Posts tagged Liturgy
Embolism
Mar 8th
Oh dear! Embolism? That sounds like a very serious condition requiring immediate medical care. Actually, it is a prayer of the Mass.
I would like to examine another part of the Mass that needs attention for the purposes of a revised authorised Anglican liturgy in the Catholic Church. This is the beginning of what is often called the Communion rite following the Canon of the Mass.
There has been some variation as to the place of the Our Father at Mass, but that was settled fairly rapidly. There is evidence to suggest that Gregory the Great moved it from after the Communion to its present place in the Roman rite. Its place in the Eastern Rite is always just before the elevation and fraction. In all rites then it comes at the end of the Eucharistic prayer. The embolism is an expansion of its last clause, praying the Lord to deliver us indeed from all manner of evil.
Its form in the older Roman form and the Use of Sarum is thus:
Deliver us, O Lord, we beseech thee, from all evils, past, present, and to come: and at the intercession of the blessed ever Virgin Mary, Mother of God, with thy blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and with Andrew, and all the Saints, graciously grant us peace in all our days: that by the help of thine availing mercy we may ever both be free from sin and safe from all distress. Through the same Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. R. Amen.
The Byzantine Liturgy, imitated by the modern Roman rite, ends this prayer by another ending – “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory”. This ending is often added to the Lord’s Prayer in the Anglican tradition, but with the Embolism entirely omitted.
The modern Roman rite (new ICEL translation) gives this abbreviated form:
Deliver us, Lord, we pray, from every evil, graciously grant peace in our days, that, sustained by the help of your mercy, we may be always free from sin and safe from all distress, as we await the blessed hope, the coming of our Saviour, Jesus Christ. R. For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours now and for ever.
The old Roman rite and most uses thereof have the Fraction during the doxology of the Embolism. The modern Roman rite does not. Instead the order is radically altered to incorporate the Pax before the Fraction. Only after the Fraction and Commixture is the Agnus Dei said:
Taught by the Saviour’s command and formed by the word of God, we have the courage to say: Our Father …
Deliver us, Lord, we pray, from every evil, graciously grant peace in our days, that, sustained by the help of your mercy, we may be always free from sin and safe from all distress, as we await the blessed hope, the coming of our Saviour, Jesus Christ.
R. For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours now and for ever.
Lord Jesus Christ, who said to your Apostles, Peace I leave you, my peace I give you, look not on our sins, but on the faith of your Church, and be pleased to grant her peace and unity in accordance with your will. Amen.
The peace of the Lord be with you always. R. And with your spirit.
Let us offer each other the sign of peace.
Fraction.
May this mingling of the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ bring eternal life to us who receive it.
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, grant us peace.
The present Anglican Use Mass is even more terse:
And now, as our Saviour Christ hath taught us, we are bold to say,
People and Celebrant
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.
The celebrant breaks the consecrated Bread and puts the third part of the Host into the chalice saying:
May this mingling of the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ bring eternal life to us who receive it.
A period of silence is kept. Then shall be sung or said.
[Alleluia.] Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us; Therefore let us keep the feast. [Alleluia.]
In Lent, Alleluia is omitted, and may be omitted at other times except during Easter Season.
The following anthem may be sung or said here:
O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.
O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.
O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, grant us thy peace.
Our Lord at the Last Supper took bread and broke it, and so it follows that the consecrated bread is broken in all liturgies. The Gallican and Eastern rites have always been much more elaborate.
The Commixture is intrinsically associated with the Fraction, and this is the dropping of a part of the Host into the chalice containing the Precious Blood. The ancient Roman rite (Ordines Romani I, II, III, etc.) was highly complex, and present practice is but a remnant. At the end of the Embolism, the archdeacon held the chalice before the Pope and he put into it the Sancta. The Sancta were a particle consecrated at a former Mass and reserved till now: the Pope had saluted it at the beginning of Mass. He made three signs of the cross over the chalice and put the Sancta into it at the words: Pax Domini sit semper vobiscum. This rite illustrates the continuity of the Sacrifice between one celebration of the Mass and the next, for in the absolute, there is only one Mass, that of Christ.
The Pope then took a loaf (yes, it was leavened bread at the time, or large unleavened breads like Jewish families use for the Seder), broke off a part, left it on the altar and went to his throne. It was only at the moment of the Pope’s Communion that he would make the three signs of the cross with the small piece of consecrated bread over the chalice held by the archdeacon, saying: Fiat commixtio et consecratio corporis et sanguinis Domini nostri Iesu Christi accipientibus nobis in vitam aeternam. Amen. Pax tecum. R. Et cum spiritu tuo. and put it into the chalice. He communicated under the species of wine. There were thus two distinct commixtures, first of the Sancta at the Pax, secondly of the newly consecrated species at the Communion. By the eleventh century, the rite of the Sancta disappeared, leaving the second commixture, as we have it now. This is seen in Ordo Romanus XIV.
It would seem that the distinction between the Sancta and the Fermentum come from this. The latter is the Blessed Sacrament sent by the Pope to all the churches of Rome to emphasise the communion of the Church. The order of this rite in the Roman rite and the slight variations thereof in northern European local uses thus come from a long evolution and simplification of the rite. The Sancta is certainly the origin of our practice of reserving the Blessed Sacrament in a tabernacle or a hanging pyx. It emphasises the unity between yesterday’s Mass and today’s.
I would very much like to see the Embolism and Fraction / Commixture rite restored in the Anglican Use to the Sarum model:
Let us pray. As our Saviour Christ hath commanded and taught us, we are bold to say :
Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.Deliver us, O Lord, we beseech thee, from all evils, past, present, and to come : and at the intercession of the blessed ever Virgin Mary, Mother of God, with thy blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and with Andrew, and all the Saints, graciously grant us peace in all our days : that by the help of thine availing mercy we may ever both be free from sin and safe from all distress. Through the same Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. R. Amen.
The peace + of the + Lord be + always with you.
R. And with thy spirit.O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.
O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.
O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, grant us thy peace.May this holy + mingling of the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ be unto me, and to all who receive it, salvation of spirit and body, and a wholesome preparation for eternal life, through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.
Thoughts on an Anglican Use Mass
Mar 8th
I would like to advance here a few disordered reflections about the form which an Anglican Use of the Roman Rite might take. These are nothing but my own ill-informed speculations interwoven with my own uninformed notions and prejudices, and should be taken as worth no more than such productions normally are, or perhaps, for those more charitably disposed, as written ruminations.
“The Anglican Use of the Roman Rite:” this phrase indicates that whatever form of liturgy this will be, it will take the form of a subset of the Roman Rite, and not a separate “Anglican Rite.” There has been a good deal of terminological and historical confusion in these areas. One often sees in the context of the Latin Church references to the “Ambrosian Rite,” the “Braga Rite,” the “Carthusian Rite,” the “Cistercian Rite,” the “Dominican Rite,” the “Lyonnaise Rite,” the “Mozarabic Rite,” the “Sarum Rite” and the like, but this seems to be a confusion of the past four centuries (or a little more), reflecting the dominance of the 1570 codification and reform of the “Roman Rite of Rome” as the “Tridentine Rite,” which was to replace all other variants save those that could document 200 years of history. All of these “rites,” save the Ambrosian Rite and the Mozarabic Rite, are or were, variants of the Roman Rite, and so more properly termed “uses” (as, in England, with the “Use of Sarum,” the “Use of Bangor,” the “Use of Hereford,” the “Use of Lincoln” and the “Use of York” before the 1540s); only the Carthusian and the Braga (that of the Portuguese diocese of that name) uses survive today in their integrity (the Carthusian “unreformed,” the Braga “reformed”) although occasionally one encounters celebration of the old Cistercian and Dominican Mass “rites.” The Ambrosian Rite of Milan (and neighboring areas) is either a very ancient variation of the Roman Rite, which since at least the Fourth Century has been subject to both Gallican and Eastern influences, or an originally distinct rite that has undergone waves of “romanization” from a very early date, while the Mozarabic Rite, which until recent decades, when it was revived (and “restored,” that is, “reformed”) in the Spanish monastery of San Juan de Silos and in several parishes in Toledo that were Mozarabic until the 1490s, was celebrated only in a side chapel in Toledo Cathedral, is an entirely distinct rite from the Roman.
