Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Editorial:
You are reading the 27th issue of the Koinonia. At this Christmas and Epiphany tide, we would like to share snippets of Anglo Catholicism starting with an
article about the great Anglo Catholic poet T.S. Eliot written by Canon Patrick Comerford, a visit to the cradle of the Oxford Movement- Pusey House, Christ Church
Oxford and Journeying...- Bishop Leo Michaels recollection of a trip to India that could have been his final journey. Thanks to Gods eternal mercy and the wonderful
members of the Holy Catholic Church Anglican Rite Church, family and friends, I returned home. This is a testimonial to Gods mercy. Attractive Ordo Kalendars are
available. Our sincere thanks to Brother Rodd Umlauf, and his sister, professional Photographer Jody Partin who granted us permission to use her photos in this edition
of Ordo Kalendar. God bless them. Do think of Koinonia and HCCAR in your charitable giving for the greater glory of God! May the eternal mercy and love of God see
us through in the year of our Lord 2015 too. Blessings of this Christmas and Epiphany Tide to you and all your loved ones. Gods grace filled New 2015 +Leo & Holly
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In the Koinonia masthead, the circle with the cross in the center symbolizes the paten and the diverse elements which form a whole. The Mosaic
represents the great cloud of witnesses and the church tradition. The red
in the letters represents the blood of Christ with the font comprised of individual pieces of letters that are not joined until the blood unifies them. Koinonia is the official publication of the Anglican Province of the Holy Catholic Church-Anglican Rite (HCCAR) aka Anglican Rite Catholic Church.
It is published quarterly at St. James Anglican Church, 8107 S. Holmes
Road, Kansas City, MO 64131. Phone: 816.361.7242 Fax: 816.361.2144.
Editors: The Rt. Rev. Leo Michael & Holly Michael, Koinonia header: Phil
Gilbreath; email: koinonia@holycatholicanglican.org or visit us on the web
at: www.holycatholicanglican.org Cover picture: Painting of Pompeo Batoni
The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, photo by
Bishop Leo Michael.
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Journeying...
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Thrown of off his bicycle, strangers took him to the hospital. His
survival was a miracle. We found him as we had known him, very
happy and active. (below in the white shirt)
We began our journey the same day we landed, knowing we had
much to accomplish in one week. Our ministry began by visiting
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House) run by the Jesuit fathers was our grand finale. Though it
was monsoon season, and pouring down rain at time, the tsunami
victims turned survivors arrived. Some rode hours on a bus or the
back of a motorcycle. One young girl, five days away from giving
birth, rode a bus for several hours. During the meeting and dinner,
the dear departed were remembered in prayer. Each of the orphans
were given the original bank documents.
The Fever
Visiting the once tsunami-ravished villages, and time spent in
interviews and counseling, we hardly slept. At night, mosquitoes
buzzed around our heads. One evening, I felt a drilling in my back
that wasnt like the other bites.
For two evenings, I suffered with a 104 degree fever and visited
the doctor on the next street. After many prescriptions and two
shots of parecetemol (fever reducer), I was growing weaker and
more tired.
The next evening we traveled back Bangalore, a twelve-hour bus
ride. The fever crept higher as the bus began to move.
I can only imagine Hollys plight, forcing pills and water in me
to bring the fever down. At the break of dawn, we finally arrived
in Bangalore.
Holly asked my family for the best hospital in town and after
being admitted in the emergency room, the blood test proved positive for Dengue fever. (This fever was the cause of my sisters demise just a couple of years ago).
We awaited our turn to be admitted into a room. And by then
more of my family had arrived. Severely dehydrated, I was given
I.V. fluids, but grew oblivious to my surroundings.
My niece begged to stay with us, knowing that Aunty Holly was
all alone, but we asked her to go home.
Later that night, my blood pressure began to plummet with
multiple organ failure and I was whisked off to the ICU.
Dropping blood platelet count was the next critical phase of
dengue fever.
Its certainly by the grace of God that Im alive, else Holly would
have had to bury me in Bangalore, India.
Thanks to the mercy of God and intercessions of family and
friends and especially the beloved clergy and members of the Holy
Catholic Church Anglican Rite, I am alive and well.
