Above: the Eikon Basilike, a purported spiritual autobiography attributed to Charles I, published days after his execution.
Oxford, England has long proudly held the titles “Mother of Lost Causes” and “City of Dreaming Spires.” Certainly the latter has bound up this lovely place with the history of English Catholicism – so often defeated, yet only to spring up again. Thus, we find that its buildings have sheltered Medieval Scholastics such as Roger Bacon. Both the University itself and the area round held many Catholic Recusants – heroes who for centuries sacrificed much, sometimes even their lives – for the Faith. During the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, many of these joined the Cavaliers who rallied to King Charles I; for some little while that hapless Monarch held court in Christ Church College’s great hall. When in turn his Catholic grandson, James II and VII was overthrown for his Faith, Oxford remained a centre of the Jacobites – the supporters of James and his son and grandsons in exile. The Oxford Movement launched there by Keble, Pusey, and Newman in the 1820s sought to re-Catholicise the Church of England. Among the results of this effort was the rise of the Anglo-Catholic Party in the Anglican Communion on the one hand, and through the conversion of the now Sainted John Henry Newman, the Catholic Revival in general and the start of the Oratories of St. Philip Neri in the Anglosphere in particular. All of these elements in turn contributed to the formation of the Inklings, a unique group of writers including J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams, whose legendary meetings at such local pubs as the Eagle and Child and the Lamb and Flag gave birth to many a beloved piece of literature.
This entire history is an important part of the Anglican Patrimony, which Benedict XVI wished to purify and preserve for the benefit of the whole Catholic Church when he created the Personal Ordinariates for former Anglicans in Britain, North America, and Australia. Many a distinguished priest, religious, and layman have entered the Catholic Church via this route, since the first was erected in 2011. One of the most erudite and in many ways astonishing was Fr. John Hunwicke, who died on April 30, 2024. A longtime “Papalist” in the Church of England, he had taught Latin at Evelyn Waugh’s and Sir John Betjeman’s prestigious alma mater, Lancing College. His erudition was wide, his humour deep, and his patience for fools thin. This was evident in his popular blog, “Mutual Enrichment,” which remains online.
As might be supposed, neither his erudition nor his humour were appreciated by everyone in either the Church of England, nor in the Catholic Church after his conversion. Fr. Hunwicke’s ordination was delayed by some of his answers on the questionnaire; to the question, “what is your favourite reading?” he answered, “the one in Berkshire.” Others he answered in Greek. After his Ordinary asked him to take a more serious tone on a second such document did his elevation to Catholic orders take place.
As perusal of his blog will show, although he maintained his sense of humour despite the tests all orthodox Catholics are subjected to to-day, his love of truth could not and would not be hidden. For ten years after his Ordination as a Catholic priest, he taught the Latin Mass (of which he was as much a master as he was of the Ordinariate Rite). Firmly aware of the gifts of the Anglican Patrimony which Benedict XVI expected him and his ilk to bring to us all he was a partisan of the cultus of the murdered King Charles I and his exiled Stuart descendants, never forgetting to mention either or both on January 30 (the anniversary of the King’s beheading) and June 10 (White Rose Day, the Jacobite observance of the birthday in 1688 of James III and VIII). He also favoured – alongside Ronald Knox and a host of others – the canonisation of Henry VI.
This proudly English and deeply Roman priest died on April 30, 2024. I had never met him, sadly. But as with so many others across the globe, I have benefitted from his insight and intelligence. Very fittingly, indeed, his Requiem was held on June 4 at 11 AM at the Oxford Oratory. Once the Jesuit Church in Oxford (and still dedicated to St. Aloysius Gonzaga), it has been the scene of what orthodox Catholics might consider defeat and triumph. Finished in 1875, Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins was one if its more noted Jesuit residents; it was for many years Tolkien’s favourite church in Oxford. This changed in the early 70s, when the Jesuits made a bonfire of the relics collection they had received decades earlier from noted Papal Chamberlain Hartwell de la Garde Grissell. But in 1990, the Archbishop of Birmingham asked the Oratory in his city to take over the parish, and three years later it became an independent Oratory on its own. The relics chapel was resurrected, and to-day boasts as beautiful a collection as ever it had before – including one of Bl. Emperor Karl. Both the Latin Novus Ordo and the Traditional Latin Mass are to be found here, and, as is usual with Oratories of St. Philip Neri in the Anglosphere, the Liturgy is wonderfully done. So it was with Fr. Hunwicke’s Requiem – a Solemn High Mass that he would have loved. Black vestments, the ineffable Dies Irae, it was without doubt a sacrifice made to God for the good of Father’s soul. Afterwards, we mourners gathered in the parish hall for a reminiscence and refreshments. It was both a fitting tribute to the man – and more importantly, the cause he served all his life in Churches, the reconciliation of England with the One True Church.