One strong implication of “Anglican Use” is that it will have no other Eucharistic Prayers (EPs) or “Prayers of Consecration” than those found in the Roman Rite. The Mozarabic Rite aside, none of these other “uses” or “rites” — call them what you will — had any other than the Roman Canon; this was so even of the Ambrosian Rite, although for Maundy Thursday and Holy Saturday only it had versions of the Roman Canon into which substantial proper prayers for those festivals were inserted, a practice unique to Milan. (The 1970s “reform” of the Ambrosian Rite introduced two new EPs, additional to the three new EPs introduced into the Roman Rite in 1969.) I have to say that I agree with the distinguished English Anglican liturgist and historian of the Early Roman Rite, Geoffrey Grimshaw Willis (1914-1982), regarding his dislike of these banal and (as he thought) un-Roman disfigurements of the Roman Rite (see his outspoken “The New Eucharistic Prayers: Some Comments,” The Heythrop Journal, XII:1 [January 1971], pp. 5-28), and if the reports are right that in whatever reconfigured Anglican Use Mass is eventually promulgated by Rome the “contemporary English” Rite II will wholly disappear, and with it these EPs, I would judge it no loss.
And well it should disappear, along with the 1979 Psalter. An Anglican Use based on, and following the pattern of, the 1979 Episcopalian Prayer Book makes no sense on a world-wide basis. Moreover, since the lame and dreary ICEL translation of the Roman Rite liturgical books is soon to be replaced by one occupying a distinctly higher linguistic “register,” it makes little sense to use any other “contemporary English” than that in use in the Roman Rite itself. However, if one of the advantages of the Anglican Use of the Roman Rite is, from a “Benedictine” vantage, to inspire and in its distinctive way exemplify a “reform of the 1960s ‘reform‘” of the Roman Rite in the direction of resacralization and a recovery of lost ground, then it makes much more sense that it should be one distinctive and consistently traditional thing, in style as well as substance, than an attempt to be all things to all Anglicans. Those Anglicans whose liturgical sensibilities are “contemporary” may well prefer to seek out the more elevated version of the Roman Rite which I hope will soon make its appearance. This is leading us fairly clearly towards the “Missal tradition” of Anglo-Catholicism in the last century, the effort that produced the English Missal, the American Missal and the Anglican Missal. To adopt or adapt one of these — my own tastes incline me more towards the English Missal — would produce a coherent and dignified rite, and would eliminate once and for all the bizarre phenomenon of the 1970 Roman Rite Offertory in ICEL English thrust into the midst of the “Cranmerian English” Rite I.
Still, and despite what I wrote above, I have speculated at times about the possibility of alternative “Anglican-like” EPs, perhaps for weekday celebrations or for certain set days on which the length of the Roman Canon, especially if said or chanted aloud, might be an inconvenience. I am going to avoid (with one partial exception) Twentieth-Century Anglican EPs, and likewise the “mainline” 1552, 1559, 1662 English rite, and its derivatives, as inadequate for Catholic purposes — by which I mean, impossible for the Catholic Church to accept the use of which as a valid EP [1]. The leaves the 1549 English rite, and the Scottish Episcopalian tradition from 1637 onwards down through 1764 to 1929, with the American Episcopalian tradition from 1789 to 1928 as a side-branch of this.
As to the 1549 rite’s EP I have never been able to understand its attraction for some Anglo-Catholics. I accept the reading of Cranmer’s theology underlying that prayer as fundamentally Reformed (in the Swiss sense) that has been advanced by Anglican scholars such as Dom Gregory Dix (1901-1952) and Professor Edward Craddock Ratcliff (1896-1967) — the former a well-known Anglican Benedictine monk and Anglo-Papalist, the latter the holder of various academic posts in Cambridge, Oxford and London, culminating as Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, and who was on the verge of entering the Orthodox Church at the time of his death — even if expressed in the most ambiguous of ways and in very “traditional,” that is, “Western-Catholic-looking” — forms. An EP of such an ambivalent, if not heretical, nature would certainly not be suitable for Catholic use. The 1549 EP is also, very clearly, an attempt at “reforming” the Roman Canon, the traditional and unique EP of the whole Western Church for centuries before the Sixteenth Century, save in the Mozarabic Rite, as well as (until the time of the post-Vatican II “reforms”) the unique EP of the Roman Church, and it seems to be that an EP conceived with the presumption of setting to right the presumed errors of the Church of Rome, the prima sedes and mater et magistra of all churches, is to act very much as Ham did towards his father, Noah, and with even less occasion to do so. Like Geoffrey Grimshaw Willis, I admire the Roman Canon for its unfathomable antiquity, as perhaps the oldest EP in continual use in Christendom, alongside that of Addai and Mari in the Semitic Christianity of the Catholic Chaldeans and the “Nestorian” Assyrians, the roots of which probably extend back into the Third Century or earlier. Of course, as a Ukrainian Catholic I cherish as well the marvelous, and typically Hellenistic, integration of form and content in those EPs such as those of St. Basil the Great, St. John Chrysostom, St. James of Jerusalem (possibly the work of St. Cyril of Jerusalem), and many others (most of them preserved in Syriac versions) which form one of the great glories of Christendom, and which were possibly the gift of the Church of Antioch, on the crossroads of the Hellenistic and Semitic worlds, to the Christian world — and which had so beneficent an impact on Anglican high-churchmen in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, to whose work we must now turn.
The ill-fated Scottish Prayer Book of 1637, which occasioned the overthrow of episcopacy in Scotland in 1638 and began the process which culminated in the outbreak of civil war in England in 1642 and the temporary downfall of the monarchy there and the execution of King Charles I, rearranged the sequence of prayers around the eucharistic consecration in the 1559 English Prayer Book (the mild revisions of 1604 did not touch the Communion Service) to give a fuller, and more traditional looking, EP, although their wording was not altered. When episcopacy was restored in Scotland in 1661, the Prayer Book was not, and it was only after the reabolition of episcopacy in 1689 that, in the years immediately after 1700 the remaining Scottish Episcopalians began to adopt set liturgical forms, some of them the 1661 English Prayer Book service, others the 1637 service, and still others their own rearrangements or revisions of the 1637 service. In this they were influenced to a considerable degree by the liturgical revisions of the English Nonjurors, although the never went so far as the main body of the English Nonjurors, who in 1718 substituted for the 1661 Prayer book EP a translation of the long anaphora found in the Liturgy of St. James of Jerusalem. In 1764 a group of Scottish Episcopalian bishops produced a revised “Communion Office” whose use subsequently became general among Scottish Episcopalians. There were, however, a number of “English Chapels” in Scotland which were under the authority of the Church of England and followed the 1661 Prayer Book, and after these were transferred to the Scottish Episcopal Church from the 1840s onward a determined attempt was made to replace the 1764 Communion Office with that of the 1661 English liturgy as the normative one. The 1764 service was never abolished, but various canons enacted in 1863 and in force until 1912 effectively marginalized its use — but then the tide turned, and in 1929 the SEC adopted a Prayer Book, the EP of which was a moderate revision of that of 1764. This remains the official Prayer Book of the SEC, although since the 1970s it has effectively been replaced by a more anodyne set of “contemporary Anglican” style of services, issued in 1970 and 1982. Meanwhile, however, and as a result of the consecration of Samuel Seabury on November 14, 1784 by bishops of the SEC and of Seabury’s promise to attempt to secure the adoption of the 1764 Scottish Communion office as that of the the newly-formed Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States, in 1789 the Episcopal Church adopted a modified version of that 1764 service — “modified,” it has to be said, in a more Protestant and “Cranmerian” direction — which, as modified in 1892 and 1928 (neither of these modifications affected the wording of the EP, although that of 1928 removed the “Prayer of Humble Access” from its position between the Sanctus and the Prayer of Consecration, where, following its position in the English 1661 rite, it had been placed in 1789 to a position after that Prayer and the immediately ensuing Lord’s Prayer; in the 1637 and 1764 Scottish rites, as in the English 1549 rite that Prayer also was positioned subsequently to the EP and Lord’s Prayer) remained the official rite of the Episcopal Church until 1979.
The texts of these three EPs can be found here:
for those who wish to consult or compare them at this point. What I will now do is to present excerpts from these three prayers, make a few comparative remarks, and then, as one rushing in as a fool where angels fear to tread, to produce a melded version of the 1764 and 1929 EPs which may seem to some suitable, and almost ideal for use in any Anglican Use liturgy. I will thereafter, in a subsequent post, go on to consider the EP of the “Liturgy of St. Tikhon” which has been used in the 1970s in some “Western Rite” parishes of the Antiochian Orthodox Church in North America, which affords a striking example, as I see it, of how not to do this sort of thing.
The Great Prayer
Mar 6th
This is the title of a wonderful little book by Hugh Ross Williamson written in 1955, dedicated to the sacredness and beauty of the Roman Canon, sometimes called the Gregorian Canon. For your meditation and consideration, I reproduce an extract from the introduction of the this book.
