Transept cross of Westminster Cathedral, London.
Mosaic and marble depiction of Our Lady of Walsingham in Westminster Cathedral, London.
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Both [Britten and Byrd] are fascinating in their insider/outsider or conformist/nonconformist status. For Byrd, there is confessional religion: the contrasting symbolism of the Somerset House group portrait versus the empty lawn of Waltham Abbey Church. For Britten, it was not Catholicism but homosexuality. Through most of Byrd’s adult life in Tudor and early Stuart England, the majority of the population regarded ‘papists’ with a similar mixture of repulsion, fear and secret fascination as prevailed in mid-20th-century Britain towards ‘pansies’: the Elizabethan Catholic minority behaved with that mixture of concealment, equivocation, secret pride and clandestine networking still recognisable to older gay men and lesbians today. Byrd and Britten (who ended up as peer, OM and CH) both enjoyed a charmed existence amid a world of persecution partly thanks to their personal closeness to a Queen Elizabeth. Without the continual moral and social dilemmas both faced, we might not have two such extraordinary and contradictory legacies of musical splendour.
Diarmaid MacCulloch compares Benjamin Britten and William Byrd (Billy Byrd? I’ll get me coat…) at the end of his essay on the latter in the London Review of Books, 31 July 2014.
The references to Somerset House and Waltham Abbey come from the start of MacCulloch’s essay, where he describes a portrait of Elizabethan grandees (three of whom were Byrd’s patrons, reflecting this Catholic’s place at the heart of Protestant court life) at Somerset House, but then says that what haunted Byrd’s life was his awareness of the loss of England’s Catholic heritage, such as the monastery at Waltham Abbey, dissolved in the year of Byrd’s birth, at which Thomas Tallis had been the last organist.
A mosaic of Our Lady of Walsingham in Westminster cathedral, London.
A few years back, I attended the funeral of a well-known London parish priest, Father Michael Hollings, in Westminster Cathedral. The Requiem Mass was presided over by Cardinal Hume, and there was a huge turnout. Fr Michael had been a decorated military officer, well-known spiritual author, University Chaplain and innovative Parish priest. The fact that this man, widely but discreetly known to be gay had, late in life been suspended for some time over what turned out to be a false allegation of molesting a youth, but had himself asked the police for two other counts of inappropriate behaviour to be taken into consideration, didn’t seem to have made any dent at all in the huge numbers of people of all ethnic backgrounds who came to his funeral. I don’t think anyone who knew him thought of him as flawless, but he was one of those people whose flaws are transparent to grace, and people loved him. Cardinal Hume was on particularly fine form, directing his homily to Michael in his coffin, talking fondly, chidingly, infuriatedly, lovingly. What I, and others, came away with from this funeral Mass, and this is not something that any liturgist can just “produce”, was a palpable sense of the proximity, solidity, and openness of Eternal Life. The Catholic faith is in the first place, and above all, to do with Eternal Life. And I suppose it is important just to remember that: why do any of us become Catholic and remain Catholic? Well, ultimately, because it is God’s way of giving us Eternal life, God’s own life.
James Alison, Is it ethical to be Catholic?
The phrase that knocked me sideways reading this was Alison’s reference to “a palpable sense of the proximity, solidity, and openness of Eternal Life”. How often do we experience this in the Lutheran church?, I found myself wondering…
HDR-photos from the Westminster Cathedral in London.
Topmost and third image are of the Lady Chapel.
Byrd created an English Catholic musical future which failed to come into existence; English Catholics wouldn’t have the public presence or the resources needed to use his work for another three centuries (and even then not many of them did).
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Young Man’s Nostalgia, London Review of Books, 31 July 2014.
Alice Thomas Ellis once said the easiest way to find the Catholic church in an English town you’ve never visited before is to stop the first person you meet and ask them to direct you to the ugliest building in town.
And behold…
Sadly not just Catholic churches, I think (at least in Aus).
The ‘life and peace’ goes a fair way toward redeeming this one though.
Oh, I should certainly have acknowledged that Lutherans in the UK are in no position to throw stones. Most of our church buildings belong to what I call “the breezeblock school of architecture”.
Finished #reading: The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism, by Louis Bouyer.
