Maiden, Mother and Queen

Mary in the Anglican tradition

Roger Greenacre

• Publisher: Canterbury Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781848252783
• eBook ISBN: 9781848254770
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

The rekindling of devotion to Mary has been one of the many gifts of the Catholic movement to the Church of England, and there are few better exponents of it than Roger Greenacre. Here he traces the way that Mary has been perceived throughout Anglican history, from the Middle Ages to today, and examines her role in ecumenical dialogue.

PART 1: Roger Greenacre

1. Roger Tagent Greenacre

COLIN PODMORE

Canon Roger Tagent Greenacre was born on 17 November 1930 and died on 30 July 2011, aged 80. For over forty years he was the pre-eminent English interpreter of the Church of England to the French Church – and vice versa.8 His mother’s French descent (he had Tagent cousins in the Beaujolais) inspired a ‘love affair with France’, where he lived a quarter of his life. Teenage exchanges with a Belgian family kindled his love of the French language, and their devout Catholicism made a profound impression.9

His own family was, as he explained in an interview three years before his death, ‘une famille anglicane traditionelle mais peu practiquante’.10 However, at the age of thirteen he went to Aldenham School in Hertfordshire as a boarder. Though the school chapel was no more high-church than his parents’ parish church had been, its chaplain, Mervyn Sweet, was an Anglo-Catholic. Looking back almost sixty years later, Roger described him as ‘a remarkable man’: ‘To him I owe my conversion to the catholic faith, the faith of the undivided Church, one, holy, catholic and apostolic.’11 It is clear that Mervyn Sweet had an influence on Roger that set the course of his life (and demonstrates the importance of school chaplaincy):

Humanly speaking, I owe my vocation to the priesthood to Mervyn Sweet, Chaplain of Aldenham at the time of my confirmation in 1946. He heard my first confession and made me a full-blooded Catholic Anglican before I had ever seen Eucharistic vestments or sniffed the heady scent of incense. He also inspired in me a love of the theatre and of the art of Eric Gill. He was a grammar-school educated Welshman, a Socialist and an Anglo-Catholic (everything the school was not!).12

It is significant that for Roger the catholic faith and catholic ecclesiology came first; its expression in Anglo-Catholic worship was always secondary.

Roger went on to read history and divinity at Clare College, Cambridge, and trained for ordination at the College of the Resurrection, Mirfield: history, theology and monasticism remained powerful interests. At Cambridge Roger would have encountered a liberal (in the sense of reasonable) Anglican catholicism. Among those who taught him at Cambridge were Michael Ramsey (Regius Professor of Divinity in Roger’s second and third year) and Henry Chadwick (Dean of Queens’ College and a future member of the Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission).13 Writing to the Dean of Clare on the death of the liberal evangelical theologian Charles Moule in 2007, Roger commented, ‘He was Dean when I came up in 1949 and was wonderfully kind, understanding and encouraging to the rather aggressive young Anglo-Catholic undergraduate I then was.’

Graduating in June 1952, Roger spent a fortnight touring Northern France with a friend, drawn by its Benedictine abbeys. Having visited Chartres, Solesmes and many of the Loire abbeys and castles, it was, he later recalled, ‘quite by chance’ that they went on 1 July to the Abbey of Notre-Dame du Bec in Normandy, to which Benedictine monks had returned just four years earlier: ‘We had heard about Bec but we knew very little. Not being sure where the Abbey was, we were not able to give notice of our arrival, so we just presented ourselves on that summer evening.’ In the courtyard of the still rather dilapidated Abbey buildings they found the abbot, Dom Paul Grammont, and the prior, Dom Philibert Zobel, sitting on two old wicker chairs. This two-night stay when Roger was twenty-one was to be the first of many visits. His diary for the summer of 1952 testifies to the broader interest in monasticism that he was to retain, recording visits to Nashdom in June and July and Quarr in August.

