The Mass in Catholic Zanzibar

In the notable article posted below from The Living Church is recorded news of the Solemn Mass celebrated yesterday by the Anglican Communion Primates in Zanzibar, Tanzania, a great historic centre of Anglo-Catholicism in Africa. The one potential reference in the news and speeches from yesterday I found glaringly absent was the importance for the whole Anglican Communion of the life and witness of Bishop Frank Weston of Zanzibar, a vitally influential Anglo-Catholic pastor and divine for his generation. Bishop Weston was a keynote speaker at the 1923 Anglo-Catholic Congress, on which occasion he gave one of the most stirring and powerful public addresses of his time, a speech given wide coverage by both secular and religious media. He was an indefatigable defender of the Catholic Faith, who opposed all pan-protestant church union schemes and established Zanzibar as an shining example of Catholic teaching and evangelism for the whole of Africa and the world. His life and many works may be studied on the Project Canterbury website: http://anglicanhistory.org/weston/.

A sadness looms over the proceedings yesterday in Zanzibar as one considers what the Anglican Communion once was and might yet still more gloriously have become if only the faith and tradition embodied by Bishop Weston had been allowed to grow and expand throughout Anglicanism. Sunday's Mass was but a glimpse, a faltering shadow or glimmer, of what perhaps could have been Anglicanism if the Catholic Revival had been permitted to succeed. But even as the Catholicism of Bishop Weston was evident in it, the Solemn Mass was a stark demonstration of division and disunity, as seven Primates could not in good conscience receive the Blessed Sacrament at that Eucharistic Celebration. The Anglican Communion, as a true eucharistic communion in the fullest sense of the term, is divided, and probably permanently. Let us learn our lessons well and jealously guard and transmit the inheritance bequeathed to us by Frank Weston.

http://livingchurch.org/publishertlc/viewarticle.asp?ID=3085

No business sessions were held on Feb. 18 as the primates sailed two hours by boat to Zanzibar to celebrate a solemn Eucharist at the Cathedral Church of Christ, also known as the Universities Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) Cathedral.

Considered the most "Catholic" of the traditional mission societies, the UMCA heritage was evident in the color, music and liturgy of the Holy Communion service drawn from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.

Over 600 worshippers packed the Cathedral, built in 1878 on the site of Zanzibar's former slave market in Stone Town. Archbishop Williams served as preacher, Archbishop Donald Mtetemela of Tanzania served as celebrant and the bishops of Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam served as deacon and sub-deacon in the elaborate Anglo-Catholic service which was conducted in both English and Swahili.

In high ritual style, Archbishop Mtetemela sang (sic) the liturgy, as clouds of incense arose from a censer held by the former Archbishop of Zanzibar, John Rahamdhani. The altar service reflected an ecclesial style seldom seen in The Episcopal Church, with copes, maniples, zucchettos and other finery. Yellow roses covered the front of the altar and much of the cathedral in honor of Quinquagesima Sunday.

Following a processional choir of 40 down the aisle to the hymn "Jesus Shall Reign," the primates proceeded down the aisle under a barrage of klieg lights and flashbulbs from the press, with 12 of the 14 new primates seated in canon's stalls around the high altar and the remaining primates seated in the stalls.

At the close of the service Canon Matthew Mhagama offered thanks to the Catholic missionary societies of the Church of England for planting the faith in Central Africa, and to the British Royal Navy for crushing the slave trade. "Whatever their shortcomings," the missionaries of the UMCA were "heroes." Their graves surrounding the cathedral were a testament to the power of the gospel and to their sacrifices for the "Catholic faith," he said.