* * *
Whether or not Jesus Christ was born of woman, lived, suffered, died, was buried and rose from the dead to ascend in glory to Heaven cannot be established by ordinary historical evidence. The only witness is in the traditions and writings of the Church.
The story of Christ rests entirely on the word of His early followers. The New Testament, (which was not finally authenticated by the Church till three hundred years later,) supplements and in part embodies the traditional teaching of the Church. And in the New Testament we can read how Christ consistently refused to give the kind of’ sign ‘ which would have found its way into ordinary history. When tempted to perform a miracle by throwing Himself down from the Temple when Jerusalem was crowded with visitors from all over the world, He refused to do it. When He was on the cross and Jerusalem had come out to see Him die, He was challenged again: “Come down from the Cross and we will believe.” It would indeed have been stupor mundi, but again He refused. When He rose from the dead, He did not show Himself to Pilate or to Caiaphas or to the crowds who had watched him die. He showed Himself, as Peter admitted: “Not to all the people, but to us . . .”
Reflections on Liturgy and Much More
Mar 6th
As some of the older clergy in both Anglican and Catholic traditions are what I would call ‘1970’s dinosaurs’, still thinking about what needs to be discarded in order to be relevant to modern man, some of the younger folk are labouring to recover what the older men spent their careers on destroying. We have recently discussed the language of the liturgy, namely archaic and modern English. Language is important, but not the only consideration in the liturgy.
One of the very first articles I wrote for The Anglo-Catholic was on the Eastward Position. There is also an extremely interesting article in The New Liturgical Movement on Bringing Verticality and Presence back to Free-standing Altars. In our pilgrimage to the Catholic Church, we are obviously concerned for our Anglican patrimony. We should also take Catholic patrimony to heart, the very patrimony that Pope Benedict XVI is trying to recover – and for which he needs the help of Anglicans. It is a task for which men of vision and energy are needed, men who are capable of seeing far beyond the confines of the ‘establishment’ box which perhaps nurtured them.
The concept of the ‘horizontal’ liturgy is hard to explain without an illustration. I have carefully avoided the caricatures many traditionalists choose of clown masses or other such extreme abuses. This is a run-of-the-mill concelebrated Mass one would find in the vast majority of Catholic churches in the world. The main celebrant is wearing a chasuble, and the concelebrants are wearing albs and stoles. What strikes me in this scene is the horizontality of everything. The altar table has nothing on it other than the cloth, the chalice, paten and ciborium (or a metal dish), a missal and perhaps a microphone. The candlesticks are free-standing and the crucifix is off to one side. Asymmetry is often a device for destroying verticality. One very often comes across a pair of stubby candles on one end of the altar (facing the people) and the crucifix on the other end, the microphone in the middle. Here in France, a common arrangement is the chalice and paten on a corporal on the side of the altar facing the people, and the missal in the centre of the altar between the priest and the corporal. Everything is symbolic.
My objective here is not to raise polemics against the modern Roman rite, but to highlight the fact of an emerging tendency within our journey to Rome. Most of us in the TAC are somewhat more ‘traditionalist’ in our liturgical orientations and geared to contributing towards a revival of traditional forms of the liturgy. I think most of us are much more tolerant in regard to the other emerging ‘tendency’ among us that is more inclined to melt into the landscape of contemporary English Catholicism. We should be tolerant and engage in dialogue, that progress be made in our learning and our spirituality. At the same time, I am convinced of the necessity for us to have clear and lucid minds. The world to which we are walking – the Catholic Church – is a difficult one, and we must proceed without romantic ideas of a ‘perfect’ Church as was often dreamt of in the nineteenth century. The Catholic Church (or at least her Pope and the more lucid bishops and clergy) is seeking to recover her own identity and sacredness in the liturgy.
I respect Anglicans who have opted for the modern Roman rite, knowing that they frequently celebrate it in a reform of the reform spirit using traditional music and celebrating with a profound sense of the sacred. I have already said that I am prepared to celebrate the modern Roman rite in situations where it would be the right response to a specific pastoral need. Like the good priests presently in the Church of England, I would interpret the texts and ceremonies in the light of Tradition. It can be done. However, I am convinced that the liturgical spirit can be fully recovered in the Church by the mutual inter-influence of a number of rites, as the Pope has allowed through Summorum Pontificum.
So it should be in the future Ordinariates. How it will all work out is not up to me, but up to men with authority and much more wisdom and experience than I. However, I am positive and hopeful that everything will continue to be impregnated with a spirit of generosity and pastoral welcome. I certainly await the day when it will be possible to minister alongside the many heroic priests here in France who have suffered everything but dungeon, fire and sword for their priestly vocations and pastoral charges.
We must work to understand each other, and walk forward in our long Lent of 2010, perhaps the most historic Lent of our lives, and remembering those who died before seeing the wonders we see today.
Solitary Mass
Mar 5th
A comment from Fr Michael Gray drew my attention to the prevailing Anglican usage regarding the celebration of Mass. Indeed, I attended the TAC Bishops’ College meeting, and found most bishops and priests assisting at Mass in the manner of the laity rather than celebrating Mass on the side altars of that lovely church of St Agatha in Portsmouth. Fr. Gray said in his comment – (…) many priests will (…) at worst will not be celebrating at all (at least within the Ordinariate) for want of a congregation!
I remembered that the Anglican tradition, like Orthodoxy, has been rigorous in prohibiting Mass or Divine Liturgy at which only the priest is present. The 1662 Prayer Book contains this rubric: And there shall be no celebration of the Lord’s Supper, except there be a convenient number to communicate with the Priest, according to his discretion. This is remarkably flexible, one must admit.
One of the things the Reformation condemned was the practice of celebrating Mass for particular intentions, in chantry chapels, in side chapels in churches, and the priests concerned receiving endowments and stipends. This was one of the “good works” that went against the barrage of solas!
One of our regular commenters, Joshua, has written a beautiful article about priests celebrating Mass alone for the simple motive of piety and love of the daily Mass.
The old rule always was that even at a private Low Mass, there must always be a server, or, in default of that, someone (even a laywoman) kneeling at the altar rail to give the responses. In fact, even if he or she couldn’t give the responses, that person’s mere presence would minimally suffice: for at least someone had to be there as well.
Just as the priest acts in the person of Christ the Head, there must be a member of the Church present (the server, so to speak, acts in the name of the Church when he gives the responses – for at High Mass, the choir sings the responses, as ideally the whole congregation does).
After some years, Bl Charles de Foucault obtained special permission from the Holy See to say Mass entirely alone – since there were no other Christians anywhere at all nearby, and the local Muslims were hardly to be expected to come and assist at Mass (seeing as he never converted any of them).
Joshua then points out that –
Firstly, the strictures against Mass entirely alone have been much relaxed in the new Code of Canon Law, since the priest’s desire of and devotion to saying Mass, even if no one be in attendance, are considered a solid reason for doing so.
It is indeed interesting to find that desire for the Sacrament of the Eucharist and devotion to daily Mass are accepted as the good reason required for saying Mass alone rather than packing everything up and going home.
Obviously, it remains that the priest should have a server or someone attending Mass if this is possible, because the Mass is a function of the Church and not a priest’s private prayer.
The modern Roman rite gives a form of Mass without a congregation, with or without a server. When faced with the choice of celebrating alone, or not celebrating, both canon law and the law of grace recommend celebrating Mass as the better thing to do.
According to each rite, there are special rules for a priest celebrating alone, but I will not go into them here.
There are important spiritual considerations. For example, the priest should see his solitary Mass as being a public Mass, even if no physical persons are present. The priest is interceding for those to whom he ministers. Each day I offer Mass for all who write and read The Anglo Catholic, which has become a kind of “teaching ministry”.
Like Anglican clergy attending Mass like lay people, Catholic priests since Vatican II have been encouraged to concelebrate. Whilst this is more than normal at ordinations or at the Chrism Mass celebrated by the Diocesan Bishop, it is not compulsory. Many priests, especially regulars in communities, have found that daily concelebration instead of daily Mass at a side altar is detrimental to their piety and fervour. I have had the experience of being in the Benedictine Abbey church at Fontgombault (France) at about 7 in the morning (after Matins and Lauds) and seeing a priest at each side altar silently offering Mass as if it were his last. The piety and spirit of prayer are overwhelming in the golden candle light reflecting on the stone walls of the ancient church.
I would like to encourage priests and bishops in the TAC and other Anglican communions to take up daily Mass, even if no people or servers are present. I fear that many Anglican priests celebrate only on Sundays, and more rarely than that when they are not charged with parish or chaplaincy work. I am sure that if I dropped daily Mass, the Office would soon follow, and nothing would remain of my priestly life.
