Of late, I have been quite dismayed about the quantities of polemical comments to my postings, and wondered if I were not doing the wrong thing or frightening people away by being too forceful. One issue we face is that of people being frightened by words with emotional meanings. They understand words emotionally. No amount of rational explanation seems to dislodge a prejudice or the instinct to cling onto the familiar through fear of the unknown. And, this instinct is often proven to be right when ordinary people are abused by narcissistic and over-authoritarian clergy who think they know what is best for us.
It is difficult for me to gauge what Sarum means to some people! As someone trained in philosophy and theology, with ten years experience as a professional translator, I have acquired a certain ability to understand and interpret words with intellectual precision, going from their etymology to their conventional use and the context of a text. A technical translator cannot afford to understand words emotionally; otherwise someone might get killed or maimed by using a machine according to erroneous instructions!
I would like readers to be assured that I do have pastoral sense as a priest, and would never advocate depriving people of their patrimony or the things they love, even the Prayer of Humble Access, which I myself find very beautiful and devotional as a preparation for receiving Holy Communion. The general consensus here is that the Prayer Book is the basis of the Anglican Patrimony. OK, it rains in England! Birds have wings! There’s no surprise here. The question is how the Prayer Book can be supplemented with Sarum material to restore its inner coherence and harmonise this tradition with the liturgical life of the Catholic Church. I remain convinced that this is the way to go without picking up bits and pieces from sappy and sentimental nineteenth century Catholicism which is foreign to Anglicanism.
I softened my stand when commenting Fr Phillips' posting on the Prayer Book basis of the BDW, and was overjoyed when he saw the wisdom of using Sarum material to flesh out the parsimonious Prayer Book material, so that the result would be something Anglicans are familiar with. Fr Hunwicke's approach is much more difficult. Other than a minority of Anglicans using the English Missal, there would seem to be no point in replicating the Latin rite Roman Catholic liturgical status quo having linguistic style as the only distinguishing point. But, perhaps that can be left as an option. Who knows? I’m not the Roman Curia who has to decide what is to be allowed and what not allowed!
I agree that Sarum could only be an "extraordinary" use and not something that could be imposed in an ordinary parish. Similarly, impose the Tridentine rite on ordinary parishes and people will vote with their feet! I find Fr Phillips' position the most realistic, which is not surprising. He is a highly experienced parish pastor. Get the 1979 and the Paul VI rite out (I am not denigrating the modern Roman rite in its proper ecclesial context), and produce a more "international" BDW based on 1549 (or English 1928) and Sarum, with some optional modern improvements like expanded lectionaries and selections of prefaces. Things are on the right track, and will be refined in time.
The big question is that famous liturgical commission, knowing whether it exists and is working, it no longer exists and its work is done and the books are waiting for "Christmas Day", or whether it is a project for the future.
OK, I’ll pick myself up and carry on working and contributing to the future of the Ordinariates. I think we will get things right, but let us do everything on a good intellectual and historically-conscious basis, otherwise we will go on making mistakes because of runaway emotions. I’m not accusing anyone any more than myself. We have a big responsibility, and we can’t afford to screw it up.
I also address a word to zealous Catholic folk who have been wounded by the way the Roman liturgical reform was imposed in the 1970’s. I won’t teach any lessons here, but we do have to learn to be less anxious about everything and less intense.
Above all, I ask your prayers and the strength of the Holy Spirit…
"… the Roman Curia … has to decide what is to be allowed and what not allowed" – not very Anglican-patrimonial.
Fair enough. I suppose not all our readers are interested in the Ordinariate project or Roman authority the way it has always been even without Ultramontanist exaggerations.
Perhaps you imply that in the true Anglican patrimony, there is no authority and everything is allowed. Not for me to judge…
I would like to re-state my many thanks to you, Father Chadwick, for the gratuitous service you have provided us. The liturgical discussions/arguments (I’ll admit that I like polemics) are a necessary part of our process of conversion and your particular view of things has been eye opening. Bounteous thanks as well to Fr. Phillips and Fr. Hunwicke, though your proposals were not as "front and center" as Fr. Chadwick's have been on this blog – there is wisdom in a multitude of counselors. I would say that if you three men were commissioned to draft our proper Anglican Catholic liturgy we would all be in the safest of hands for there is not a modernist bone among you. You are all in my prayers.
Although I wouldn't have thought twice about Sarum before reading Father Chadwick's postings, I confess his resolute advocacy is beginning to chip away at my defences! I'm extremely glad that I won't have to decide on the liturgies which finally emerge!
I would however worry about rassourcement as a general strategy, whether the sources are Sarum or apostolic Christianity. It was the attempt to get behind the Tridentine 'accretions' which is behind much of post Vatican II remaking of the liturgy. 21st century Anglicanism is a hotch potch liturgically and in other ways, but it has certainly been influenced by Cranmer, the Catholic Reformation of Trent, as well as Victorian English (and Roman) sentimentality. That's part of our organic growth and, whatever we make of that, I'd rather we pruned and perhaps endured apparent flaws than resorted to radical remaking.
On a slightly different point, it's easy to think of the Anglican patrimony as being simply an Anglo-Catholic patrimony. Shouldn't we think of a general Anglican patrimony? (Roughly, aren't there protestant aspects of Anglicanism that might also prove fruitful in a Catholic context? Metrical psalms anyone??)
It's interesting to consider the idea of pushing for the Protestant dimension of Anglican patrimony, but there are some observations I would like to make.
