During Lent, those who attend the full series of Musical Oratories in the church on Wednesday evenings will be familiar with the invaluable contribution made by all of the three choirs with which we are currently blessed here. The superb and professional London Oratory Choir, the world acclaimed Schola from our senior school and the excellent parish Junior Choir each take it in turns to enhance the meditations on penitential themes that are led by the fathers over the course of four Wednesday evenings. Our holy father St Philip was a pioneer in this form of spiritual exercise, and it is said that the Oratory in Rome is the origin of the word “oratorio” when used to denote those great choral compositions of the baroque period.
At some stage during the musical Oratories, we are usually treated to the sublimely haunting motet Civitas Sancti Tui by the English composer William Byrd. A lamentation over the ruin of Jerusalem during the Babylonian captivity as described in the Old Testament, it was sung this year by the Schola at our second Musical Oratory, and is always repeated by our professional choir on Good Friday during the Veneration of the Cross. Its words poignantly convey the desolation of Calvary and point us to another destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple which would follow as a consequence of Our Lord’s Crucifixion: “Thy holy city has become a wilderness. Zion has been deserted; Jerusalem has been left desolate” (Is 64:10).
As a Catholic and a recusant, Byrd witnessed the religious devastation of this land during the Protestant revolt, when altars were stripped, shrines demolished, and relics desecrated. Civitas Sancti Tui seems to have been composed soon after the unspeakably savage martyrdom of St Edmund Campion at Tyburn in 1581, but it has been suggested that it was first inspired during Byrd’s late teens, when he witnessed the removal of the Blessed Sacrament from St Paul’s Cathedral after the death of the last Catholic monarch Mary Tudor in 1558.
Lest we should ever be tempted to take our blessings for granted, we should sometimes reflect on what it must be like to live as a Catholic with no access to the Blessed Sacrament. The uncanny sense of emptiness that is experienced when visiting a beautiful medieval church is a reminder of what our ancestors were so brutally deprived of when the celebration of Mass was outlawed on pain of death and the Blessed Sacrament banished from the realm. Thanks be to God there were heroic priests who continued to offer the Holy Sacrifice in secret, and brave Catholic laity who hid them. The earthly price could not have been more gruesome, nor the eternal reward more glorious.
The closest that most of us will have come to anything like real sacramental deprivation will have been during the unwelcome restrictions that were imposed during the Coronavirus saga. It was horrendous to hear reports of sinners denied Confession, and of the sick and elderly dying without the consolation of the Sacrament of Extreme Unction and deprived of “Viaticum”, that supernatural food for the journey into eternity which is Our Lord’s Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. What a relief it was when church doors finally reopened. We can only hope and pray that if ever the Holy Mass is driven underground again in this country God will grant us priests with the courage to provide God’s children with the sacraments even if it means risking liberty, life and limb.
How delighted a Catholic recusant like William Byrd would have been to know that one day his sacred compositions would accompany Catholic worship publicly in English churches where Our Lord would be reserved in tabernacles once again. How thrilled he and those English martyrs who were slaughtered at Tyburn and elsewhere would be to walk into the London Oratory to find the Blessed Sacrament enthroned and exposed for public adoration over the High Altar amid a blaze of hundreds of candles during our annual Forty Hours Devotions this month. The Quarant’Ore will open with a High Mass of Exposition and Procession of the Blessed Sacrament on Tuesday 12th March at 6.30pm, and will close as usual with Mendelssohn’s Lauda Sion followed by Solemn Benediction at 7pm on Thursday 14th March. Making time to participate in these devotions and to rest in silent adoration in front of Our Lord is one valuable way of keeping Lent and showing our gratitude for His sacramental Presence with us. Let us make the most of it, and never take Our Lord’s Real Presence with us for granted.
Father Julian Large