(click to enlarge)
Will you look at this! Just an ordinary Anglo Catholic Church. What great riches of liturgical beauty and ecclesiastical glory the Anglo Catholics hold!
One of the great tragedies of the present apostasy in the Church of England is the decline and fall of the great Anglo Catholic parishes and vocations. Many are still struggling on valiantly, and many of them are doing their best to fight the decay within Anglicanism and hold to what they can of the Catholic faith within their tradition.
When they finally slip away, as they must I fear, so many beautiful buildings, so many beautiful fittings and furniture and frontals and vestments and statuary and stained glass and carvings and relics and much much more will simply end up in ecclesiastical junk shops or dusty rooms.
More than the stuff of worship are the lives and the souls that are being lost. The glorious stuff is temporal. So many Anglicans in the present crisis of faith have not left the Anglican Church for the Catholic Church. They have simply left Christ’s church altogether.
The souls lost because of Anglicanism’s departure from the Truth are the greatest loss of all.
Indeed Father! Pray for us as we contend for the faith and all its beauty. Who knows, perhaps some buildings with new vestments could return to their original owners… 😉
You’re welcome to the picture! Some of us stay on to fight for the very people you mention who otherwise would leave the Church altogether, as I have seen happening before in another communion.
I’m sorry I forgot to reference your blog! Where exactly is this glorious reredos, and can I have it when you’re done with it?
Oh, don’t apologise. I meant it, help yourself. The reredos is part of the Church of Saint Augustine, Pendlebury, in Manchester, also known as the ‘Miner’s Cathedral’ because of the large scale open cast mining which used to be undertaken close by. There is a graveyard at the back which has the inevitable graves from the inevitable mining disasters, including many Russian Orthodox who came to this part of Manchester from the 1850’s onwards to work in the mining and textile industries. They have mainly gone, but Broughton, nearby, still has many of the grand houses which they built as well as a large Orthodox Church. The Church is now part of the Forward in Faith team ministry taking in Saint Augustines, an old mission chapel and the main church of Saint Peter, Swinton. You could put in a request, I suppose, but you may have to wait another four hundred years…..or you may not. It’s worth a punt.
We lived in Clitheroe for three years after I left the CoE, and have fond memories of that rainy part of the world.
What is that thing in lower right-hand corner on the step saying: “We Will”?
It’s a kneeling pad. Anglican ladies do needlepoint coverings with lots of creative designs.
Yes, the gradual loss and mothballing of buildings and furnishings that can have no other use than in Catholic liturgy is very sad – especially as much of it was given in memoriam.The parish church of which I am the priest is a case in point – marble altars with relics embedded, baldachino, Blessed Sacrament chapel elevated up and behind the High Altar &c.; Most of the CofE would have no idea what to do with it, or why it was there in the first place.But … love this stuff as I do, I know a lot of it is impedimenta that tempts to an idolatary symptomatic of ‘in communion with the bricks rather than the bishop’.The closing comments of your post highlight the real tragedy – the loss of the living stones who couldn’t hack Anglicanism’s latest apostasies but haven’t been educated well enough in the Faith either to hang in there (for now), or cross the the Tiber with no further ado.
Father, you might be interested in several in our diocese…the Diocese of Fort Worth that recently left the Episcopal Church: St. Timothy’s http://www.fwepiscopal.org/st.timothy/ , St. Luke’s http://stlukemw.org , and St. Vincent’s Cathedral http://stvc.org/ . There are other church in this diocese, as well, with true Angelo Catholic traditions that we intend to keep!