There are many wonderful points about Anglican priestly spirituality, but this aspect of daily Mass (which is recommended and not a canonical obligation like the Office) certainly needs to be improved.
Patrimonial
Mar 4th
A few words in an earlier blog about the language of worship, and a great trail of comments followed. Now I know that many Anglicans (of every colour) in the USA are very concerned about Prayer Books, and the more Catholic they are, the more they want to hold on to ancient forms of prayer. I do understand. It has become for them the touchstone of orthodoxy, especially since many bishops refused to permit its use. Conversely in England the 1662 Prayer Book is defended by law, so it has been less important to us – a symbol of the Erastian State Church, even. Yet it is what I grew up with. Before Vatican II affected us all we were obliged in England to use the Book of Common Prayer – or something related to it. At any rate, whether English Missal or Interim Rite or 1927 (often referred to as 1928) or a compilation of the Vicar’s devising, the language was sort-of Cranmerian. After Vatican II, liturgy went in diverse directions in the Church of England. There were series 1, 2, and 3 and once parishes had been equipped with all those books they were rapidly declared illegal and instead we had what is naughtily referred to as Comic Worship (more properly ‘Common Worship’). But it was not Common, in the sense that the Book of Common Prayer intended the word. Common Prayer meant something shared by all. Common Worship had so many variants that you could not find it celebrated in the same manner in any two churches. So Catholics in the CofE increasingly turned to the Roman Catholic books. Whereas in an earlier generation it was only the extreme ultra-montanes who dared use the Missal, it became more and more THE touchstone of Catholicisim in the latter part of the 20th Century. When I toured my patch as a ‘Flying Bishop’ it was generally the Roman Missal that the Priest opened for me on the Altar. Sometimes he would apologise and say that for the Canon we had to use something from Common Worship because the Diocesan required it, but that was not generally the case. And just now and again, more in country parishes than in town ones, I would be asked to use one of the older Prayer Book variants.
Since the announcement of the Ordinariate, one of the more frequent questions I have had to answer is “Will we have to use Prayer Book Language?” – generally with the rider that if we did, you could forget it so far as THAT priest was concerned. So I have tried to explain that the Apostolic Constitution makes it clear that any of the Masses of the Roman Rite may be used, as well as whatever is provided in “Anglican” form – which we suppose will be something like the Book of Divine Worship of the Anglican Use Catholics in the USA.
Then if we do not cling to the Prayer Book, what do we have to bring to the party? Some suppose that the BCP and the King James Bible are all that we have, and without these we might as well simply become Roman Catholic Converts without the Ordinariate.
I believe that is a profound misunderstanding both of what the Holy Father wants from us and what we have to offer. In England, at least, our Pastoral Rule is more important than the words we use in public worship. It derives from fifteen centuries during which the parish clergy have known that they have a responsibility for the entire Community, whether or not they declare themselves ‘Church of England’. At an induction the priest is given the cure of souls by the Bishop. That attitude pervades the whole of our pastoral ministry. We visit the sick when we know about them, though they may never darken the doors of our church. We pray for them, we call on newcomers to the parish, and we train our lay people to do the same. We seek out candidates for Baptism and Confirmation. We marry all comers, and we bury all goers. Although our parishes are vastly bigger than his, and the knowledge of our people will be far less thorough, many of us still believe that the sort of model that George Herbert set before us is one worth striving for. It also describes the sort of care that people expect from us – and it comes not just from the Caroline Divines or the Tractarians, but from as far back as the Pastoral Rule of St Gregory, taught by St Augustine of Canterbury and reinforced by King Alfred.
More, too, than the mere WORDS of worship, there is the style of worship which matters. Visiting diverse parishes on Sundays, it is usually the Roman Missal put before me. I still celebrate a version of the Prayer Book Rite from time to time. I did this morning, and so I do most Thursdays in my local Parish Church. Not everyone will find it easy to do. For us older ones the words are in our very being, we scarcely need a book at all. For those more recently ordained, they may have scarcely ever heard the words of the Prayer Book. Unless they were in a Cathedral Choir, they are unlikely to have met solemn high Mattins. Most of the Ordinands who came to St Stephen’s House in my time simply did not know the Prayer Book forms of the Holy Communion, nor of Benedictus or Te Deum. They may have to become familiar with some of these things in the Ordinariate. What matters though, whichever Rite we use and in whichever direction we face when celebrating, is that we have our focus on God, and that our personal idiosyncrasies are replaced with a stillness and focus which help a congregation to worship. But I am sure this applies to every priest, Anglican or Roman Catholic.
I think there is a difference of style which means that we stay after Mass to meet people and socialise. It is a luxury which in this country most Priests of the Roman Communion do not have, since they must rush off to another Mass. But whether this really is part of our Patrimony, or simply our good fortune, remains to be seen. Similarly I think that we spend more time with penitents – because we have fewer of them; but that also might be a myth to be dispelled by experience. I fancy we take preaching more seriously than others – but I might be wrong about this. I believe our hymn-singing is more varied and full throated – but that might simply be a prejudice on my part.
Above all, we cannot know what our Patrimony comprises except when others experience it. If it includes pomposity and a sense of superiority, then these must go. But the Holy Father, who knows Anglicans well, seems to think we DO have gifts to bring into the greater Church. I am very excited at the prospect: and even more at the prospect of exercising a priesthood which is rooted and grounded in the faith of the Apostles.
Western Orthodoxy Revisited
Mar 4th
I have had to comment on a comment coming from a well-known English priest of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia. It is not my intention to raise any polemics against our Eastern Orthodox brethren, I think it is important for you all to know that attempts to create ‘Anglican-friendly’ structures in Orthodoxy are very different to the concept of the Personal Ordinariates in the Catholic Church.
Here is a scholarly article by Dr. Jean-François Mayer, a researcher at Fribourg University in Switzerland I have known personally. Dr. Mayer himself had become Orthodox after having explored a number of so-called ‘independent Catholic’ churches. I know nothing of his present ecclesial affiliation, but his academic speciality is that of new religious movements, sometimes known as cults and sects and he has a website – Religioscope with articles in French and English.
His position on western Orthodoxy is frankly sceptical, but he seems to give a fair appraisal of the Western Orthodox movement. The translation from the original French version is mine.
* * *
ATTEMPTS AT CREATING
A WESTERN ORTHODOX RITE
Historical outline[1]
by Jean-François Mayer
Religioscope – May 2002
N.B.: This article resumes, with a few updates and the addition of a “sitography”, large extracts from a text named “Must Orthodoxy be Byzantine? Attempts at creating a western Orthodox rite”, published five years ago in a collective work called Regards sur l’Orthodoxie. Mélanges offerts à Jacques Goudet (under the direction of Germain Ivanoff-Trinadtzaty), Lausanne, L’Age d’Homme, 1997, pp. 191-213. Religioscope thanks the publisher Ed. L’Age d’Homme for having authorized this article and takes advantage of the occasion to remind its readers about the considerable production of this firm, and especially its major contribution to publishing Slavonic literature.
Westerners who join the Orthodox Church feel that they are the legitimate heirs of western Christianity of the first millennium. This, however, brings up the question about the ways to find attachments to this heritage: Will this simply be a question of incorporating it as a fundamental spiritual element of Orthodox tradition, or can we try to find the specific practices of an Orthodox West, or even “orthodoxise” western liturgical practices? It is not surprising that some individuals or groups have attempted to find a western Orthodox way with its own rites. Historically, this phenomenon has found itself in interaction with several other developments: the emergence of ecumenical concerns, Anglo-Catholicism, Old Catholicism, the liturgical research movement, the Russian emigration and the Orthodox diaspora in general. We will sketch out a summary of the attempts to create a western Orthodox rite, by endeavouring not to simply repeat already existing studies[2].
More Patrimony
Mar 3rd
A Trustees’ meeting at Pusey House today meant I was visiting Oxford for the first time since the opening of the restored Ashmolean Museum. For me, the prize of their collection is the Alfred Jewel. It is a marvellous piece of craftsmanship, but its historial connection is even more important than its beauty. Alfred the Great reigned over a kingdom which had its centre in Winchester, our local Cathedral City. When he sought to restore the monastic life after the depradations of the Danes, he equipped a number of monasteries with the Scriptures, and a copy of St Augustine’s ‘Pastoral Care’ which he had translated into English. He also sent them an aestel, a pointer to be used in public reading. The Alfred Jewel is thought to be part of just such an aestel, and it was found buried in a Somerset field. It too has an Old English inscription, saying “Alfred had me made”.
