Ordinariate Patrimony - Evensong becomes a Catholic Devotion!

I'm looking forward to attending Evensong!
This evening there will be an historic celebration of Solemn Evensong & Benediction by the Oxford Ordinariate Group in the Priory Church of the Dominicans in Oxford - Blackfriars. In keeping with the patrimony they have brought with them, this will be followed by strawberries and refreshments. Music will include works by Stanford, Howells, Byrd, and Gibbons and the preacher is Monsignor Andrew Burnham.

I spent many happy hours whilst at university in Durham soaking up the sound of Vespers in the magnificent Durham Cathedral and enjoying the Tudor translation of the psalms - especially the "conies among the rocks". So I think it might be twenty years since I've been to Evensong!

Willaim Oddie has an interesting article about the event and further reflections on the Catholic Herald page. Here is a little from it:

What the Pope, God bless him, has actually done is to re-appropriate a liturgy whose origins were in the first place entirely Catholic. As the Anglo-Catholic liturgist and divine Percy Dearmer (a friend of G K Chesterton) pointed out, the first Anglican Prayer Book “was not created in a vacuum, but derives from several sources. First and foremost was the Sarum Rite, or the Latin liturgy developed in Salisbury in the 13th century, and widely used in England. Two other influences were a reformed Roman Breviary of the Spanish Cardinal Quiñones, and a book on doctrine and liturgy by Hermann von Wied, Archbishop of Cologne.”

The Eucharistic liturgy which emerged was, of course, entirely defective from a Catholic point of view, simply invalid, and deliberately so: it was made brutally clear that this was not the sacrifice of the Mass. But Cardinal Quiñones’s attempt at streamlining the Breviary was adopted virtually in its totality.