying – such crimes will not affect careers or promotions or cardinals’ hats.

UPDATE: From CNN

The soon-to-be (maybe) ex-bishops of Chile

Every bishop in Chile offered his resignation to Pope Francis on Friday, after a three-day emergency summit at the Vatican to discuss Chile’s sex abuse scandal.

In total, 31 active bishops and three retired bishops announced in a statement that they had offered to resign over the scandal and place the issue “in the hands of the Holy Father so that he might freely decide for each one of us.”

The simultaneous resignation of all the bishops in a single country is thought to be unprecedented in the modern history of the Catholic church.

Will Francis accept the resignations? or is this just a bit of theater? Stay tuned.

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Mount Calvary Music: Pentecost: May 20, 2018

May 15, 2018 in hymns, Mount Calvary Church, Music No Comments

Mount Calvary Church

Eutaw Street and Madison Avenue

Baltimore, Maryland

A Roman Catholic Parish of

The Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter

Anglican Use

Rev. Albert Scharbach, Pastor

Whitsunday

May 20, 2018

8 AM Said Mass

10 AM Sung Mass

Prelude

Komm, Gott Schöpfer, Pachelbel

Hymns

Hail thee, festival day (SALVA FESTA DIES)

Spirit divine, attend our prayers (GRÄFENBERG)

Hail this joyful day’s return (SONNE DER GERECHTIGKEIT)

Come Holy Ghost, Creator blest (MENDON)

Anthems

Confirma hoc, Deus, William Byrd

Factus est repente, William Byrd

Postlude

Fantasia super Komm Heiliger Geist (BWV 651), J. S. Bach

Common

Mass for Four Voices, William Byrd

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Prelude

Komm, Gott Schöpfer, Pachelbel

Here on a baroque organ. Here is Fabien Desseaux on the organ of Saint-Ouen in Rouen.

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Hymns

Hail thee, festival day (SALVA FESTA DIES)

Hail thee, Festival Day, Venantius Fortunatus (ca.540-early 7th century), translated by George Gabriel Scott Gillett (1873-1948).

The origins of this hymn are in a poem, or verse epistle, by Fortunatus, addressed to Felix, Bishop of Nantes (d. 582), beginning ‘Tempora florigero rutilant distincta sereno’. It is a poem of nature in spring welcoming the risen Saviour. A section of the poem begins

Salve festa dies toto venerabilis aevo
qua Deus infernum vicit et astra tenet.

Hail, Festival day, worthy of veneration in every age,
on which God conquered hell and secured the skies.

Here is the Pentecost section at St. John’s Detroit.

George Gabriel Scott Gillett (1873-1948) was educated at Westminster School and Keble College, Oxford. He took Holy Orders (deacon 1898, priest, 1899), and held curacies at London and Brighton. He then became domestic chaplain to Earl Beauchamp and Viscount Halifax, and from 1913 to 1925 worked in South Africa, chiefly in Pretoria and Johannesburg. On return to England, he served as Education Secretary to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Gillett was closely associated with the English Hymnal (1906), and was one of those thanked in the Preface for ‘writing or translating hymns specially for this Hymnal’ (p.vii). He was responsible for the Whit-Sunday text of ‘Hail thee, Festival Day’, translated from the Latin ‘Salve, festa dies’*, in which the verse part begins ‘Lo! In the likeness of fire, on them that await his appearing’.

Ralph Vaughan Williams composed SALVE FESTA DIES as a setting for Venantius Fortunatus’s famous text “Hail Thee, Festival Day.” The tune, whose title comes from the opening words of that text, was published in The English Hymnal of 1906. Like SINE NOMINE (505), this tune is vigorous and jubilant with a rhythmic energy characteristic of Vaughan Williams’s hymn tunes.

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Spirit divine, attend our prayers (GRÄFENBERG)

Spirit divine, attend our prayers was written by Andrew Reed (1787-1862), who wrote to as a prayer for revival in the East End of London.

1 Spirit divine, attend our prayers,
and make this house thy home;
descend with all thy gracious powers;
O come, great Spirit, come!

2 Come as the light: to us reveal
our emptiness and woe;
and lead us in those paths of life
where all the righteous go.

3 Come as the fire, and purge our hearts
like sacrificial flame;
let our whole soul an offering be
to our Redeemer’s name.

4 Come as the Dove, and spread thy wings,
the wings of perfect love;
and let thy church on earth become
blest as the church above.

5 Spirit divine, attend our prayers;
make a lost world thy home;
descend with all thy gracious powers;
O come, great Spirit, come!

Here is the tune.

Andrew Reed (1787-1862) was the son of a watchmaker, who was also a lay preacher. He became a watchmaker himself, but sold his tools and entered Hackney College in 1807 to train for the Congregational ministry. He was also an energetic philanthropist, one of the founders of several institutions in and near London: the London Orphan Asylum, the Asylum for Fatherless Children, the Infant Orphan Asylum, the Asylum for Idiots, and the Royal Hospital for Incurables.

GRÄFENBERG was composed by Johann Crüger as a setting for Paul Gerhardt’s “Nun danket all’ und bringet Ehr.” GRÄFENBERG was first published in the 1647 edition of Crüger’s Praxis Pietatis Melica. The tune is arbitrarily named after a water-cure spa in Silesia, Austria, which became famous in the 1820s. Crüger (1598-1662) attended the schools at Guben, Sorau and Breslau, the Jesuit College at Olmütz, and the Poets’ school at Regensburg.

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Hail this joyful day’s return (SONNE DER GERECHTIGKEIT)

Hail this joyful day’s return is from a Latin hymn for Lauds at Pentecost, doubtfully ascribed to Hillary of Potiers, and translated by Robert Campbell. He preserved the meter of the Latin poem.