Protestantism is by definition a refusal of the Papacy, the Episcopate, the sacrificing priesthood and the Sacraments in their full meaning as accepted in the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Protestant Anglicans are unlikely to be remotely interested in entering the Catholic Church via an Ordinariate or any other way. If they are against the ordination of women and "pan-sexuality", they can simply join another church or found their own.
The idea of restoring north-end celebration and pre-Oxford Movement Anglicanism as I described to some extent in one of my old articles http://www.theanglocatholic.com/2010/01/the-importance-of-the-position-of-the-altar/ is hardly consistent with the ideas of the present Pope.
As far as I am aware, all Anglicans interested in the Ordinariate project are Anglo-Catholics. Those attracted to "Elizabethan Settlement" latitudinarianism, like the Protestants, will not join an Ordinariate.
There are still a few metrical psalms in our hymn books. Why not? They can be sung as hymns like any other. Vernacular Bibles and liturgies are part of the Protestant legacy, but have also been a part of the Catholic mainstream too. The Douay-Rheims Bible is older than the King James version and the English is just as beautifully written. There have been vernacular liturgies in parts of Europe since the 14th century and Rome has allowed Mass in Chinese for a very long time.
But, all in all, I see only the Anglo-Catholic patrimony (with its cultural and liturgical dimension reaching back only as far as the mid nineteenth century with Ritualism) going into the Ordinariates.
You have a point about liturgical hodge-podges. Every rite in the Church, including the Tridentine, is a hodge-podge of Roman and Gallican sources , and all man-made.
I could conceive of Rome simply letting the Ordinariates continue with what they are doing now – and envisaging something more definitive in the future. Such an idea is absolutely anathema to Tridentine Catholics, but it was how things were done in the early Anglican Use parishes before the BDW received its definitive approval.
Perhaps there might be a convergence onto the Anglican Missal (more Prayer Book content than the English Missal) and that would end up being the official Anglican Use liturgy or one of two or three. Neither Fr Phillips nor I know what could be in Rome's mind. Is it going to be free-for-all and organic development or a brand new book to which all must conform? Paradigms are changing in the Roman Church, and I find it impossible to predict anything.
Yes, it is important to maintain an Anglican, not just an Anglo-Catholic, patrimony. Yes, I personally would like to recover the metrical psalms – but this is almost as much archeology as Sarum!
Incidentally, most of the translations of Office Hymns in the Anglican hymn books are from Sarum sources, on the pretence that it was English. Similarly with hymns like "All glory, laud and honour" and "Hail thee festival day". So we are singing more Sarum than we think.
In passing, somebody attributed the rank of "Canon" to me a while back. For the truth's sake, I am not. Clerk in Holy Orders, Master of Arts and of Letters at the University of Oxford, Fellow of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants – but not Canon.
Inasmuch as Protestantism is defined essentially as a protest against Catholicism clearly it can't be imported. But to the extent it names a movement with a culture and a history, not all of which aspects are deliberately opposed to Western catholicism, there may be aspects which can be imported. Although I wouldn't rule out liturgical forms being part of this Protestant patrimony, the issues are perhaps rather more obvious in the case of domestic spirituality and theology. It strikes me as simply a pity if (eg) Hooker, Bunyan, and Law don't end up as being considered as part of the patrimony. But to do this requires, well, a hermeneutic of discontinuity: a way of engaging with tainted, but valuable, traditions. Anyway, I'd be interested in reactions. Certainly, given that the Ordinariates will be almost exclusively Anglo-Catholic, such a hermeneutic would require an imaginative leap into perhaps unfamiliar territory. But the Tractarians had to do this and it might not be a worthless activity a) if the Ordinariates are going to preserve some of the breadth of Anglicanism; and b) if the Ordinariates have (as I have seen suggested) a role in reaching out to non-Anglican Protestants.
Would you like to write a guest article about this idea? I personally wouldn't feel very motivated to write about Hooker and Bunyan and pre-Oxford Movement Anglicanism. But I think you are not wrong. I wrote an article some time ago called The Benedictine Settlement.
But we must be aware that a future breadth and comprehensiveness will not resemble what we had under the British Establishment. That corpse is being laid to rest and the vultures are waiting for the scraps. But, I agree with you that we can't have another narrow vision of something like the Society of St Pius X (who, for example, set up a chapel in the Archdiocese of Lyons and celebrated the Roman Rite, not the traditional Lyons rite – still the living rite of the diocese until the 1970's).
Another part of me says that we should not waste too much time with Hooker, communion tables and wine flagons and rather cast our minds to the new breath opening up under Benedict XVI.
Anyway, write an article and send it to me via the e-mail address on my own site (or to Christian Campbell). I'll post it for you, and then we'll see what the comments say.
Well, Father, that's my intellectual bluff called! Yes, I'll try and put something together on this and will be in touch.
My bishop likes to say that there are Anglicans who are Catholics, and Catholics who are Anglicans. He is the latter, I the former. Yet I expect we shall both meet merrily in The Ordinariate. In Canada in the ACCC (TAC) we have two liturgical works well under way: a new missal based on the Canadian BCP (1962) with the addition of the Sarum Offertory prayers and Introits and Graduals etc. and additional Masses deemed necessary to make a complete missal, and a new Office Book. The Office Book is being tested by some at this time, and the missal is in use in the Cathedral Parish in Victoria to test it out and check for errors; I am privileged to say Mass or hear Mass daily as read from this missal. The texts have been sent to Rome for comment. If approved of, they can be added into the mix when a new prayer book is being readied. The Mass text includes both the Canadian Canon and the Roman Canon. I suppose until things are sorted a bit, the missal won't get printed except perhaps for a small number, which is unfortunate.