Yesterday our Holy Father celebrated mass in the Sistine Chapel for the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, and for the first time he has celebrated facing east. The portable forward facing altar was purposely not brought out.
For a long time Benedict has upheld the tradition of mass facing east, and now that he has made a public statement to this effect. What we in the Birmingham Oratory have held out in doing, often by the skin of our teeth in the 1960's and 1970's, has been vindicated. I am sure that some diocesan liturgy commissions will be reaching out for boxes of tissues....
4 comments:
Aren't we the lucky ones!
Birmingham Oratory, like London, had a temporary table facing the people in the late 1960s but this was scrapped in the mid-70s after the provost of the London Oratory (Fr. Michael Napier - God Bless him) wrote an article in Clergy Review and a pamphlet on the fallacy of mass "facing the people".
The London Oratory suffered quite a bit, with Cardinal Hume bribing the Oratorians and when that was unsuccessful, refusing to do confirmations in it for nearly a decade.
But truth will out... as they say
Fr Guy was patiently trying to explain ad orientem to me this morning!
I have seem many beautiful church with horrible little table placed at the center. I am just glad the oratory is not one of them
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