Hail, this joyful day’s return;
Hail, the pentecostal morn.
Morn when our ascended head,
On his Church his Spirit shed. Alleluia.

Like the golden tongues of flame,
On the twelve the Spirit came ;
Tongues, that earth may hear their call;
Fire, that love may burn in all. Alleluia.

Thou who didst our fathers guide.
With their children still abide;
Grant us pardon, grant us peace,
Till our earthly wanderings cease. Alleluia.

To the Father praises sing,
Praise to Christ our risen king,
Praise to thee, the Lord of love.
Blessed Spirit, holy Dove. Alleluia.

Sung at the Matthäuskirche in Munich here is the hymn with the German text. Here is the Osnabrücker Jugendchor at the Dom St. Petrus zu Osnabrück. Here is a spirited take on the tune by Kantor Ralph Leinen.

Here is the Latin:

Beata nobis gaudia
Anni reduxit orbita,
Cum Spiritus paraclitus
Illapsus est Apostolis.

Ignis vibrante lumine
Linguæ figuram detulit,
Verbis ut essent proflui,
Et caritate fervidi.

Linguis loquuntur omnium,
Turbæ pavent Gentilium:
Musto madere deputant,
Quos spiritus repleverat.

Parata sunt hæc mystice,
Paschæ peracto tempore,
Sacro dierum circulo,
Quo lege fit remissio.

Te nunc Deus piissime
Vultu precamur cernuo,
Illapsa nobis cœlitus
Largire dona Spiritus.

Dudum sacrata pectora
Tua replesti gratia:
Dimitte nostra crimina,
Et da quieta tempora.

Deo Patri sit gloria,
Sit laus Patri cum Filio,
Sancto simul Paraclito
Nobisque mittat Filius
Carisma Sancti Spiritus.
Amen.

Here is the Gregorian.

Robert Campbell (1814-1868) was educated at the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh and became a lawyer. He began life as a member of the Church of Scotland, but became an Episcopalian and later (1852) a Roman Catholic.

SONNE DER GERECHTIGKEIT was originally the tune to a fifteenth-century folk song, “Der reich Mann war geritten aus,” and it was adopted by the Bohemian Brethren for 1566 hymnal, Kirchengeseng. The tune is thus a contrafactum, changed from the folk/court use to church use. The title is the German incipit for the chorale most commonly associated with the tune. SONNE DER GERECHTIGKEIT is a bright tune characterized by a rising initial motif and forceful rhythms.

The words of the folk song are of dubious morality, a story about what happened when the rich man went riding and what his wife gave to the beggar while her husband was gone.

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Come Holy Ghost, Creator blest (MENDON)

Come Holy Ghost is a translation of the Veni Creator Spiritus.

1 Come, Holy Ghost, Creator blest,
Vouchsafe within our souls to rest;
Come with Thy grace and heav’nly aid
And fill the hearts which Thou hast made.

2 To Thee, the Comforter, we cry,
To Thee, the Gift of God Most High,
The Fount of life, the Fire of love,
The soul’s Anointing from above.

3 The sev’n-fold gifts of grace are Thine,
O Finger of the Hand Divine;
True Promise of the Father Thou,
Who dost the tongue with speech endow.

4 Thy light to every thought impart
And shed Thy love in every heart;
The weakness of our mortal state
With deathless might invigorate.

5 Drive far away our wily Foe,
And Thine abiding peace bestow;
If Thou be our protecting Guide,
No evil can our steps betide.

6 Make Thou to us the Father known;
Teach us the eternal Son to own
And Thee, whose name we ever bless,
Of both the Spirit, to confess.

7 Praise we the Father and the Son
And Holy Spirit, with them One;
And may the Son on us bestow
The gifts that from the Spirit flow!

Rabanus Maurus Magnentius (c. 780 – 4 February 856), also known as Hrabanus or Rhabanus, was a Frankish Benedictine monk and theologian who became archbishop of Mainz in Germany. He was the author of the encyclopaedia De rerum naturis (“On the Natures of Things”). He also wrote treatises on education and grammar and commentaries on the Bible. He was one of the most prominent teachers and writers of the Carolingian age, and was called “Praeceptor Germaniae,” or “the teacher of Germany.” In the most recent edition of the Roman Martyrology (Martyrologium Romanum, 2004, pp. 133), his feast is given as February 4th and he is qualified as a Saint (‘sanctus’).

Rabanus composed a number of hymns, the most famous of which is the Veni Creator Spiritus. This is a hymn to the Holy Spirit often sung at Pentecost and at ordinations. It is known in English through many translations, including Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire; Come, Holy Ghost, Creator blest; and Creator Spirit, by whose aid. Veni Creator Spiritus was used by Gustav Mahler as the first chorale of his eighth symphony.

MENDON is a traditional German tune.

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Anthems

Confirma hoc, Deus, William Byrd

Confirma hoc Deus, quod operatus es in nobis; a templo tuo quod est in Jerusalem, tibi offerent Reges munera. Alleluia.

Stablish the thing, O God, that thou hast wrought in us, for thy temple’s sake at Jerusalem: so shall kings bring presents unto thee. Alleluia.

Even in times of turmoil, the Church needs music. The seventeenth-century English composer William Byrd realized this, and published his Gradualia over several years from 1605. It contained chants for the Proper of the Mass for almost the entire church year, and comprises a considerable proportion of Byrd’s motet output.

Confirma hoc Deus is the offertory from Whitsun. This is not a long work – the Gradualia contains several miniature motets. However, despite its size, Confirma hoc Deus does not lack artistry. The writing is particularly smooth and the structure sound. The musical phrase at “quod est in Hierusalem” forms the basis for a set of imitative passages. The passage before the terminal Alleluia is particularly inventive.