So I sought it out. Once it was displayed, isolated, in a little display case among various Byzantine objects. Now it is in its proper context, and even shares its case with a smaller but similar object, found nearer to Oxford, at Nuneham Courtney. Alfred was greatly concerned with the recovery of learning among the clergy, both secular and religious, of his kingdom. He was also the founder of the Royal Navy. Both these very English concerns predate the invasion by the Norman French in 1066, who made us speak their language for nearly four hundred years. The English of Shakespeare and of Cranmer would have been very different without the efforts of Alfred and his monks – and later of Geoffrey Chaucer. Language matters, and the language of worship matters exceedingly. How shall we achieve, in the Ordinariate, English which is “understanded of the People” yet has the rhythm and dignity appropriate to worship? No good simply relying on history to provide our models. The ‘Pastoral Rule’ is not easy to understand in the Early English of Alfred; and the Canterbury Tales take some fathoming. Much as we may regret it, the same is increasingly true of Shakespeare and Cranmer. We must do better than the Book of Divine Worhip of the Anglican Use. But where are our liturgist-poets for today?
Liturgical Archaeologism
Mar 2nd
Yesterday evening, I commented on a comment on an old posting of mine on the liturgy. Without rehashing the conjectures of what might be the official Roman ‘Anglican’ liturgy for the Ordinariates, I often come up against the same arguments for going back to sources.
I believe the 1962 missal and the Novus Ordo missal, as well as the various prayerbooks should all be scrapped and the starting point again be a liturgy based on the Ordo Romanus Primus.
A few years ago, a friend invited me to accompany him on a visit to the organ of Poitiers Cathedral, a rather splendid eighteenth century instrument, an original Clicquot, that had recently been restored. It has the most uncomfortable console I have ever come across. The pedalboard is of the baroque French type, and the organ is tuned to mean-tone temperament. In other words, it was a purist restoration. It was impossible to play Bach, and the temperament gave an excruciating comma even when playing in E minor – just one sharp in the key signature but with a sharpened leading note, the D#, in the B major dominant chord, which was like drinking lemon juice! What is the point of spending hundreds of thousands of euros on an organ restoration when the use of the finished product is so restrictive? You can play seventeenth and eighteenth century French music on this organ, and nothing else. You can’t even accompany the liturgy if the key signature exceeds more that two sharps or flats, and don’t even think about minor keys! So much for authentic restoration. I’m all for preserving the past, but what’s wrong with a modern pedalboard and a less excruciating unequal temperament for tuning? It is a question of respect for tradition, but with intelligent innovation and development.
The real problem here is what is desired. Do we want want an organ that is exactly as its original builder left it, or a functional church organ, or a wise compromise between the two? In the case of Poitiers Cathedral organ, I would have made a few careful alterations to increase the instrument’s scope. If that were impossible for technical or aesthetic reasons, then one can only leave the original organ for French baroque music experts, and install another organ in another part of the Cathedral for more general use. I see the same problems in the liturgy. The old Tradition has to be carefully preserved, lest things should be destroyed through ignorance and the phenomenon of fads and fashion. On the other hand, there has to be something to which the faithful and clergy can relate.
I have often gone on about Sarum, which has not been regularly in use since about the seventeenth century (recusants and expatriate English priests in France, etc.). Is this not also archaeologism? I would argue that this is not the case, since it is a developed liturgy that stopped, and can be resumed in exactly the same way as the older form of the Roman rite which also was ‘stopped’ and replaced by the new rite in 1969.
Strain at a gnat and swallow a camel! Some would baulk at ‘re-booting’ a recent and developed liturgy, and would seek to restore the Missal to the pristine form and rite of the holy Fathers in the words of Pope St Pius V. When I researched the Tridentine missal, I was quite flabbergasted to discover these words coming from a Pope, so that Paul VI in 1969 could claim to be doing nothing different. We are led to believe that both Popes scraped the barnacles from the bottom of the hull and gave the boat new sails. “Returning to pristine antiquity” was the leitmotiv of the Jansenists of the Synod of Pistoia and Archbishop Bugnini.
In actual fact, despite these surprising words of the Pope, the Tridentine Missal was simply a prune-back of the 1474 Princeps Missal with some reference to available sources, and above all, the mature Roman Rite of the 11th century. It was not a ‘reconstruction’ or a new creation, even though only five sequences remained and the lectionary is left rather impoverished. What the Jansenists and the 1960’s reformers envisaged was something else. The former wanted so-called antiquity, and the latter wanted something inculturated into secular modernity.
Archaeologism is the only coherent response if you do not believe in organic development. If no continuous development is desirable or possible, then the liturgy has to be constantly on the drawing board and in the workshop, and as Luther said, the closer the Mass is to the Last Supper, the more Christian it is, or words to that effect. Always this Heraclitan notion of constant motion, noise and disturbance! The Church needs to become a spiritual home, and we need a minimum of stability!
This idea of the liturgy being in a perpetual ‘restoration workshop’ negates the ‘organic’ liturgical development identified by Newman and others in the Church’s doctrinal life and teaching. We do really have to know what we want: periodically prune away accretions according to the limitations of our scholarship, and take the risk of throwing away the baby and keeping the bathwater, and chasing the shadow of a paradise that probably never existed? The early Church was in a constant state of strife and conflict, compared with which the Continuing Anglican Churches with their squabbling bishops and dreamy priest bloggers are but a choirboys’ picnic. Peace only began to come to the Church after centuries of Ecumenical Councils, and the troubles continue to this day as soon as two people disagree about something!
The Prayer Book was supposed to be a restoration of pristine antiquity. So was the new Roman missal, and that is found to need extensive work to cover the cracks left by the faulty scholarship of the 1960’s. Perhaps we could sweep everything away and have a tabula rasa, and then what? No liturgy at all like the Unitarians or the Quakers? We need to know what we want.
The Language of Canaan
Mar 1st
This article was submitted to The Anglo-Catholic by Fr. Michael Gray of The Traditional Anglican Church, the English province of the TAC.
* * *
The question of the language of worship has been raised recently. This is not just an issue for English speakers, but of course if amongst any Western Rite Roman Catholics the transition from Latin to local language has been well managed, then we thank God. However, it is notorious that there have been problems with English, and it is only fair to explain the special sensitivities which Continuing Anglicans have about the subject. It is to some extent necessary to write from personal expertise, so I should explain that my first degree was in Greek and Latin, and my second and third degrees gave me some knowledge, not as much as I might like, of Hebrew, Aramaic and other early Christian languages.
Up to the 1960s, there was in most English speaking countries one liturgical language, which can be summarised as that of the Prayer Book and Authorised Version. Hymns usually conformed to that language. Even where later translations of the Bible were in use (and neither the Revised Version nor the Revised Standard Version penetrated parish worship very much), these generally conformed to the liturgical language. And the “English Missal” tradition also conformed to it.
In Which I Respond to Terry
Feb 26th
In response to my post about the launch of the Friends of the Ordinariate site, Terry from Japan chided me in the comments section. Since then, I’ve had some experiences I want to share that have a bearing on his criticisms and given me food for thought. Here’s an excerpt of what Terry said:
You may have a very low opinion of the Catholic mass, which is very evident in your posts, but in a lot of the world, particularly in Asia, Latin, thees and thous are alien to them and have no relevance.
-snip-
If keeping the poetry, thees and thous, costly vestments etc. result in just a small group of worshippers who think they’re a class above the rest, than you can keep it.
-snip-
I’ve met many people who only attend the NO who are ten times better Christians that those who only attend the full bells and smells form of mass, turn up their noses at everything else yet cannot find any charity in their hearts.
-snip-
If you’re going to keep thumbing your nose down at everything that doesn’t fit in with your idea of worship, you won’t be happy even when you are fully accepted in the Catholic church.
Tibernauts and the Vita Catholica
Feb 25th
I started to answer a comment on my last post, and then realized that actually this was going to need a post of its own. The commenter, Jeremy Hummerstone, observed that whereas I was correct to suppose that the Book of Common Prayer would be unlikely to find much use by the clergy in an English ordinariate, this does not mean that its use would not be welcomed among many of the laity. I think that he is probably right. He also wondered whether one feature of an ordinariate would be ‘micromanagement of everything we are allowed to say and do’.
I understand that this is a genuine fear on the part of many; there has been a lot of debate in the Catholic Church about a tension between a centralized authority and local initiative. This may well have been fuelled by a resistance in the name of liberalism to Pope Benedict’s initiatives in various fields, which is perceived as threatening the important Vatican II principle of collegiality. In this hermeneutic, one must understand, ‘collegiality’ means the right of any liberal bishop or theologian to do as he sees fit without fear of reproach from above or below.
