Sunday Transfers

Bishop William Kenney, the apostolic administrator of Birmingham diocese, will this morning lead a Corpus Christi procession atMapledurham House, near Reading, after Mass in its historic chapel.

That's good to hear. For today is the real feast of Corpus Christi. Three years ago, the Bishops of England and Wales high-handedly moved the feast to the following Sunday, in a diktat that also monkeyed around with other Holydays of Obligation.

Many priests and people have never reconciled themselves to this change, or the insulting lack of consultation. So it's interesting that Bishop Kenney, who is running Birmingham diocese until a new bishop is appointed next year (why such a ridiculous delay?), is presiding at this Mass - in the ordinary form, I assume - organised by the local parish in Caversham.

It's important to emphasise that it wasn't just traditionalists who were upset by the bishops' de haut en bas ruling. The moving of the great weekday feasts of Epiphany, Ascension and Corpus Christi was a little piece of iconoclasm, comparable to the reordering of churches to make them look less like Catholic places of worship and more like social security offices. Last year, the bishops even attempted (but failed) to get a ruling out of Rome that would have stopped celebrations of the old feast days in the extraordinary form.

So does Bishop Kenney's wise and generous gesture signify a change of heart by the bishops as a whole? That's going too far, probably. But I think that some bishops, at least, now recognise that their experiment with the calendar has caused nothing but unhappiness and confusion. (Damian Thompson blog)