While at Mirfield, he read contemporary French theologians such as Louis Bouyer and Henri de Lubac and travelled in France, learning about the liturgical movement and other developments. The Mirfield regime was ‘austere’, but the liturgy was ‘rich and solemn, with much plainsong’. The tombs of the Founders, on either side of the High Altar in the Community Church, were an inspiration: both Gore and Frere had participated in the Malines Conversations of the 1920s, whose goal of corporate reunion between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church the Belgian liturgist and ecumenist Dom Lambert Beauduin had expressed as ‘L’église anglicane unie, mais non absorbée’. It was above all to Anglican–Roman Catholic ecumenism that Roger gave his life.

Roger was ordained to the diaconate at St Paul’s Cathedral on Michaelmas Day 1954. A five-year curacy at All Saints, Hanworth, in London and two years of college and school chaplaincy followed. As a priest at Hanworth, Roger took groups of teenage boys on pilgrimage to Walsingham, and in 1957 (the year before Fr Hope Patten’s death), he became a Priest Associate of the Holy House. In 1960 he spent some months there as Assistant Priest to Fr Patten’s successor, Fr Colin Stephenson.

Belgium

Roger spent the academic year 1961–62 at the Catholic University of Louvain, as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Priest Student. Following the announcement of the Second Vatican Council in 1959, the Louvain theology faculty had invited the Archbishop to send a series of priests to study for a year. Of the eight who went, four in particular – Martin Reardon, Roger, John Halliburton and Hugh Wybrew – repaid the investment by contributing significantly to ecumenical relationships. Already widely read in contemporary French theology, in Louvain Roger encountered many of the Belgian theologians who were working in the preparatory commissions for the Council and would have such great influence upon it after it opened in October 1962. He also visited Chevetogne, the Benedictine monastery founded by Beauduin, whose vocation was ecumenical and liturgical – as his own would be.

Holy Week and Easter

Back in England, Roger moved to Central London as curate of St Mark’s, North Audley Street, and then Chaplain of Liddon House, ministering to the William Temple Association (for intelligent young professional people starting work in London). In 1963 he preached a series of Lent sermons at the Annunciation, Marble Arch, and St Mary’s, Bourne Street, giving the biblical, theological and spiritual background to the celebration of Holy Week and Easter. These were informed by Roger’s knowledge of Continental liturgical scholarship and practice. Eric Mascall, who heard them, persuaded him to publish them. The Sacrament of Easter (1965) was influential and of lasting significance. Later editions, written with Jeremy Haselock, appeared in 1989, 1991 and 1995. In 2008 Roger was still the obvious person to introduce the season in the relevant Using Common Worship volume.14

St George’s, Paris

In 1965 Roger became Chaplain of St George’s, Paris. When he arrived, St George’s was still a rather conservative Anglo-Catholic church. There were no women at all on the church council and it was unthinkable that a woman should read the lesson. He immediately began to change both the church’s worship and its life. In line with the fashion of the mid-1960s he had the altar moved out into the chancel and started celebrating mass in the westward position. (It was ‘a happy coincidence’ that an architect had declared the top step of the old high altar unsafe.) The ‘fiddle-back’ chasubles were packed away; clergy and servers began wearing modern-style chasubles and albs. Wine and cheese were served every Sunday after mass, and a year or two later a simple lunch of home-made soup, bread and cheese, fruit and wine began to be offered. The inadequacy of the church hall meant that lunch had to be served in Roger’s sitting room, the cooking and washing up being done in his kitchen, but he was happy to open his home to his people in this way.15

St George’s is the Church of England’s ‘flagship’ in France, and in the heady days of ecumenism following the Second Vatican Council (which concluded in December 1965) Roger became the pre-eminent English interpreter of the Church of England to the French Church. That role he retained, through lecturing and writing, for over forty years.