It is a sixties thing, really, this presentation of law as being the bastion of the powerful to oppress the weak. The whole purpose of law, as we know should be (and generally is) the reverse; it ensures that nobody gets the opportunity to establish his own will over a body of reluctant people. The fact that Rome is now calling some bishops to account is because it has restored the right of lower clergy and laity to appeal against their bishop where an injustice has been perceived to have been done. The people have a right to orthodox teaching and orthoprax liturgy; if this is denied them, then a higher authority has not just a right but a duty to intervene.
This does not mean a micromanagement of the Church: as long as the faithful are receiving the authentic tradition (the rites and teaching of the Church), then no intervention is necessary, nor does it take place; to suggest anything else, as some liberals in the Roman Catholic Church do, is simply scaremongering.
I have to say that I am very happy to have the safeguard of appeal to higher authority in operation. We believe that the Catholic faith is in essence the matured form of that faith that Christ taught to his apostles, do we not? Then I need to be sure that what I hear from my bishop and my pastor is in accord with this, and I want some means of redress, some right of appeal, if I believe that I am not getting what I am due.
I suppose that in the Western Anglican Church, there has not been any sort of meaningful check in favour of orthodoxy or orthopraxy except in the most serious cases, and then (as in the case of the ordination of practising homosexuals) intervention can arouse a storm of protest. I suppose that this is because there has been (since the Elizabethan settlement, really) such a divergence of views that a latitudinarian attitude is the only practical one possible if all are to live in peace. However, having accepted the Catholic system in Ordinariate form or in Roman form, Tibernauts will be expected to live by it; to teach it and to practise it as the rest of us do.
In this same spirit, Mr Hummerstone is correct that Church authorities will surely take a close interest in the rites that the ordinariates propose to become the Prayer of the Church, for they will need to express not just the beliefs of the gathered community of the Ordinariate Parish of St Miggin*, Little Wiggleswade, but of the entire Catholic Church. I, no doubt, will remain a priest of the Roman use of the Latin rite, but I need to be able to say ‘Amen’ to all the Church’s rites, including the Maronite, the Malabar, and those of the Ordinariate, and you need to be able to say ‘Amen’ to mine and all the others. Which is to say, in the selection of the rites that it will celebrate, without a doubt, the Ordinariate will play a very strong role, but the Universal Church will also want a say, and may have some strong views.
This is not by any means extraordinary or foreign to Anglican tradition, either. For hundreds of years, one of the things you could certainly say about Anglicanism was that, whatever any particular Anglican believed, he expressed his belief in the use of the same rites; namely, the Book of Common Prayer. The early Tractarians were very insistent on this (in public worship, anyway), and it was only towards the end of the nineteenth century that other practices began (the Anglican Missal, the English Missal) actually out of a desire to establish uniformity with the greater Catholic tradition. Now, within Anglicanism, the practice of almost congregationalist-style divergence in worship has been nearly canonized, but the practice is not Catholic, and, as I suggest, I think that really it is not Anglican either.
Public dissent from the official books of worship could in the past be justified by necessity, or by a desire to be united to the Catholic mainstream in as articulate a manner as a parish dared. However once joined formally to the Catholic mainstream, then surely all imperfect things will pass away, and Anglo-Catholics will be able to worship in a way that truly unites them to each other across parish boundaries, diocesan boundaries, national boundaries, seas and oceans and even time itself.
What is important to remember is that those first across the Tiber are going to be those who will decide these matters. That means that aspiring Tibernauts need to start thinking about this about a month ago and ask themselves just what they really want.
* Yes, there really is a St Miggin, or Miggo; an early African saint, feast day, 18th December.
The Use of Hymns
Feb 24th
This article was submitted to The Anglo-Catholic by Fr. Michael Gray of The Traditional Anglican Church, the English province of the TAC. We are thankful for this contribution to our reflections on sacred music.
* * *
A guide to the use of hymns, a study in practical patrimony
It is too easy to take the use of hymns for granted, and to decide what is to be sung at the last moment, without serious consideration. There is a better way, which gives respect to a significant part of our patrimony! For convenience, I assume that most English parishes will (and generally should) use either English Hymnal (EH) or Ancient and Modern Revised (AMR) as the main book – in both cases not the recent revisions but their predecessors. The even older version of Ancient and Modern (“Standard Edition”) is also possible. References in this text are to those versions.
A historical survey
The Church of England has only ever had one obligatory hymn, if we define that as a metrical text in English. That is the choice of translations of ”Veni creator spiritus” in the Ordinal, an office which is not likely to be encountered in many parishes.
The Church of England allowed but never required, before and after service but not within it, metrical psalms according to the “Old Version” (Sternhold, Hopkins and others) and later the “New Version” (Tate and Brady). A few of these survive in modern hymn books, such as “All people that on earth do dwell” (EH 365) and “Have mercy Lord on me” (EH 74). In practice, both the Old and the New Versions had a slightly wider repertoire than psalms. There were metrical versions of the ten commandments, Lord’s Prayer and creeds. There were even a few original compositions such as “O Lord turn not away thy face” (EH 84) and “While shepherds watched their flocks by night”(EH 30).
A Short Office for Expiation of a Desecrated Church
Feb 16th
This short office is to be found in the Directorium Anglicanum.
XI.—A Short Office for Expiation and Illustration of a Church desecrated or prophaned.
¶ If a Church hath been desecrated by Murther and Bloodshed, by Uncleanness, or any other sort of Prophanation, the Bishop attended by two Priests at least, and one Deacon, shall enter into the Church, which shall be first prepared by cleansings and washings, &c.
¶ The Bishop and his Clergy being vested, shall go in Procession about the Church on the inside, saying alternately the Seventh Psalm and the Ninth Psalm.
¶ After which the Bishop, with his Clergy, shall go to the Holy Table and there kneeling down shall pray.
O Almighty God, Who art of pure eyes and canst not behold impurity, behold the Angels are not pure in thy sight, and thou hast found folly in thy saints; have mercy upon thy servants, who with repentance and contrition of heart, return unto thee, humbling ourselves before thee in thy holy place. We acknowledge ourselves unworthy to appear in thy glorious presence, because we are polluted in thy sight, and it is just in thee to reject our prayers, and to answer us no more from the place of thy Sanctuary; for wickedness hath reached unto the Courts where thy holy feet have trod, and have defiled thy dwelling-place, even unto the ground, and we by our sins have deserved this calamity. But be thou graciously pleased to return to us as in the days of old, and remember us according to thy former lovingkindnesses in the days of our Fathers. Cast out all iniquity from within us, remove the guilt of that horrible prophanation that hath been committed here, that abomination of desolation in the holy place, standing where it ought not; and grant that we may present unto thee pure Oblations; and may be accepted by the gracious interpellation of our High Priest, the most glorious Jesus. Let no prophane thing enter any more into the lot of thine inheritance; and be pleased again to accept the prayers which thy servants shall make unto thee in this place. And because holiness becometh thine house for ever, grant to us thy grace to walk before thee in all holiness of conversation; that we becoming a royal Priesthood, a chosen Generation, a people zealous of good works, thou mayest accept us according to thine own loving-kindness, and the desires of our hearts. O look upon thy most holy Son, and regard the cry of his blood, and let it on our behalf speak better things than the blood of Abel.
O let that sprinkling of the blood of the holy Lamb, who was slain from the beginning of the world, make this place holy and accepted, and purifie our hands and hearts, and sanctifie our prayers and praises, and hallow all our Oblations, and preserve this house, and all the places where thy Name is invocated from all impurity and prophanation for ever; and keep our bodies, and souls, and spirits, unblameable to the coming of our Lord Jesus. Thus, O blessed Father, grant that we being presented unto thee without spot or wrinkle, or any such thing, may be cloathed with the righteousness of Saints, and walk in white with the Lamb in the Kingdom of our God for ever and ever. Grant this, O Almighty God, our most gracious Father, for Jesus Christ his sake, to whom with thee and the Holy Spirit, be all worship, and love, and honour, and glory, from generation to generation for ever. Amen.
¶ Then the Bishop and Clergy arising from their knees shall say the Anathematism [1] unto the Εὐφημισμός, or Acclamation [2], as in the Form of Consecration: After which, kneeling down, shall be said the Third Prayer placed in that Office a little before the Anathematism [3]. And next to that the Second Prayer which is immediately before that [4]; and then the Prayer of S. Clement [5].
¶ After which, arising from his knees, the Bishop shall say,
Seeing now, dearly beloved in the Lord, we have by humble prayer implored the mercy of God and his holy Spirit, to take from this place, and from our hearts, all impurity and prophanation, and that we hope by the mercies of God in our Lord Jesus Christ, he hath heard our prayers, and will grant our desires, let us give hearty thanks for these mercies, and say,
¶ Then shall be said the Εὐφημισμός, or Acclamation, as at the end of the Office of Consecration of Churches, &c.