Here is the Gloriana Ensemble. A different take by the Quink Vocal Ensemble.

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Factus est repente, William Byrd

Factus est repente de coelo sonus, tamquam advenientis spiritus vehementis ubi erant sedentes, alleluia; et repleti sunt omnes Spiritu Sancto, loquentes magnalia Dei, alleluia, alleluia.

Suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a mighty wind coming where they were sitting, alleluia; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, speaking the wonderful works of God, alleluia, alleluia.

Factus est repente is the Communion verse for Pentecost.

Here is the Merbecke choir.

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Postlude

Fantasia super Komm Heiliger Geist (BWV 651), J. S. Bach

Here is Robert McCormack at the organ.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s great “Eighteen” (or Leipzig) chorale preludes (based upon hymns of the day) were compiled during the latter years of his life, when he was at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. These works had their origin earlier in his career, and there is a great diversity of style and compositional technique found in the set. A grander opening to this compilation one can scarcely imagine. The melody, or cantus firmus, of Komm, Heiliger Geist (Come, Holy Ghost, a hymn for Pentecost, itself based upon the Gregorian Veni Creator Spiritus) is heard in the pedal throughout the work, with rapid figurations in the manuals. Bach frequently used text painting devices to convey meaning, and some have said the lively manual parts are meant to convey the rushing of the Holy Spirit. It is played upon the organ’s “plenum” or full organ, in this case principals and mixtures, with a reed stop only in the pedal to highlight the melody. Bach was greatly influenced by his predecessors, and his perfection of the form known as a cantus firmus chorale may have been inspired by Johann Pachelbel, who frequently employed the form in his works.

The Schoenstein organ at St. Paul’s, K Street, is best known for its mastery in accompanying an Anglican service, with orchestral colors in abundance, yet it shows here its versatility in the clear and bright plenum ideal for such a piece from the culmination of the Baroque period. One hopes that Bach himself would marvel at the rich beauty of the sound (if surprised by some of the organ’s more Romantic attributes and equal temperament tuning!).

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Common

Mass for Four Voices, William Byrd

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The Ascension at Cambridge

May 13, 2018 in Music No Comments

Ascension Thursday has been transferred to Sunday in many dioceses. (Frequent question asked at Catholic rectories: “What time is Midnight Mass this year.”)

The Anglicans seems to stick to Thursday. Beginning in 1902, the choir at St. John’s at Cambridge began the custom of singing from the top of the tower. Here is the chorister Benedict Flinn explaining the tradition.

And here is the choir singing at noon, Ascension Thursday 2018.

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Mount Calvary Music May 13, 2018

May 9, 2018 in hymns, Mount Calvary Church, Music No Comments

Ascension, Rabbula Gospels, 6th c.

Mount Calvary Church

Eutaw Street and Madison Avenue

Baltimore, Maryland

A Roman Catholic Parish of

The Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter

Anglican Use

Rev. Albert Scharbach, Pastor

Easter VII

May 13, 2018

8 AM Said Mass

10 AM Sung Mass

Prelude

Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir, Johann Pachelbel (1653-1706)

Hymns

Love’s redeeming work is done (SAVANNAH)

Let all mortal flesh keep silence (PICARDY)

The head that once was crowned with thorns (ST MAGNUS)

Anthems

Non vos relinquam orphanos, William Byrd

O Rex gloriae, William Byrd

Postlude

Christ lag in Todesbanden, Samuel Scheidt

Common

Missa de S. Maria Magdelena, Healy Willan

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Prelude

Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir, Johann Pachelbel

On the harmonium.

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Hymns

Love’s redeeming work is done (SAVANNAH)

Love’s redeeming work is done by Charles Wesley is a cento composed of stanxas ii.-v.,x., of his hymn “Christ the Lord is risen to-day.” Books originating in the Church of England tradition use the tune SAVANNAH, first found in England in John Wesley’s A Collection of Tunes, Set to Music, as they are commonly sung at the Foundery (1742), with the name HERNHUTH, which indicates its origins in 18th-century Moravian books. The name SAVANNAH comes from the Moravian settlement at Savannah, Georgia. Wesley accompanied the Moravians on their voyage from England to Savannah and was deeply impressed by their calm and faith during a storm that panicked the sailors.

1 Love’s redeeming work is done;
fought the fight, the battle won:
lo, our Sun’s eclipse is o’er,
lo, he sets in blood no more.
2 Vain the stone, the watch, the seal;
Christ has burst the gates of hell;
death in vain forbids his rise;
Christ has opened paradise.
3 Lives again our glorious King;
where, O death, is now thy sting?
dying once, he all doth save;
where thy victory, O grave?
4 Soar we now where Christ has led,
following our exalted Head;
made like him, like him we rise;
ours the cross, the grave, the skies.
5 Hail the Lord of earth and heaven!
Praise to thee by both be given:
thee we greet triumphant now;
hail, the Resurrection Thou!

Here is the St Edmundsbury Cathedral Choir. Here is a 1970 version from Guilford Cathedral.

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Let all mortal flesh keep silence (PICARDY)

Let all mortal flesh keep silence is a paraphrase by James Moultrie (1829—1885) of the Cherubic Hymn from the Liturgy of St. James of the Eastern Church. The hymn dates to the third century. It is chanted as the bread and wine are carried to the altar. The Greek text reads: “Let all mortal flesh keep silent, and stand with fear and trembling, and in itself consider nothing of earth; for the King of kings and Lord of lords cometh forth to be sacrificed, and given as food to the believers; and there go before Him the choirs of Angels, with every dominion and power, the many-eyed Cherubim and the six-winged Seraphim, covering their faces, and crying out the hymn: Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.” Here is the hymn in the 4th Plagal. Here is the Great Entrance.