Someone said, God is not done with you as yet. What could have
been my journey to eternity, resulted in a miraculous recovery.
I have dedicated to work for the Lord all the more and for the
cure of His flock. Far left, Roger Pierce (Hollys Facebook friends
husband) is in Bangalore and
makes a surprise visit after Hollys
online plea for prayers.
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OXFORD
MOVEMENT
The term Oxford Movement is often used to describe the whole of what might be called the Catholic revival in the Church of England. More properly it refers to the activities and ideas of an initially
small group of people in the University of Oxford
who argued against the increasing secularisation
of the Church of England, and sought to recall it to
its heritage of apostolic order, and to the catholic
doctrines of the early church fathers. The success
of this theological task was so great, one might argue, that it is now difficult to distinguish between
those who were given the name Tractarians (see
below) and the wider Anglo-Catholic wing of the
church which built on and developed their ideas.
Origins: In the early 1830s, at Oriel College in Oxford, a growing
number of young and extremely able Fellows, informally grouped
around the slightly older John Keble, were increasingly outspoken
about the needs and shortcomings of the contemporary church.
These were heady times in England. Catholic emancipation had
come, and the forces surrounding the Reform Act of 1832 were
felt in all walks of life. The old status quo was being threatened,
but many questions about church government and doctrine were
left unanswered. There was a feeling that there was everything to
play for. In Dean Churchs words, the leading figures of the Oxford
movement were men of large designs.
John Henry Newman dated the beginning of the Oxford Movement to Kebles Assize Sermon of July 1833, on National Apostasy.
The subject matter may seem remote: a protest against parliamentary legislation to reduce the absurdly large number of bishoprics in the Church of Ireland. But the theme was crucial. Was the
Church of England a department of the Hanoverian state, to be
governed by the forces of secular politics, or was it an ordinance of
God. Were its pastors priests of the Catholic Church (as the Prayer
Book insisted) or ministers of a Calvinistic sect?
Newman, Vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Richard Hurrell Froude, a junior fellow of Oriel, and William
Palmer, a fellow of Worcester, joined with Keble to launch a series
of Tracts for the Times, developing these themes (hence the name
Tractarians). During the following eight years, ninety such Tracts
were published. Did Baptism bestow an indelible character on the
soul? What does consecration of the eucharistic elements signify?
Was the Reformation and Elizabethan Settlement a release from
papal bondage, a disaster imposed by a heretical state, or a sophisticated via media between these two extremes? How were the
golden ages of the early Church Fathers and seventeenth century
Anglican theology to be recovered?
From the very beginning, the history of the Oxford Movement
is a history of controversy. The jostlings of university politics which
now might seem insignificant were in fact crucial to the future of
the Church of England. The unsuccessful attempt of the Tractarians to prevent Renn Dickson Hampden (later Bishop of Hereford), whose theology they viewed with suspicion, from becoming
Regius professor of divinity is a case in point. The publication in
1838 of Froudes Remains, is another. Froude went much further
than anything hitherto in asserting the Church of Englands inherent Catholic heritage. Catholicism is not confined to the Roman
communion, nor Orthodoxy to the eastern churches. Perhaps the
greatest explosion occurred in response to Newmans Tract Ninety,
which appeared in 1841, and argued that there was nothing in the
Thirty-nine Articles contrary to the Council of Trent.
Edward Bouverie PuseyIn 1834, another young fellow of Oriel,
Edward Bouverie Pusey threw in his lot with the Tractarians, contributing a characteristically learned tract on Baptism. Keble had
retired from Oxford in the early 1820s. The weight of leadership
of the Oxford Movement had largely been borne by Newman, the
Vicar of the University Church, but in the wake of the furore which
accompanied Tract Ninety he increasingly withdrew to his semimonastic establishment at Littlemore. Pusey was inevitably seen as
the emerging figurehead of the movement in Oxford.