¶ Then shall the Priest, whom the Bishop shall appoint, begin Morning Prayer.
¶ The Psalms for the day are Psalm 18 and Psalm 30.
¶ The first Lesson is, Zechariah i.
¶ The second Lesson, Mark xi. unto verse 26 inclusively.
¶ The Collect is the same with that at Morning Prayer in the Consecration of Churches.
¶ If any Chalice, Paten, Font, Pulpit, or any other Oblation or Utensil for the Church, be at any time newly to be presented, the Bishop is to use the Forms of Dedication of those respective Gifts which are particularly used in the Dedication; and this is to be done immediately after the Nicene Creed, at the time of the Communion; ever adding the Anathematism and Acclamation.
Te decet Hymnus.
What is this “Personal Ordinariate”?
Feb 14th
On the heels of his excellent essay “United in Communion, but not Absorbed: Understanding the Pope’s Welcome,” Bishop Elliott has hit another home run with the following address delivered earlier today in Melbourne. My emphases in bold and comments in blue.
* * *
WHAT IS THIS “PERSONAL ORDINARIATE”?
Bishop Peter J. Elliott, Auxiliary Bishop of Melbourne, on Understanding Pope Benedict’s Offer to Traditional Anglicans
An address given to Forward in Faith Australia at All Saints’, Kooyong, Melbourne, on Saturday, February 13th 2010.
Anglicans can no longer speak of “swimming the Tiber”. Pope Benedict XVI has built a noble bridge, a symbol chosen as the cover illustration for the Catholic Truth Society edition of his Constitution Anglicanorum coetibus. Today I want to try to describe where that bridge leads.
The Tiber crossings of those Anglicans who have gone before us have often been difficult and dangerous — and, in any event, it has proven difficult to organize a group swim. Not only is the Holy Father’s bridge a noble construction that lifts us high above the perilous waters, it allows us to pass over the deep without breaking ranks. And, as Fr. Dwight Longenecker has observed, this comfortable crossing may appeal to other Christians inspired by the ordered march of the Anglican host towards the threshold of the Apostles.
I have already summed up the papal offer as “united in communion but not absorbed”, words which resonate with the ecumenical vision of the recent past, particularly the era of Pope Paul VI and Archbishop Michael Ramsey. Now “United in communion but not absorbed” is realized in “a Personal Ordinariate for Anglicans who wish to enter full communion with the Catholic Church”, to use the Holy Father’s words in his Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum coetibus.
Defining a “Personal Ordinariate”
Anglicanorum coetibus establishes a distinct community for Anglicans who choose to return to unity with the Successor of St Peter. But it is not accurate to call this an “Anglican Rite Ordinariate”. A better expression would be an “Anglican Use Personal Ordinariate”, that is, a structured community maintaining its own traditions, at the same time enjoying distinct liturgical privileges within the Roman Rite. To understand the proposed structure we may compare it with similar structures that already exist within the Catholic Church.
I must confess that I have yet to hear of anyone being under the impression that the personal ordinariates established an “Anglican Rite,” but it is certainly a good thing to point out that this is not the case. Our post-Reformation Anglican “liturgical, spiritual, and pastoral traditions” are a direct outgrowth of the Roman Rite, make little sense divorced from this context, and it is vital that they be assessed within the larger scope of that history. In order to realize the full potential of our tradition, we must conscientiously develop what I term an “Anglican hermeneutic of continuity.”
The Military Ordinariate
The proposed Anglican Use Ordinariate may be compared to the Military Ordinariate, set up in many countries, including Australia, the UK and the US. The Anglican Church of Australia has a similar structure. Anglicanorum coetibus refers to this structure in footnote 12.
A Military Ordinariate is kind of diocese covering a whole country but also “present” in places outside the country where military personnel serve, such as Afghanistan or East Timor. The bishop of the armed forces exercises ordinary jurisdiction over military chaplains and Catholic members of the armed forces – wherever they may be. Therefore his ministry relates directly to people and is more personal than territorial.
However, the structure proposed in Anglicanorum coetibus for an Anglican Use Personal Ordinariate is closer to a territorial diocese. There could be several Ordinariates in one country, which is not the case with the military structure. Therefore to better understand an Anglican Use Ordinariate we look into the venerable ancient Eastern Rites within the Catholic Church, properly called the Eastern Catholic Churches.
One important distinction, of course, between the military ordinariate (as well as the personal prelature) and the personal ordinariate is that the latter has (permanent) clerical, religious, and lay subjects.
One Church: East and West
These autonomous Churches are in communion with Rome, but their members are not “Roman Catholics”, that is, not Catholics of the Roman Rite. I now need to open up something essential that many Anglicans do not understand – that the Catholic Church is not a monolithic structure. She is a communion of Churches, led by bishops who are in communion with the Bishop of Rome and with one another, members of one apostolic college. This unity through a communion of particular or local Churches is set out in the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church promulgated by the Second Vatican Council. Lumen Gentium, 23.
See here.
Every diocese is a “particular Church”, governed by a successor of the apostles. This is why we talk of the Church of Rome, the Church of Melbourne, the Church of Washington etc. Through a complex history beginning in apostolic times, most of these particular Churches today are grouped together within the Roman Rite. Not only are they in communion with the Church of Rome, the See of Peter, but they also use the liturgy of Rome. The members of these particular Churches may be known as Roman Catholics, or Catholics of the Roman Rite, or Latin Catholics.
At the same time, many other particular churches are grouped within a series of ancient Eastern Rites, also in communion with Rome, but using liturgies appropriate to their origins: Syrian, Greek, Egyptian, Armenian etc. Their members are Ukrainian Catholics, Maronite Catholics, Coptic Catholics etc. They are not Roman Catholics. This is why it is wrong to lump us all together and call everyone in communion with Rome a “Roman Catholic”. I can describe myself in those terms, but my fellow Ukrainian Catholic should not – and will not – describe himself as an “RC”. So to sum it up, within the Catholic Church there is a wide range of Catholics and worshipping communities of Christian people.
Diocese and Eparchy
Looking more closely into these Eastern Catholic Churches, we first find typical territorial dioceses in the home country: Ukraine, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, India, Iraq etc. But then we find a second kind of diocese for those members of these Churches who have emigrated and are now scattered across a country such as Canada or Australia. This kind of diocese is usually, not always, called an eparchy.
In an eparchy an Eastern Rite bishop has jurisdiction over all the clergy and lay faithful of his Rite, within a country or within a region in a big country such as Canada. For example, the Ukrainian Catholic bishop with a fine cathedral in North Melbourne is the bishop of the Eparchy of St Peter and Paul, Australia. He has ordinary jurisdiction over all Ukrainian Catholics in Australia. His people are also known as “Greek Catholics” because they celebrate the liturgy of Constantinople, the Byzantine Rite.
The same kind of structure also applies to the Maronite diocese of St Maroun, the Chaldean Diocese of St Thomas and the Eparchy of St Michael the Archangel for Melchite Greek Catholics, all based in Sydney. The territory of these bishops coexists with the dioceses of the Roman Rite in Australia and the bishops are members of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference.
The Anglican Use Ordinariate
The Ordinary of an Anglican Use Personal Ordinariate will be like an eparch, having jurisdiction and pastoral care over a series of parishes, “juridically comparable to a diocese”. But he will “teach, sanctify and govern” within the Western tradition, the Roman Rite, and that is the interesting and new development in Anglicanorum coetibus. There is also another closer similarity between the proposed Anglican Use Personal Ordinariates and Eastern Catholic eparchies. That may be described as a distinctive “ethos” based on a liturgical tradition and a wide range of customs, history, spiritualities and culture, never forgetting the personal bonds between people and families. In your case this will be the Anglican patrimony. We will look more closely at this in due course.
In full communion with the Successor of St Peter, members of each Personal Ordinariate will be gathered in distinctive communities that preserve elements of Anglican worship, spirituality and culture that are compatible with Catholic faith and morals. Members of an Ordinariate will be able to worship according to own liturgical “use”, while still being Catholics of the Roman Rite. So in the Ordinariate you will be “Roman Catholics” or “Latin Catholics”, part of the largest group in the Universal Church. At the same time, like the Eastern Rite Catholics, you will be the bearers of a distinctive and respected tradition. Your Ordinaries, bishops or priests, will work alongside bishops of the Roman Rite dioceses and the bishops of Eastern Rite eparchies and dioceses, finding their place within the Episcopal Conference in each nation or region.