Let all mortal flesh keep silence,
And with fear and trembling stand;
Ponder nothing earthly minded,
For with blessing in His hand,
Christ our God to earth descendeth,
Our full homage to demand.

King of kings, yet born of Mary,
As of old on earth He stood,
Lord of lords, in human vesture,
In the body and the blood;
He will give to all the faithful
His own self for heavenly food.

Rank on rank the host of heaven
Spreads its vanguard on the way,
As the Light of light descendeth
From the realms of endless day,
That the powers of hell may vanish
As the darkness clears away.

At His feet the six wingèd seraph,
Cherubim with sleepless eye,
Veil their faces to the presence,
As with ceaseless voice they cry:
Alleluia, Alleluia
Alleluia, Lord Most High

Her is the King’s College, Cambridge, choir.

Gerald Moultrie was a Victorian public schoolmaster and Anglican hymnographer born on September 16, 1829, at Rugby Rectory, Warwickshire, England. He died on April 25, 1885, Southleigh, England.

PICARDY is a hymn tune, based on a French carol; it is in a minor key and its meter is 8.7.8.7.8.7. Its name comes from the province of France from where it is thought to originate. The tune dates back at least to the 17th century, and was originally used for the folk song “Jésus-Christ s’habille en pauvre”. First published in the 1848 collection Chansons populaires des provinces de France, “Picardy” was most famously arranged by Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1906 for the hymn Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence.

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The head that once was crowned with thorns (ST MAGNUS)

The Head that once was crowned with thorns was written by Thomas Kelly (1769-1854), who based this hymn on Hebrews 2: 9-10 which speaks of Christ’s glory and the universal message of grace that is available because of Christ’s suffering: “But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor; that he by the grace of God should taste death for every man. For it became him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings.”

Kelly employs the poetic device of hypotyposis – a vivid description of a scene or events in words – that provides the singer with a glimpse of the splendor of heaven, which is contrasted with the suffering of the cross and the suffering of all who follow Christ on earth.

1 The head that once was crowned with thorns
is crowned with glory now:
a royal diadem adorns
the mighty Victor’s brow.

2 The highest place that heaven affords
is his, is his by right,
the King of kings, and Lord of lords,
and heaven’s eternal Light;

3 The joy of all who dwell above,
the joy of all below,
to whom he manifests his love,
and grants his name to know.

4 To them the cross, with all its shame,
with all its grace, is given:
their name, an everlasting name,
their joy, the joy of heaven.

5 They suffer with their Lord below,
they reign with him above;
their profit and their joy to know
the mystery of his love.

6 The cross he bore is life and health,
though shame and death to him;
his people’s hope, his people’s wealth,
their everlasting theme.

Here is the Choir of the King’s School.

Thomas Kelly

Son of a judge, Kelly attended Trinity College (BA 1789) and planned to be a lawyer. After converting to Christ, though, his career plans changed to the ministry. He became an Anglican priest in 1792, but eventually became one of the famous dissenting ministers. He wrote over 760 hymns. Miller’s Singers of the Church (1869) says of him:

Mr. Kelly was a man of great and varied learning, skilled in the Oriental tongues, and an excellent Bible critic. He was possessed also of musical talent, and composed and published a work that was received with favour, consisting of music adapted to every form of metre in his hymn-book. Naturally of an amiable disposition and thorough in his Christian piety, Mr. Kelly became the friend of good men, and the advocate of every worthy, benevolent, and religious cause. He was admired alike for his zeal and his humility; and his liberality found ample scope in Ireland, especially during the year of famine.

Jeremiah Clarke

The tune ST MAGNUS first appeared in Henry Playford’s Divine Companion(1707 ed.) as an anonymous tune with soprano and bass parts. The tune was later credited to Jeremiah Clark (b. London, England, c. 1670; d. London, 1707), who was a chorister in the Chapel Royal and sang at the coronation of James II in 1685. Later he served as organist in Winchester College, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the Chapel Royal. He shot himself to death in a fit of depression, apparently because of an unhappy romance. Supported by Queen Anne, Clark was a prominent composer in his day, writing songs for the stage as well as anthems, psalm tunes, and harpsichord works.
Although ST. MAGNUS was originally used as a setting for Psalm 117, it has been associated with this text since they were combined in the 1868 Appendix to Hymns Ancient and Modern. The tune is named for the Church of St. Magnus the Martyr, built by Christopher Wren in 1676 on Lower Thames Street near the old London Bridge, England.

ST. MAGNUS consists of two long lines, each of which has its own sense of climax. The octave leap in the final phrase has a stunning effect, like a vault in a Gothic cathedral.

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Anthems

Non vos relinquam orphanos, William Byrd (1540-1623)

Non vos relinquam orphanos. Alleluia. Vado, et venio ad vos. Alleluia. Et gaudebit, cor vestrum. Alleluia.

I will not leave you comfortless. Alleluia. I go, and I will come to you. Alleluia. And your heart shall rejoice. Alleluia.

Here are the Cambridge Singers.

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O Rex gloriae, William Byrd (1540-1623)

O Rex gloriae, Domine virtutum, qui triumphator hodie super omnes coelos ascendisti; ne derelinquas nos orphanos, sed mitte promissum Patris in nos, spiritum veritatis. Alleluia.

O King of glory, Lord of all power, who ascended to heaven on this day triumphant over all; do not leave us as orphans, but send us the Father’s promise, the spirit of truth. Alleluia.

