Blast from the Past

A reader as alerted me to this, a letter from one Fr Steven Fisher to Fr John Zuhlsdorf of WDTPRS. This is not the same Fr Steven Fisher is it?

'Fr Z, 

For information (and publication if you wish). As well as the weekly EF Low Mass on a Sunday morning at 8.30am we are introducing regular EF Sung Masses in this parish, thanks to a quartet of music scholars from our local university in Canterbury. We will be starting on Sunday 7th December at 6pm with Palestrina’s Missa Brevis. 

The Parish is St Ethelbert’s, 72 Hereson Road, Ramsgate, Kent, UK
(Tel: +44 1843 592071; www.rc.net/southwark/ramsgate). 

In 597AD St Augustine landed in Ebbsfleet (which is in the parish of Ramsgate) and converted the pagan King, Ethelbert. We are delighted to be regularly offering Mass in a form that would have been, in its essentials, the same as that offered by Saint Augustine when he arrived on these shores. 

P.S. Except on Sundays we face ad orientem at all Masses (OF & EF,
including school ones). 

Brick by brick… 

With my best regards
Fr Steven Fisher'

Nowt so queer as folk is there!? Brick by brick, indeed! I guess we can all agree the Church was a different place in 2008. New era and all that...This can't be the same priest...can it? And is this the same Fr Steven Fisher as described and quoted in The Telegraph?

For Catholics in Ramsgate, Kent, Fr Steven Fisher is the man of the hour. Parishioners of the Pugin-designed St Augustine’s in the town had feared their church might be about to close but now Fr Fisher, who serves a neighbouring parish, says he will celebrate a Tridentine Mass there every Sunday. 

Augustus Welby Pugin, who was something of a social theorist as well as an architect, designed St Augustine’s as part of his vision of an ideal Catholic community in the area, though as he died at 40 (of syphilis, probably) he didn’t live to see the church completed.
It is profusely decorated and Pevsner called it a “marvel”. 

But earlier this month the Benedictines, who had looked after the church for more than a century, announced they were leaving their abbey and seeking a new home, so the congregation of St Augustine’s, understandably in this age of padlocked churches, feared the diocese would close it. 

Then Fr Fisher, the parish priest of St Ethelbert’s, Ramsgate, stepped in, proposing to parishioners that he could transfer the Tridentine Mass that’s currently offered at St Ethelbert's to St Augustine’s. 

“I gave the people a democratic vote,” he says, as if that was the most natural thing to do in the Catholic Church. They voted by 75 to zero in favour of the plan. From January, a Tridentine Mass will be celebrated in the Lady Chapel of St Augustine’s on Sundays at 8.30 in the morning. 

“The people seem happy about it,” Fr Fisher says. He has also engaged a caretaker to open up the church to visitors on Sunday afternoons. 

Fr Fisher, who sounds very friendly and sensible on the phone, is keen on the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, as it's also known, although “it was Bishop John Hine [an auxiliary bishop in Southwark] who mooted this possibility to me”. 

The Extraordinary Form particularly suits St Augustine’s, according to Fr Fisher, since it’s the Mass as Pugin would have known it and besides, he says, breezily: “I’ve been saying it weekly since before Summorum Pontificum.”

Was the same Fr Fisher at Our Lady of the Rosary now discontinuing the 'bi-ritual' standard of the parish running a 'bi-ritual' parish previously, as recently as 2009 onwards?  What possible objection could Fr Fisher have to the model of Our Lady of the Rosary established by his predecessor? And as for 'visitors' and the conflict that may or may not pose to a (welcoming) Christian community, I would imagine Ramsgate received quite a few. The mystery deepens, the fog thickens and this priest begins to take on an identity that is somewhat 'enigmatic'.