In 1967 he guided Archbishop Ramsey through a visit to the French churches. In 1969 the French Anglican–Roman Catholic Committee (ARC) got underway, with Roger as Co-Chairman. He attended the French bishops’ annual assemblies as the Anglican observer, and travelled widely, lecturing and addressing ecumenical gatherings. Lecturing at the Institut supérieur d’études oecumeniques of the Institut catholique de Paris from its inception in 1967, a generation of future bishops sat at his feet. He became Rural Dean of France in 1970.

Chichester

In 1975 Bishop Eric Kemp brought Roger to Chichester as a residentiary canon (Chancellor until 1997, then Precentor). Jeremy Haselock has commented, ‘Roger was not entirely unhappy to move out of the ramshackle Presbytère in the rue Auguste-Vacquerie into a house in Vicars’ Close, Chichester, which combined the characterfulness of the fifteenth century at the front with the elegance of the eighteenth century at the back. Here he made a comfortable home where his hospitality rapidly became legendary.’16

During his time in Chichester Roger lectured at catholic universities across Europe, but the focus now was on trying to make the Church of England less insular and more closely linked with the European main. As Diocesan Ecumenical Officer (1976–88) and Chairman of the European Ecumenical Committee (1989–99), he developed and maintained a flourishing cathedral and diocesan twinning with Chartres. As Chancellor he gave an annual lecture series. From 1976 to 1988 he lectured in church history at Chichester Theological College; one former student recalls him reducing a whole class to tears by his account of the fall of Constantinople to Muslim forces in 1453.

During his twenty-five years in Chichester Roger brought into the Church of England insights gleaned from his knowledge of the Church in France and Belgium and his experience of ecumenical dialogue. Immersion in the thought-world of French-speaking Catholicism enabled Roger to place the Anglican tradition in a wider European perspective which highlighted its essential catholicity. Comparison with what befell the French Church during the Revolution brought out its continuity: France has nothing comparable with an English cathedral of the old foundation such as Chichester. Intensive ecumenical experience tends to make one less starry-eyed about other churches and somewhat more sanguine about one’s own.

As a member of English ARC (1981–96), Roger was Anglican co-author of its Study Guide to ARCIC I’s Final Report (1982) and played a key part – with the French ecumenist Suzanne Martineau – in the genesis of Twinnings and Exchanges (1990), the important agreement with the French Bishops’ Conference on eucharistic hospitality. His book The Catholic Church in France: An Introduction (1996) presented the French Church and its relations with the Church of England. Roger brought his ecumenical insights to bear on the General...

Table of contents

• Copyright information
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by the Bishop of Chichester
• Introduction by Colin Podmore
• PART 1: Roger Greenacre
• 1. Roger Tagent Greenacre
• 2. Address at the Funeral Requiem in the Chapel of Sutton’s Hospital in Charterhouse Friday 12 August 2011
• 3. Sermon at the Requiem Mass in Chichester Cathedral, Friday 23 September 2011
• 4. Tribute at the Requiem Mass in Chichester Cathedral, Friday 23 September 2011
• PART 2. Homilies on the Blessed Virgin Mary
• 5. Introduction to the Homilies
• 6. Mother of God Incarnate
• 7. Blessed Among Women
• 8. Queen of Heaven
• 9. St Joseph
• PART 3. The Blessed Virgin Mary in the Anglican Tradition
• 10. An Anglican Witness
• 11. I Sing of a Maiden: Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages
• 12. Mother Out of Sight: Anglican Devotion to Mary
• 13. Mark Frank (1613–64): A Caroline Preacher
• 14. The Virgin Mary in the Liturgical Texts of the Anglican Communion
• PART 4. The Blessed Virgin Mary in Ecumenical Dialogue
• 15. Mary and the Church: The Ecumenical Dialogue and Our Lady (1964)
• 16. Mother of All Christians (1998)
• 17. An Ecumenical Pilgrimage in Honour of Mary, Mother of Our Lord (1998)
• 18. Our Lady, Chosen by God (1999)
• 19. Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ (2005)
• Publications by Roger Greenacre: A Select Bibliography