Here are the New Cambridge Singers.

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Postlude

Christ lag in Todesbanden, Samuel Scheidt (1587-1634)

Here on the organ.

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Mount Calvary Music: Ascension Thursday May 10, 2018

May 5, 2018 in hymns, Mount Calvary Church, Music No Comments

Mount Calvary Church

Eutaw Street and Madison Avenue

Baltimore, Maryland

A Roman Catholic Parish of

The Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter

Anglican Use

Rev. Albert Scharbach, Pastor

Ascension Thursday

May 10, 2018

7 PM Sung Mass

Rev. Edward V. Meeks

Christ the King Church, Towson

Celebrant and Homilist

Prelude

Prière du Christ montant vers son Père from L’Ascension, Olivier Messiaen

Hymns

Hail the day that sees Him rise (LLANFAIR)

O King most high, of earth and sky (ACH GOTT UND HERR)

See the conqueror mounts in triumph (IN BABILONE)

Anthems

Ascendit Deus, Peter Philips

Ascendit Deus in iubilatione, Henry Purcell

Common

Missa Brevis, Palestrina

Postlude

Glorificamus, John Redford

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Prelude

Prière du Christ montant vers son Père from L’Ascension, Olivier Messiaen

Although it may well be better known in its version for organ, Olivier Messiaen’s L’Ascension of 1932-1933 is the most famous of his early orchestral scores (early in this case meaning pre-Turangalîla-symphonie). Messiaen had in 1931 been appointed organist at L’Église de la Trinité, and by 1935 an organ version of L’Ascension had been finished; in truth, the work’s conception seems to lie midway between the two media: one passage may seem wholly orchestral in design and execution (even in the organ version), while another may have trickled from Messiaen’s fingers as he sat at his beloved La Trinité organ. That is not to say that the orchestral version of the work is anything but masterfully and magnificently scored, only to say that, try though he might, at that point in his life Messiaen could not wholly disassociate his music from the organ-bench upon which so much of it was first played. One major difference between the two versions must be noted: the third movement of the organ version is a completely different piece of music than the third movement of the orchestral version.

Here is Gaston Litaize on the Grandes Orgues de l’Eglise Saint Francois-Xavier in Paris. Here is the London Symphony under Leopold Stokowski.

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Hymns

Hail the day that sees Him rise (LLANFAIR)

“Hail the Day that Sees Him Rise” by Charles Wesley (1707-1788) was published in 1739 in Hymns and Sacred Poems under the title “Hymn for Ascension-Day.” The original poem comprised 10 stanzas. The stanzas in red are not used in the 1940 Hymnal

1. Hail the day that sees Him rise, Alleluia!
To His throne above the skies, Alleluia!
Christ, awhile to mortals given, Alleluia!
Reascends His native heaven, Alleluia!

2. There the glorious triumph waits, Alleluia!
Lift your heads, eternal gates, Alleluia!
Christ hath conquered death and sin, Alleluia!
Take the King of glory in, Alleluia!

3. Circled round with angel powers, Alleluia!
Their triumphant Lord, and ours, Alleluia!
Conqueror over death and sin, Alleluia!
Take the King of glory in! Alleluia!

4. Him though highest Heav’n receives, Alleluia!
Still He loves the earth He leaves, Alleluia!
Though returning to His throne, Alleluia!
Still He calls mankind His own, Alleluia!

5. See! He lifts His hands above, Alleluia!
See! He shows the prints of love, Alleluia!
Hark! His gracious lips bestow, Alleluia!
Blessings on His church below, Alleluia!

6. Still for us His death He pleads, Alleluia!
Prevalent He intercedes, Alleluia!
Near Himself prepares our place, Alleluia!
Harbinger of human race, Alleluia!

7. Master, (will we ever say), Alleluia!
Taken from our head to day, Alleluia!
See Thy faithful servants, see, Alleluia!
Ever gazing up to Thee, Alleluia!

8. Grant, though parted from our sight, Alleluia!
Far above yon azure height, Alleluia!
Grant our hearts may thither rise, Alleluia!
Seeking Thee beyond the skies, Alleluia!

9. Ever upward let us move, Alleluia!
Wafted on the wings of love, Alleluia!
Looking when our Lord shall come, Alleluia!
Longing, gasping after home, Alleluia!

10. There we shall with Thee remain, Alleluia!
Partners of Thy endless reign, Alleluia!
There Thy face unclouded see, Alleluia!
Find our heaven of heavens in Thee, Alleluia!

This stanza is used as the conclusion in the 1940 Hymnal:

Lord beyond our mortal sight, Alleluia!

Raise our hearts to reach thy height, Alleluia!

There thy face unclouded see, alleluia!

Find our heaven of heaven in thee, alleluia!

Her is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and full orchestra.

The first and second stanzas employ apostrophe, a rhetorical device in which the poet addresses an absent or inanimate object. The first addresses the day of Jesus’ ascension, the second the gates of heaven which accept Christ in glory.

The third emphasizes the true humanity of Jesus and his continued investment in the lives of those on earth, in comparison to his heavenly inheritance described in the previous lines. He is the continuous intercessor for mankind, imploring his assistance in the efforts of all to follow him in the ascent to the presence of God, leading finally to the beatific vision and eternal union with God.

Some minor textual alterations were made by Thomas Cotterill for the 1820 publication, Selection of Psalms and Hymns. The addition of “Alleluia!” at the end of each line was instigated by E.G. White for the 1852 publication of Hymns and Introits.