In 1843 he preached a sermon before the University entitled
The Holy Eucharist a comfort to the penitent. Much of the sermon appealed to the Fathers and to the Caroline divines but in
an increasingly politicised situation it was too much for the Evangelicals - including Philip Wynter, the Vice Chancellor - to tolerate. Despite Puseys exhaustive explanations and massive public
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Movement proper had long ceased to be. Though he did not see
the end of dissent and dispute, Pusey (who died in 1882) lived to
witness the theology of a Catholic Church of England carried into
all areas of the land. The rediscovered emphases on apostolic succession and the Catholicity of the church, on priesthood, on sacrament and sacrifice, on prayer, holiness and the beauty of worship,
are the Tractarians gifts to their successors. A glance round the
contemporary Church of England, still vastly divergent but nevertheless teeming with colourful decorations, revised liturgies, ancient hymns, and thousands of processions, aumbries, altars, oratories and retreat houses, reminds us just how dramatically the life
of the English Church was renewed by the Catholic vision of those
Oxford men of large designs. The Oxford movement ( text the
courtesy of Puseyhouse.org) Images Bishop Leo and Holly Michael
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Above, the pub where C. S. Lewis and Tolkien met and wrote
where Holly is sitting. Above right their witnessing to their
visit to the pub.
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by Patrick Comerford
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Eliots conversion may have been shocking at the time, if
not revolutionary. But the response of his contemporaries, whatever
it may have been, was not going to turn him: No one ever attempted to convertme; and, looking back on my pre-Christian state of
mind, I do not think that such a campaign would have prospered.
His conversion to Anglicanism was encouraged through
reading the prayers and sermons of Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626),
Bishop of Winchester. His poem, Journey of the Magi(1927), the
first of theAriel Poemsand written shortly after his baptism, begins
with a quotation from a sermon on the Epiphany by Andrewes in
1622:
It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had
of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to
take a journey, and specially a long journey in. The ways deep,
the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, insolstitio
brumali, the very dead of winter.
Eliot opens hisJourney of the Magiwith similar words:
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
In his essay,For Lancelot Andrewes: an Essay on Style and
Order(1928), published the following year, Eliot argued that Andrewess sermons rank with the finest English prose of their time,
of any time. Eliot spoke of his indebtedness to the bishops writings: he is the first great preacher of the English Catholic Church,
he had the voice of a man who had a formed visible church behind him, who spoke with the old authority and the new culture.
For Eliot, The intellectual achievement and the prose
style of Hooker and Andrewes came to complete the structure of
the English Church as the philosophy of the thirteenth century
crowns the Catholic Church the achievement of Hooker and
Andrewes was to make the English Church more worthy of intellectual assent. No religion can survive the judgment of history un-
less the best minds of its time have collaborated in its construction; if the Church of Elizabeth is worthy of the age of Shakespeare
and Jonson, that is because of the work of Hooker and Andrewes.
The writings of both Hooker and Andrewes illustrate that determination to stick to essentials, that awareness of the needs of the
time, the desire for clarity and precision on matters of importance,
and the indifference to matters indifferent, which was the general
policy of Elizabeth Andrewes is the first great preacher of the
English Catholic Church.
He was influenced too by Nicholas Ferrars life at Little
Gidding, and by the works of Richard Hooker and Jeremy Taylor.
Ash Wednesday(1930), Eliots first long poem after becoming an Anglican, has been described as his conversion poem.
But he regarded theFour Quartets as his masterpiece, and the collection earned him his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. It comprises four poems: Burnt Norton(1936),East Coker(1940),The
Dry Salvages(1941) andLittle Gidding (1942).
Childhood nurse from Co Cork
Many biographers suggest Eliots conversion to Anglicanism may have been helped by his childhood experiences in the
company of his Irish nurse, Annie Dunne from Co Cork. He wrote
in 1930: The earliest personal influence I remember, besides that
of my parents, was Annie Dunne, to whom I was greatly attached.
She took the young Eliot with her to the little Catholic
church which stood on the corner of Locust Street and Jefferson
Avenue when she went to make her devotions, and also took him
to Mass in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Writing in the Criterion in 1927 shortly after his baptism,
Eliot recalled that when he was a six-year-old, Annie had discussed
with him about the ways of proving the existence of God. She gave
him a glimpse of a liturgical Christianity that was very different
from his Unitarian background. James E Miller suggests that the
seeds for his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism had been sown by
The title, of course, refers to Ash Wednesday, the first
of the forty days of Lent, and the poem deals with the struggle
that ensues when one who has lacked faith in the past strives to
move towards God. It is a richly but ambiguously allusive poem
and deals with the aspiration to move from spiritual barrenness to
hope for human salvation. The poem is concerned with personal
salvation in an age of uncertainty, where the weariness of giving
up to a creed weighs heavily on the speaker:
(Why should the agd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?