A real mixed bag, this. Fr Bouyer was a convert to Catholicism, having previously been a Lutheran minister. His book sets out to demonstrate two things: how the “positive principles” of Protestantism are also affirmed by the Catholic Church, and how it is the “negative principles” of Protestantism that led to the Reformation schisms, and ultimately undermined the Protestant churches - so that, Fr Bouyer argues, it is only the Catholic Church in which the true, positive principles of the Reformation can flourish.
The first half of the book is mostly excellent. Fr Bouyer gives one of the best presentations I’ve ever read of the “positive principles” of the Reformation, especially in the chapters on sola gratia,justification by faith and the sovereign authority of Scripture (as a vehicle for the living Word of God, rather than as the basis for a “religion of the book”).
Those are the chapters which focus most on Martin Luther. The other chapters in this half of the book look at the sovereignty of God and soli Deo gloria, which Fr Bouyer associates more with John Calvin. This is where things begin to go awry, as it becomes apparent that Fr Bouyer, despite having been a Lutheran minister, regards John Calvin as a great improvement upon Luther, and sees Karl Barth as the very culmination of Protestant thought, for both good and ill. Even then, though, Fr Bouyer is fascinating on such topics as the “mystical” nature of Calvinism.
In the second half, Fr Bouyer turns his attention to the “negative principles” of Protestantism, such as extrinsic justification. Fr Bouyer makes some effective points in this section, in particular as regards the impact, on both Protestantism and the initial Catholic reaction against it, of the nominalist philosophy that pervaded the late medieval church. For most part, though, his fire is concentrated upon a generic “Protestantism”, anti-sacramentalist and subjectivist in nature.
The problem is that he seems only intermittently aware of any distinction between this “generic continental Protestantism” of the early 20th century, and the rather different teachings of the confessional Reformation churches, especially the Lutheran church. It’s irritating, even bizarre, to be told by Fr Bouyer that Luther taught that the sacraments are only a “psychological help to faith” or “empty signs”. The fact that Fr Bouyer regards the sacramental system of Calvinism as “the most favourable hypothesis” among the Protestant churches says it all.
Could I therefore recommend Fr Bouyer’s book? The first 166 pages, very much so. As I said above, Fr Bouyer’s presentation of the great positive principles of the Reformation, and his insistence that Catholics have much to learn from Protestants about these principles that Fr Bouyer regards as thoroughly Catholic (“a rediscovery and application of what was capital and permanent in Christianity”) is superb. Just don’t feel you have to keep grinding all the way through to the end if you find the second half as hard going as I did.
![“ Byrd wrote only three [Mass settings], but what a trio they are: in three, four and five parts, all dating from a few years in the 1590s and straightaway put in print by the composer, with only minimum discretion despite the dangers. These are the...](https://64.media.tumblr.com/9cddd6d99bfd0e53f7ed543b6bfdf958/tumblr_nb6s8j2Gf91qz6qr3o1_1280.png)
Byrd wrote only three [Mass settings], but what a trio they are: in three, four and five parts, all dating from a few years in the 1590s and straightaway put in print by the composer, with only minimum discretion despite the dangers. These are the last major English Catholic Mass settings before the 19th century, yet they are not the end of a tradition, and are startling in their lack of deference to what had gone before. Notably, Byrd sets the Kyrie chorally instead of leaving it as plainsong, for the first time in English liturgical practice. […]
After that opening element of the Ordinary of the three-part Mass, the gloriously athletic ingenuity of the remaining sections gives the illusion of a much denser texture than we’d expect from three voices, but it is easily sustained by an experienced trio of singers, such as might unobtrusively arrive at a recusant country house for a discreet gathering of the faithful.
McCarthy intriguingly points to technical indications in the original published text which suggest that Byrd’s Mass settings could each have been performed non-stop over a sotto voce spoken celebration of a Low Mass, adding solemnity to a sacred occasion which was a brave defiance of Protestant persecution, but which nevertheless needed to be over as quickly as possible.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Young Man’s Nostalgia, London Review of Books, 31 July 2014.
(The picture is the cover of this new Hyperion Records release; the painting is a detail from the Madonna della Ombre by Fra Angelico.)
Evansville Press, Indiana, February 5, 1912
it’s a leap yeap
My nightmare: making a typo that people are still talking about over a century later
Happy leap yeap!
The typo heard round the world