The next significant textual change, however, is less justified. In the first stanza, the original “Ravish’d from our wishful Eyes” is altered to “To his throne above the skies,” avoiding the pejorative or scatological implications of “ravish’d.” While this goal is met, it is at grave disservice to the evocative tone of the original text. Similarly, in the second stanza, the word “pompous” is replaced with “glorious,” again avoiding a negative meaning, but again spoiling the true meaning of the text.

The tune now associated with this text is Robert Williams’ melody LLANFAIR, which first appeared in John Parry’s collection, Peroriaeth Hyfryd (Sweet Music), in 1837. The tune name is an anglicized form of the author’s hometown in Wales, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllandtysiliogogogoch (it’s pronounced the way it is spelled; in English it means: church of St. Mary in the hollow of white hazel near the rapid whirlpool of the Church of St. Tysillio by the red cave). The first pairing of this text and tune is found in The English Hymnal of 1906. The harmonization found in the contemporary UM Hymnal was prepared in 1927 by David Evans. The 1941 Lutheran Hymnal presents the text to the 12th-century French tune ORIENTIS PARTIBUS and Hymns Ancient and Modern presents two alternative tunes by Wm. H. Monk and S.H. Nicholson.

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O King most high, of earth and sky (ACH GOTT UND HERR)

O King most high of earth and sky is an anonymous hymn from the Cluniac Breviary, 1686: Supreme Rector coelitum. It was translated from Latin to English by William J. Blew.

1 O King most high of earth and sky
On prostrate death thou treadest,
And with thy blood dost mark the road
Whereby to heaven thou leadest.
2 O Christ, behold thine orphaned fold,
Which thou hast borne with anguish,
Steeped in the tide from thy rent side;
O leave us not to languish!
3 The glorious gain of all thy pain
Henceforth dost thou inherit;
Now comes the hour–then gently shower
On us thy promised Spirit!

Here is the Wakefield Cathedral Choir.

Here is the Latin hymn:

Supreme rector coelitum/ qui morta devicta potens / cruore signatum tuo / ad astra pandis semitam!

Alto benignus e Throno / et patris almi dextera / quos hic relinquis orphanos / non intrei desinas.

Parta tuis laboribus / iam tu potiris gloria. Nunc hora: / promissum Patris / Nunc mittis nobis Spiritum.

William John Blew (1808-1894) born in St. James’s, Westminster. He was educated with John Henry Newman at Great Ealing School. He graduated Wadham College, Oxford, B.A. in 1830, and M.A. 1832. On taking Holy Orders, Blew was Curate of Nuthurst and Cocking, and St. Annes, Westminster, and for a time Incumbent of St. John’s next Gravesend. Besides translation from Homer (Iliad) and Aeschylus (Agamemnon the King), and works in the Book of Common Prayer, including a paraphrase on a translation of the same in Latin, he edited the Breviarium Aberdonense 1854, and published a pamphlet on Hymns and Hymn Books, 1858; and (with Dr. H.J. Gauntlett) the Church Hymn and Tune Book, 1852, 2nd. ed. 1855.

ACH GOTT UND HERR was published in As Hymnodus Sacer, edited by Christianus Galler (Leipzig, Germany: 1625); it was adapted & harmonized by J. S. Bach.

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See the conqueror mounts in triumph (IN BABILONE)

See the conqueror mounts in triumph was written Christopher Wordsworth and was published in his Holy Year (1862) in ten stanzas. The text views the ascending Lord being sung to by angels at heaven’s gates, recalls Christ’s suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension, and looks forward to our reign with Christ in glory. The text emphasizes not only the event of the Ascension but also its meaning for us: in Christ’s ascension, “we by faith can see” our own.

1. See the Conqueror mounts in triumph;
see the King in royal state,
riding on the clouds, his chariot,
to his heavenly palace gate!
Hark! the choirs of angel voices
joyful alleluias sing,
and the portals high are lifted
to receive their heavenly King.

2. He who on the cross did suffer,
he who from the grave arose,
he has vanquished sin and Satan;
he by death has spoiled his foes.
While he lifts his hands in blessing,
he is parted from his friends;
while their eager eyes behold him,
he upon the clouds ascends.

3. Thou has raised our human nature
on the clouds to God’s right hand;
there we sit in heavenly places,
there with thee in glory stand.
Jesus reigns, adored by angels;
Man with God is on the throne;
mighty Lord, in thine ascension
we by faith behold our own.

This seems to be the original version:

See, the conqueror mounts in triumph;
see the king in royal state,
Riding on the clouds, His chariot,
to His heavenly palace gate.
Hark! the choirs of angel voices
joyful alleluias sing,
And the portals high are lifted
to receive their heavenly king.

2. Who is this that comes in glory,
with the trump of jubilee?
Lord of battles, God of armies,
He has gained the victory.
He Who on the cross did suffer,
He who from the grave arose,
He has vanquished sin and Satan,
He by death has spoiled His foes.

3. While He lifts His hands in blessing,
He is parted from His friends
While their eager eyes behold Him,
He upon the clouds ascends;
He Who walked with God and pleased Him,
preaching truth and doom to come,
He, our Enoch, is translated
to His everlasting home.

4. Now our heavenly Aaron enters,
with His blood, within the veil;
Joshua now is come to Canaan,
and the kings before Him quail;
Now He plants the tribes of Israel
in their promised resting place;
Now our great Elijah offers
double portion of His grace.

5. He has raised our human nature
in the clouds to God’s right hand;
There we sit in heavenly places,
there with Him in glory stand:
Jesus reigns, adored by angels;
man with God is on the throne;
Mighty Lord, in Thine ascension
we by faith behold our own.

6. Holy Ghost, illuminator,
shed Thy beams upon our eyes,
Help us to look up with Stephen,
and to see beyond the skies,
Where the Son of Man in glory
standing is at God’s right hand,
Beckoning on His martyr army,
succoring His faithful band.