Eliots journey to Christianity was along a long and
winding path. Yet this poem, which is not so much about God as
a prayer to God, displays a great spiritual maturity in a relatively
new convert.
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appealingly unsophisticated
natural man.
Another Irish figure
created by Eliot is Sir Henry
Harcourt-Reilly, the psychiatrist in The Cocktail Party who
merrily sings a refrain of the
bawdy song, The One Eyed
Riley. The characters partblindness may have been partly inspired by James Joyces
sight problems.
Four Irish friends
Perhaps the best way
to evaluate Eliots attitude to Irish people is to look at his friendship with four key Irish contemporary literary figures: the writers
WB Yeats, James Joyce and Louis MacNeice and the Jesuit Martin
DArcy.
Through his contacts with Bertrand Russell and Ezra
Pound, Eliot mixed with a group including the aging Irish poet
William Butler Yeats. At first, Eliot expresses distaste for Yeats,
and even mocked Yeatss membership of the Theosophical Society.
Later, following his attendance atthe first performance of Yeatss
one-act play, At the Hawks Well,in 1916 and after the publication
ofThe Wild Swans at Coolein 1919, Eliot softened his opinion of
Yeatss poetry,.
In his review of Joyces Ulysses in 1923, Eliot favourably
mentions Yeats. But it was not until 1935, in the Criterion, that
Eliot publicly praised Yeats, when he called him the greatest poet
of his time. Eliot continued to praise Yeats, who was born into a
prominent (Anglican) Church if Ireland family; however, in a lecture in Dublin in 1936, Eliot regretted that Yeats came to poetry
from a Protestant background. After the death of Yeats, Eliot was
invited to give the first annual Yeats lecture to the Friends of the
Irish Academy in 1940.
Eliot and Joyce first met at the Hotel de lElysee in Paris
on 15 August 1920. They dined in Joyces favourite restaurant, and
Joyce extended his hospitality several times. Their friendship blossomed after The Waste Land and Ulysses were published around
the same time in 1922.
In 1923, when Eliot reviewed Ulysses, he said: It is a book
to which we are all indebted and from which none of us can escape. It marked a major shift in literature, he said. It is, I seriously
believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art.
Eliot would look to Joyce for support when he separated
from his wife, and Eliot continued to visit Joyce whenever he was
in Paris. In his Dublin lectures in 1936, Eliot said Joyce seems to
me the most universal, the most Irish and the most Catholic writer
in English of his generation What is most truly Irish is most
truly Catholic.
Meanwhile, from 1932, Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)
was sending poems to Eliot at Faber and Faber. MacNeice was
the son of an Anglican bishop, John Frederick MacNeice (18661942), Church of Ireland Bishop of Cashel, Emly, Waterford and
Lismore (1931-1934) and until
his death Bishop of Down, Connor and Dromore (1934-1942).
Eliot did not feel these poems by
MacNeice were worth publishing
in a single volume, but he used
several of them in his journalThe
Criterion.
In 1934, MacNeice sent Eliot
the long poems that were published
as the book Poems (1935). In 1939, Eliot helped to plan MacNeices
tour of the US, arranging engagements in Princeton, Harvard and
Wellesley. The developed a firm friendship, and when MacNeice
died in 1963, Eliot wrote in The Times of his grief and shock at his
unexpected death just as Faber was about to publish a new volume
of his verse. He said MacNeice was a poet of genius, who had
the Irishmans unfailing ear for the music of verse, and he never
published a line that is not good reading.
Lifelong friendships
Eliot also had a lifelong friendship with the Jesuit philosopher, Father Martin Cyril DArcy(1888-1976), whose literary circle
also include Evelyn Waugh, Dorothy L Sayers and WH Auden and
whose parents were born in Ireland.