Four days later, I was in Portsmouth, England, to deliver a lecture at the Ordinariate parish of St. Agatha’s. What Oxford is to British education, Portsmouth is to the Royal Navy. Here you may find Nelson’s ship HMS Victory, and Henry VIII’s resuscitated flagship Mary Rose. The church to which I was bound was itself as returned from the dead as the evil Tudor King’s craft. Founded in the late 19th century by Fr. Robert Radclyffe Downing, it is an Italianate Basilica in the middle of what was once one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the area. This reflects Fr. Downing’s status as both yet another of the legendary Anglo-Catholic “slum priests” and a forthright Papalist. When enemy action devastated the area during World War II, it was decided that the church’s destruction was imminent, and it was shut down and deconsecrated in 1954. But such a treasure was it considered by the locals, that a series of legal conflicts saved it from destruction, and the church came into the hands of a private trust in 1987. Many of the church’s original treasures that had been “saved” by being sent to churches which themselves closed in the meantime. These returned by the time the church reopened to the public in 1994. The head of the trust, Rev. John Maunder, attempted to carry on where his predecessors left off. In 2012, he was received into the Catholic Church with his flock and ordained. At last, St. Agatha’s was exactly where its founder had wanted it.
It is a remarkable church in many ways. As various Catholic and Anglican churches in the area closed, many of their furnishings came to the reopened building. The overall result is a beautiful mixture of the harmonious and the chaotic. Purists will not like the jumble of styles; but the prayerful atmosphere created by presence of so many well-beloved items residing in a safe haven cannot be denied.
The Mass at St. Agatha’s is that of the Ordinariate. But here is an interesting note. Amongst Anglo-Catholics before our own Vatican II, the most common form for worship was a “Mass” taken from English or American Missals produced in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This “Missal Mass” was in fact largely a Tridentine Mass in Elizabethan English with additions from either the pre-Reformation Sarum Rite or the Book of Common Prayer. After the promulgation of the Novus Ordo, however, in 1969, many Papalist priests in the Church of England began using it as a sign of their spiritual or interior unity with the Pope (this was far less common among the like-minded in the United States, Canada, and Australia). When the Ordinariates were created, their Rome-authorised Missal, Divine Worship, was purposefully constructed to allow the use of either alternative – although Eastward facing in either case. The Mass at St. Agatha most definitely is the Anglo-Catholic Missal Mass; both Pope and King are prayed for with gusto, and the choir is superb.
The late Pope Benedict XVI is revered in the ordinariates as their founder. Thus, it was decided to offer, on Saturday, June 8, at 11am, Ferdinand Schubert’s Requiem Mass in G minor for the late Pontiff. It was incredible – and as much a taste of Heaven as Fr. Hunwicke’s had been, although very different. I then gave my talk about the Anglican Patrimony and its importance for the Church as a whole – not simply as an interesting museum piece, but rather, as Pope Benedict had intended, a means of evangelising the Anglosphere. Certainly, the large numbers of people from all over the area who flock to St. Agatha’s show that they are attracted by what can be found there.
There is a chapel at St. Agatha’s to King Charles the Martyr, a devotion which Fr. Maunder shared with his friend, Fr. Hunwicke, and for the same reason. In an old column, the latter priest commented on the cultus of Charles I:
…it’s no good some of you writing to complain that, since the cult of blessed Charles has never been sanctioned by a Vatican decree of beatification, I am being Inappropriate. You will notice that I carefully use a lower case b. A neat ecumenical compromise, yes? And ferocious Anglicans can put their pens down, too: in the forms of service used for some three centuries in the Church of England, he is never once called ‘Saint’; he is always ‘blessed’. So there was no precedent for the Victorian romantics (such as the Bateman in Saint John Henry Newman’s Loss and Gain) who took it upon themselves to canonise him. In the seventeenth century, in any case, the old practice of local Western churches simply by a decree establishing liturgical texts beatifying their own for a local cult, was not quite extinct. So it is an ecclesiological question that we have here, rather like that concerning separated Oriental Saints canonised in the East since the schism. One may, surely, hope for an ecumenical and ecclesiological climate in which King Charles may achieve the style Blessed Charles; in which he will be regarded as the Ordinariate’s Gift to the whole Catholic World…
Indeed, he goes on to question, “If it had not been for our blessed Charles, would there now be an Ordinariate?”
It is a fair question – and not only as regards Charles I. Fr. Hunwicke adds,
We can set King Charles beside other monarchs … S Charlemagne (canonised by an antipope); Louis XVI, who died (his obit only a few days ago) in the revolutionary holocaust of 1793 … the Blessed Emperor Charles of Austria … who evoke for us Christian Europe … the real Europe; the Europe of the Christian Social Realm in which men struggled, not always successfully but not always unsuccessfully, to maintain the principle of the Kingship of Christ – that Lordship emphasised by popes such as Pius XI in his Quas primas. This is Magisterial teaching which Vatican II, in its preamble to Dignitatis humanae, maintained when it decreed that it integram relinquit traditionalem doctrinam Catholicam, ‘leaves entire traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ.’
This is one gift of the Anglican Patrimony to the Catholic Church – a realisation, held from the Church Fathers until almost our own times, that the cultural, social, and political order must be conformed to Christ. Granted, it is a vision that Anglicanism could not and did not achieve, precisely because of its traumatic separation from Rome; it has been forgotten by many Catholics – even at the highest level – because from 1789 down to Vatican II so many Catholic countries had this vision forcibly ended by violent revolutions. But at both Oxford and Portsmouth I was forcibly and gratefully reminded of the ideal.
