Posted on 04/28/2007 9:02:31 AM PDT by TaxachusettsMan
Adrian Fortescue was a very odd man. "A false laugh, an unwilling little discourtesy, any assumption of knowledge or for that matter of anything, any instance of woolliness of thought or defective reasoning, any uncouthness, affectation, hollowness of feeling, elaborateness of phrasing, any use of foreign tags or phrases, would be sufficient to induce in him a very hearty, unreasoning natural dislike." Yet thousands loved him.
He spoke 11 languages, held three doctorates and hoped to be a professor of theology. Instead, 100 years ago, he founded the parish of St Hugh, Letchworth, the garden city started in 1903 in Hertfordshire, where he died in his 49th year. An exhibition devoted to him is to open there later this year.
Hertfordshire harboured two brilliant, eccentric Catholic priests in those years, the other being R H Benson, about whom I wrote on February 3. I can't find that they met. Both kept to their studies when they could.
Adrian Fortescue had an unusual upbringing. Schooled in Boulogne, and orphaned at 12, he lived with an aunt in Wimbledon before going to the Scots College in Rome aged 17. After four years' theology at Innsbruck he was ordained by the Prince Bishop Simon of Brixen, Austria, in 1898. He added Arabic and Syriac to his languages and spent 1907 in the Levant and Asia Minor. He had to shoot a man dead in self-defence, and at Hebron another fight for his life left him with a smashed shoulder that took weeks to heal.
So it was a change of gear to arrive in Letchworth in November 1907 and say his first Mass for 50 parishioners in a hut by the railway.
Although Dr Fortescue, as he was always called, felt he had no liking or talent for parish work, he set about building a church. He kept himself and the parish by writing. His renowned liturgical work The Ceremonies of the Roman Rite Described was written not out of scholarly zeal but to get £100.
His growing congregation was well schooled, taught to sing the regular parts of the Mass in Latin, and other liturgical chants, using, uniquely, the reformed classical pronunciation, not Church Latin with its soft c's.
Brick-built St Hugh (Dr Fortescue grew angry if anyone said "St Hugh's") was small, simple and beautiful, with a frieze of large Latin letters, and candlesticks and vestments designed by Fortescue. He was a neat artist and skilled calligrapher. Pages of his idiosyncratic Latin and Greek scripts are reproduced in a memoir by his friend John Vance. A seal he drew, signifying "Jesus Christ, Victor", is shown below.
But the glory of the new church was the ciborium, the canopy over the altar. Gilt beneath, it rose on four tooled pillars. It was not like the barley-sugar pillared baldacchino in St Peter's, Rome, more a humbler Sant'Ambrogio, Milan. I went to Letchworth to see it.
The church Fortescue built is now the parish hall, a false ceiling covering the lettering frieze. In 1963, the ciborium was transferred to the new church, about which Nikolaus Pevsner's architectural guide is sniffy, though it is light and roomy. But the ciborium was more recently torn down. It was perhaps out of scale with the larger church.
Anyway, while the church was a-building, Dr Fortescue organised a remarkable celebration of the liturgy of St John Chrysostom in Westminster Cathedral, with the choir trained to sing the eastern chants.
Fortescue wrote three books on the eastern churches, a handy monograph on Donatism and a handsome edition of Boethius (along with Dante, a lifetime interest). He never shirked visits to the sick, no matter how busy he was. There is a touching account of ministering to a German prisoner-of-war camp.
Suffering stomach pains, he was told on the shortest day of 1922 that he had cancer and would remain an invalid even if an operation succeeded. He felt fear and regretted his unfinished work, but came to see it was "silly to make a fuss about so inevitable a thing as death". He left his parish after a New Year's Eve sermon on "Christ our friend and comforter". There were two operations before and after his birthday on January 14. On February 11, 1923, he died, and is buried at Letchworth.
They thought because I had written a book about the Mass, that I would be the right man to revise Baldeschi. Of course, really, I was the very last man to choose for such a job. Your MC would have done it ten times better. He might even have liked writing the book (though I find it difficult to understand how any human being could really like such stuff). I do not think even £100 would have tempted me to write it if I had foreseen what a ghastly business it would prove to be.
Try to imagine for one solid year of my life (and life in any case is scandalously short) I spent all day comparing Merati and Martinucci and Vavasseur, to find out where the thurifer ought to stand at the Magnificat, who takes off the bishop's left glove, what sort of bow you should make at the Asperges. I had to look serious and discuss the arguments for a ductus duplex or the other thing, whatever it is called, at each candlestick, when you incense the altar.
Conceive of man, said to be in the image of God, spending his time over that kind of thing!
Even now that the burden is over, it still fills me with rage to think of those days. I could have learned a new language easily in the time. I could have gone every day to the cinema. I could have read the complete works of Marie Corelli.
My cat was spending his time in sane and reasonable pursuits, chasing birds in the garden, climbing trees, or sleeping in his basket, while I was describing the conduct of the second MC at Pontifical Vespers Not At The Throne.
And they affect to believe that we lead a nobler life than the beasts.
Of course I have got my £100, but the next time I want to earn money I think I will try loading a truck with coal. That would be just as difficult, and infinitely more worthy of the dignity of man.
Now even when I have finished the loathsome business, the nuisance still pursues me. I might have foreseen this. Now I find that people, up and down the country, take me to be a serious authority on these questions. I have already a pile of letters, asking questions about ceremonies, and wanting to start grave discussions on points they have found in the book. My inclination is to answer to these people that I know nothing at all on the subject, that I have now no idea what the book says on any point, and no time for such stuff. I neither know nor care one straw whether the celebrant should or should not have a hassock to kneel on, nor which sort of Monsignore may use a bugia. The obvious thing to me would seem to be that if it is possible to find a grown-up man who cares whether he has a bugia or not, by all means let him have it; envy him whose desire is so easily satisfied.
But I suppose it would be unfair to Burns and Oates to take this line. At any rate, now that I have earned money, nothing shall induce me to look at the book again, unless I have to take up the disgusting burden again someday for a second edition. I suppose, while I was writing the stuff, I acquired a certain amount of knowledge on the subject. Fortunately, I have completely forgotten all this.
Excellent post!! Thanks for the thread :-)
Tridentine ping-worthy!
bttt
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