It was perhaps at DArcys suggestion that the Irish Jesuits
invited Eliot to Dublin for the first time in January 1936. During
that visit, Eliot lectured in University College Dublin, attended a lecture by Father Roland
Burke-Savage, the Jesuit editor
of Studies, and twice addressed
the English Literary Society at
UCD in Earlsfort Terrace.
Later, DArcys major
work, The Mind and Heart of
Love, was published by Eliot at
Faber and Faber in 1945.
Later life
When he was offered the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard (1932-1933), he left his wife Vivienne in England.
On his return, he filed for divorce, and she spent the rest of her life
in a psychiatric hospital until her death in 1947.
Eliots plays included Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
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n the thirty-eight years I've attended Christmas morning services, I don't remember thinking much about the nativity
crche. After all, I'd seen the Infant, His parents and shepherds hundreds of times in churches, on front lawns and beneath Christmas trees. They blended long ago into the season's background. But a several Christmases ago, as my wife
and I knelt at an altar, waiting to receive Holy Communion, the plaster figurines in front of us caught my attention. And
I knew why.
My gaze had shifted for a moment to the crucifix behind the pulpit. It loomed thirty feet above the altar and suddenly brought the
Christmas crche into a new and sobering perspective.
Two thousand years ago, few people in Bethlehem recognized the importance of the stable where Joseph and Mary snuggled their
newborn son. It's not hard to understand why others missed its significance. It wasn't the kind of place you'd expect to find anyone of
importance. The stable was not like the pretty pictures printed on Christmas cards. The grueling journey to Bethlehem left Joseph and
Mary tired and hungry. They longed to find a place to bathe and for a warm bed. Instead, they arrived in a city of strangers, and Joseph
raced in vain from inn to inn, desperately seeking a comfortable place for his wife to lie down. You know the story.
They couldn't find a room in the local inn, so they settled themselves for the night in a darkened corner of a stable, to the smell of manure and rotting straw. But in that stable, Almighty God took the form of a helpless Child and stepped into humanity to reconcile you and
me to Himself. The miraculous birth in that dirty place heralded a cataclysmic transformation in the relationship between us and Himself.
No one in that little town of Bethlehem knew it, but humanity's destiny revolved around that manger -- and Calvary's cross looming
in its shadow. Three decades later, beneath that cross, the manger was a distant memory in Mary's heart. The Child-grown-to-be-a-Man
now hung on a splintered, bloodstained crossbeam. It looked nothing like the smooth and polished cross towering above the altar in front
of me.
On Calvary's cross, Jesus' back laid ripped open by Roman whips. Blood from the roughly woven crown of thorns caked on His forehead. Nails holding him to the wood sent waves of searing pain across His hands and feet. Thirst ravaged his throat.
His strength slowly slipped away as he struggled to breathe. Meanwhile, soldiers jeered, religious leaders mocked, and his friends and
family wept. No one on that hillside knew it, but as Jesus suffered and then died on that cross, God launched the second of His threephased plan to rescue us from the even more horrible destiny our sins had guaranteed us. The crche is about the Savior's birth; the cross,
about His death.
The crche cradled God's incarnation; the cross tortured Him. The crche is about God's Son born into our world; the cross, about
Him paying sin's judgment and dying in our place. But without the third phase -- the empty tomb -- the crche and the cross would be
meaningless. Without the empty tomb, no one would have hope for life beyond this one. No one would have assurance that we have a
heavenly Father who loves us, grieves with us, yearns for an intimate relationship with us. The crche, the cross, and the empty tomb
brought God's plan of reconciliation and redemption to completion. Because of that Divine Triad, Christians can know with absolute
certainty that their sins can forgiven. The crche, the cross and the empty tomb is God's irrevocable declaration that those who believe
with obedient faith the Baby of the crche became the Man on the cross and resurrected Savior, wehave God's promise of eternal life (see
John 3:16). As I received Holy Communion that morning, I prayed I would never again see the crche simply as a reminder of a long-ago
Bethlehem birth.I hoped -- and continue to hope to this very day-- it will always remind me that God really does love the world so much
that He gave His Son to die in our place. I hope it always reminds me that His birth, death, and resurrection is the reason we say, "Merry
Christmas!"