7. See Him, who is gone before us,
heavenly mansions to prepare,
See Him, who is ever pleading
for us with prevailing prayer,
See Him, who with sound of trumpet,
and with His angelic train,
Summoning the world to judgment,
on the clouds will come again.

8. Raise us up from earth to Heaven,
give us wings of faith and love,
Gales of holy aspirations
wafting us to realms above;
That, with hearts and minds uplifted,
we with Christ our Lord may dwell,
Where He sits enthroned in glory
in His heavenly citadel.

9. So at last, when He appeareth,
we from out our graves may spring,
With our youth renewed like eagles,
flocking round our heavenly King.
Caught up on the clouds of Heaven,
and may meet Him in the air,
Rise to realms where He is reigning,
and may reign for ever there.

10. Glory be to God the Father,
glory be to God the Son,
Dying, risen, ascending for us,
who the heavenly realm has won;
Glory to the Holy Spirit,
to one God in persons Three;
Glory both in earth and Heaven,
glory, endless glory, be.

The original text, although too long to be sung by a congregation, was considered by John Julian as “is the nearest approach in style and treatment to a Greek Ode known to us in the English language. The amount of Holy Scripture compressed into these lines is wonderful. Prophecy, Types, Historical Facts, Doctrinal Teaching, Ecstatic Praise, all are here; and the result is one grand rush of holy song.”

Wordsworth’s hymn speaks of Jesus as a conquering hero. Gone are all the aspects of humility, replaced by full glorification. Jesus’ ascension is seen like an ancient parade of triumph: “You ascended on high, leading a host of captives in your train and receiving gifts among men, even among the rebellious, that the LORD God may dwell there.”(Ps 68:18) The One who rode a donkey into Jerusalem now uses the clouds as His chariot, fulfilling the Psalter: “He lays the beams of his chambers on the waters; he makes the clouds his chariot; he rides on the wings of the wind; he makes his messengers winds, his ministers a flaming fire.”(Ps 104:3-4) The crowds that welcome Him are the LORD’s angels instead of Judeans waving palm branches. Jesus strides powerfully into His heavenly kingdom.

The second stanza continues to describe the Ascended Lord. Wordsworth alludes to Psalms 47 and 24, which are traditionally used on Ascension Day: “God has gone up with a shout, the LORD with the sound of a trumpet.”(Ps 47:5) and “Lift up your heads, O gates! And be lifted up, O ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in. Who is this King of glory? The LORD, strong and mighty, the LORD, mighty in battle!”(Ps 24:7-8) The stanza also speaks of the victory that Jesus has won over the grave, sin, and Satan. This is tied to the statement made about Jesus in Hebrews: “When Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet.”(Heb 10:12-13) By His resurrection, no one can actually stand in opposition to Him. Jesus’ ascension confirms His victory.

Wordsworth includes details from the Ascension Narrative: “Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands he blessed them. While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven.”(Lk 24:50-51) But the hymnist also begins to tie Jesus to figures from the Old Testament, using them as types. The first is Enoch, a man whose life is recorded in Genesis: “Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.”(Ge 5:24) As much as Enoch pleased God in the primeval days of the earth’s existence, Jesus surpassed him in His complete obedience to what His Father required, even the call to sacrifice. For that reason the LORD speaks of Jesus: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”(Mt 3:17b) And the LORD rewards Him: “The LORD says to my Lord: ‘Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.’”(Ps 110:1).

Wordsworth’s tying Jesus to the figures of the Old Testament continues. He calls the Ascended Jesus our Aaron, because He is the great high priest who has gone into the heavenly sanctuary: “We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.”(Heb 6:19-20) His lyrics refer to Jesus’ Hebrew name Joshua, but the Ascended Jesus surpasses that ancient leader of the Hebrews into Canaan: “For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on. So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.”(Heb 4:8-10) Jesus is named Elijah, the one who gave a double portion of his spirit to Elisha; this alludes to Jesus’ giving the Holy Spirit at Pentecost: “This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing.”(Ac 2:32-33) Through these acts, Jesus stands as the head of a long line of people whom the LORD raised up. But as the Incarnate LORD who is the Messiah, Jesus exceeds them all.

The closing stanza focuses on the theological significance of Jesus’ Ascension. Wordsworth notes the fullness of the Incarnation’s mystery: that in Jesus, human nature is now exalted into heaven. Now a Man is present in the heavenly places, since Jesus assumed humanity in order to save it: “Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.”(Heb 2:14-15) The result of Jesus’ work is not for one Man to be present in the world to come. In His ascension, we anticipate our blessed fate. Our shared destiny is to be raised with Jesus: “Since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been written, ‘I believed, and so I spoke,’ we also believe, and so we also speak, knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence.”(2Co 4:13-14) That blessed fate is ours because Jesus has died, risen, andascended. With that as our great hope, we rightly celebrate the day when His earthly work performed for us was completed. (thanks to Mount Calvary Lutheran)

Christopher Wordsworth

Christopher Wordsworth (1807-1885) was the nephew of the poet William Wordsworth. Christopher Wordsworth was an athlete, classicist, poet, and Anglican bishop of Lincoln, to which position he was appointed by Disraeli.

IN BABILONE is a traditional Dutch melody that appeared in Oude en Nieuwe Hollantse Boerenlities en Contradansen (Old and New Dutch Peasant Songs and Country Dances), c. 1710. Ralph Vaughan Williams discovered this tune as arranged by Julius Rontgen (b. Leipzig, Germany, 1855; d. Utrecht, the Netherlands, 1932) and included it in The English Hymnal (1906).

Here is an improvisation on IN BABILONE at the Church of the Advent.

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Anthems

Ascendit Deus, Peter Philips

Ps. 46:5 Ascendit Deus in jubilatione, et Dominus in voce tubae.
Dedit dona hominibus.
Alleluia.
Ps. 102:19a Dominus in caelo paravit sedem suam.
Alleluia.

Here is the NUS choir.

Peter Philips published this anthem in Cantiones Sacrae (1612).This motet is full of vitality and energy. There are brass fanfares at the in voce turba and rapid-fire alleluias characteristic of Sweelinck, The piece ends in a joyful triple meter on shouts of alleluia.

Peter Philips (c.1560–1628) was an eminent English composer, organist, and Catholic priest exiled to Flanders. He was one of the greatest keyboard virtuosos of his time, and transcribed or arranged several Italian motets and madrigals by such composers as Lassus, Palestrina, and Giulio Caccini for his instruments. Some of his keyboard works are found in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. Philips also wrote many sacred choral works.

Philips was born in 1560 or 1561, possibly in Devonshire or London. From 1572 to 1578 he began his career as a boy chorister at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, under the aegis of the Catholic master of choristers, Sebastian Westcott (died 1582), who had also trained the young William Byrd some twenty years earlier. Philips must have had a close relationship with his master, as he lodged in his house up to the time of Westcote’s death, and was a beneficiary of his will.

In the same year (1582), Philips left England for good, like so many others for reasons of his Catholicism, and stayed briefly in Flanders before travelling to Rome where he entered the service of Alessandro Farnese (1520–1589), with whom he stayed for three years, and was also engaged as organist at the English Jesuit College. It was here that in February 1585 he met a fellow Catholic exile, Thomas, third Baron Paget (c. 1544–1590). Philips entered Paget’s service as a musician, and the two left Rome in March 1585, travelling over several years to Genoa, Madrid, Paris, Brussels and finally Antwerp, where Philips settled in 1590 and where Paget died the same year.

After settling, Philips married and gained a precarious living by teaching the virginals to children. In 1593 he went to Amsterdam “to sie and heare an excellent man of his faculties”, doubtless Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, whose reputation had by then long been made. On his way back, Philips was denounced by a compatriot for complicity in a plot on Queen Elizabeth’s life, and he was temporarily imprisoned at the Hague, where he probably composed the pavan and galliard Doloroso (Fitzwilliam Virginal Book nos. LXXX and LXXXI). Philips himself translated the accusations made against him during his trial, revealing that he could by then speak Dutch. He was acquitted and released without further charges.

Philips’ fortunes took a turn for the better on his return, and in 1597 he was employed in Brussels as organist to the chapel of Albert VII, Archduke of Austria who had been appointed governor of the Low Countries in 1595. Here, after his wife – and child’s – deaths, he was ordained a priest in either 1601 or 1609 – opinions differ; in any case, he received a canonry at Soignies in 1610, and another at Béthune in 1622 or 1623. In his position at court, Philips was able to meet the best musicians of the time, including Girolamo Frescobaldi, who visited the Low Countries in 1607–1608, and his fellow-countryman John Bull, who had fled England on a charge of adultery. His nearest colleague, however, was Peeter Cornet (c. 1575–1633), organist to Archduchess Isabella, wife of Philips’ employer the archduke.

Philips died in 1628, probably in Brussels, where he was buried.

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O God the King of Glory, Henry Purcell (1659-1695)

O God, the King of glory, who hast exalted thine only Son, Jesus Christ, with great triumph into heaven, we beseech Thee leave us not comfortless, but send to us thine Holy Ghost to comfort us, and exalt us to the same place where out Saviour Jesus Christ is gone before us. Amen.

Here is the Oxford Camerata.

This anthem implores God, who exalted Christ to heaven, not to leave us comfortless. The first few measures introduce the King with a nod to the French baroque overture, then uses rising phrases to convey the sense of exaltation, then arrives on a high D major chord. It then turns to striking chromatic harmonies that convey the sense of pleading for the comfort and companionship of the Holy Ghost.

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Common

Missa Brevis, Palestrina

An important characteristic of Palestrina expressed clearly in this work is the use of frequent tempo changes, which are governed entirely by the changing meaning and significance of the text. Hence there is a far greater feeling of phrase than of beat and rhythm. The unity of form which overwhelms the listener reflects very clearly the peace and serenity that Palestrina himself possessed in his faith. It is not known why the mass came to be called Missa Brevis, for it is not any shorter than the usual four part Palestrina mass.

Unlike most Renaissance mass settings, it is not based on a chant melody or motet. The flowing and perfectly balanced melodic lines in the Benedictus are sung by the upper three voices. In the second Agnus Dei, the texture expands from four to five voices; the second soprano melody repeats the first soprano melody two measures later (an example of a canon). The static beauty of the final section invites contemplation of eternal realities.

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Postlude

Glorificamus, John Redford (1486-1547)

Here it is on the harpsichord.

Like those of his stylistic counterpart, William Blitheman, Redford’s compositions display a great deal of variety in their exploration of the keyboard. This composition is from the Mulliner Book.

John Redford was a major English composer, organist, and dramatist of the Tudor period. From about 1525 he was organist at St Paul’s Cathedral (succeeding Thomas Hickman). He was choirmaster there from 1531 until his death in 1547. Many of his works are represented in the Mulliner Book.

Redford is notable as one of the earliest composers, rather than improvisers, of organ music, having notated a significant quantity of keyboard music, all of it liturgical in function, based on plainchant melodies.

A Postscript on Images of the Ascension

A common medieval way of depicting the Ascension looks slightly odd to modern eyes.

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