As Archbishop Hepworth stated at the 2009 Forward in Faith UK National Assembly:
There will be an Anglican leader who relates to the Holy See on behalf of the Anglican Catholics. Thus establishing a body that is Anglican Catholic as distinct from Roman Catholic, Ukrainian Catholic, Maronite Catholic, or whatever. It’s not a rite but it looks awfully like one…
This comment wasn’t really understood by many at the time — and it is a novel concept — but the Anglican personal ordinariates are revolutionary. An while legally being Catholics of the Roman Rite (i.e. “Roman Catholics”), the distinctiveness of the Anglican patrimony — which is much more comprehensive than mere liturgical deviations from the norms of the Latin Rite — will truly justify the appellation “Anglican Catholic” for our people.
“United…”
When Anglicanorum coetibus was published, an elderly lady went to her vicar and said, “Father, are we all Roman Catholics now?” Of course it is not as simple as that, nor should it be. Entrance into full communion with Rome through an Ordinariate involves a personal decision, and a sacramental process. This decision for unity involves acceptance of the pastoral care and the authority Christ entrusted to the successors of St. Peter.
As Archbishop Hepworth has noted, whatever the process of reception, it will occur in the context of our existing communities.
The decision to be reconciled through an Ordinariate can only made through following personal conscience, that is, after prayer, study and reflection. This is a step of faith in Jesus Christ and his Church. It involves accepting all the teachings of the Church on faith and morals.
It should be noted that many TAC communities have been engaged in “prayer, study and reflection” for many years. Indeed, the bishops of the TAC only approached the Holy See after a long period of discernment and development, confessing the Catholic Faith as expressed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church without reservation. Many of us have already made the decision to be reconciled; we are now simply waiting for this corporate process to play out. Some anti-Roman Anglican polemicists have found fault with this. According to the naysayers, any Anglican who comes to believe in the doctrines contained in the Catechism of the Catholic Church has a moral obligation to submit individually and without delay; to do otherwise, they say, must be a grave sin. Thankfully the Holy Father acknowledges our aspiration to rejoin the unity of the Western Church in a corporate fashion. And I know I speak for many Anglican Catholics when I say that, were the Holy Father to demand individual conversion, we would submit in obedience — but the Holy See simply has not asked us to do so.
Such a personal assent of faith needs to be formed and informed. To use an Anglican expression, please “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” the Catechism of the Catholic Church, described in Anglicanorum coetibus as “the authoritative expression of the Catholic Faith professed by members of the Ordinariate”. This official resource summarises the Faith “once given”, embodied in one Word of God that comes to us, as the Second Vatican Council teaches, through Scripture and Tradition.
Unity in Faith is preserved and animated by unity with the Vicar of Christ on earth, and with the bishops of the apostolic college gathered around him. However, we need to consider the practical dimension of unity, the discipline of the Church and her laws. These are, set out for Catholics of the Roman Rite, including members of the Ordinariates, in the 1983 Code of Canon Law, a new version of the 1917 Code, revised in light of the Second Vatican Council and reforms that developed after the Council.
Some Anglicans may be alarmed at the prospect of coming under Canon Law, but the code is also a detailed charter of the rights of clergy and laity. For example a bishop’s authority is regulated by the code. In that perspective the code might even be called the “constitution” of the Church. However, I need to be frank about one relevant area of the code, marriage.
For Anglicans, of even more concern than episcopal abuse should be the grave defect of our democratic synodical processes. As I wrote a few weeks ago:
Presently, our Anglican synodical structures involve — in addition to bishops — representatives of both the clergy and the laity participating on a practically equal footing. Clergy and laity are generally organized into separate houses which must concur in order to pass legislation governing the diocese, province, &c. Essentially, while lip service is paid to the notion of episcopal government, Anglican jurisdictions are organized in the fashion of modern, democratic, secular governments, and apostasy is ever but one vote away. In principle, there is nothing preventing an Anglican synod from reinterpreting Holy Scripture or Sacred Tradition, rejecting Catholic Faith and Apostolic Order. This is precisely what has happened in the Episcopal Church and throughout the Anglican Communion in the past several decades. Continuing Anglicans pride themselves on their orthodoxy and assume that they are immune from the doctrinal corruption now prevalent in the Anglican Communion, but the Continuing jurisdictions, all, have reconstituted the same defective ecclesiastical government which allowed the Episcopal Church to disintegrate into apostasy. It is only the conservatism of their present membership that prevents the jurisdictions of the so-called Anglican Continuum from falling away from the Faith.
In this area the Code is precise, maintaining what was once upheld within Anglicanism, Christ’s teaching on the indissolubility of marriage. The Code guides diocesan tribunals and higher tribunals in Rome, such as the Rota and certain Vatican Congregations. Therefore, married people, clergy and laity, who intend to enter the Ordinariate need to be aware that they cannot be reconciled to the Church as members of the Ordinariate until any irregular marriage situations are cleared up through diocesan tribunals. Unity in Christ for married people involves unity in his sacrament of Marriage. Access to the tribunals is easy and they are run along kindly pastoral lines.
This is an excellent point as there will, no doubt, be certain practical difficulties here. At least in the ACA, our bishops ought to have been following, as closely as possible, the criteria established by the Roman Catholic Code of Canon Law. It is to be hoped that these documented canonical procedures will aid in the regularization of marital situations.
Alongside the Code of Canon Law internal laws and statues will regulate the sacramental, pastoral and administrative life of the Ordinariate. The required administrative structures are already set out in the Complementary Norms that accompany the Constitution. Here again we find some similarity between the Ordinariate and an autonomous Eastern Catholic Church. But there is a separate Code of Canon Law for the Eastern Churches, which protects their traditions, customs and sacramental discipline.
Some of these similarities might be the right of the Governing Council to submit a terna for the selection of a new ordinary directly to Rome, or the requirements that the same body consent to the advancement of a candidate to Holy Orders, the erection of deaneries, establishment of seminaries or houses of formation, &c. Anglicanorum Coetibus and the Complementary Norms enshrine certain aspects of the Anglican synodical tradition of government.
“But Not Absorbed”
Some critics of Anglicanorum coetibus have perceived the similarity between the Ordinariates and Eastern Catholic Churches. Then they dismiss the Pope’s generous offer as “Uniatism”, that is, a “unity” imposed by submission to papal imperialism. Catholics avoid the polemical term “Uniate”. Eastern Rite Catholics find it very offensive. It suggests that all their Churches broke away from ancient Churches and returned to the jurisdiction of the Pope for opportunistic political or economic reasons. Maronite Catholics in particular resent this rhetoric because they were never separated from Rome. But Eastern Catholics know that the freedom, autonomy and traditions they value are protected by unity with Rome.
In studying the interesting history of past projects to reunite Rome and Canterbury, some forgotten or hushed up, we find proposals that are now included in Anglicanorum coetibus, summed up in the phrase dear to Pope Paul VI and Archbishop Ramsey, “united but not absorbed:”. This is why, in a recent article, I said: “Yet you do not come to the Ordinariates with empty hands. As I learnt forty two years ago, you will lose nothing – but you will regain an inheritance stolen from us four centuries ago. That heritage was largely recovered by the giants of the Oxford Movement. I believe they smile on us now….”
Indeed there have been several initiatives over the past decades that have, for various reasons almost always having to do with the fickleness of the Anglican parties, come to naught.
What precisely is this “inheritance stolen from us four centuries ago”? It is the distinctive “ethos” of the whole tradition of English Catholicism, from the Romano-British and Irish Christians up to the Reformation. Then we see it continuing is two directions.
All that is true and beautiful in Anglicanism — as Anglicans has always maintained — is proper to the Catholic Church. This Patrimony is not our exclusive property; it is “a precious gift” and a “treasure to be shared” with the whole of the Church Universal.
First there was the subsequent development of Catholicism in light of the Councils of Trent, Vatican I and Vatican II, first maintained secretly by “recusants” and then by English Catholics of the Roman Rite who received emancipation in 1829. The Venerable John Henry Newman joined these faithful people in 1845. Their heroic story is marked by continuity. They bravely maintained what would have been part of Christian life had not communion with the Successor of St Peter been severed at the Reformation. My own experience of the Catholic Church in England has been of a welcoming community, an Anglo-Irish (or today an Anglo-Polish!) melting pot, but distinctively English in culture, spirituality and identity.
At the same time, we look to the parallel development, your heritage which Anglicanorum coetibus recognises, honours and seeks to maintain. Within the diverse structure of the Anglican Settlement, Anglicans with Catholic convictions sought to maintain, enrich or restore continuity, often at great cost. We think of the Caroline divines, Scottish Episcopalians, the Wesleys, and the scholars and heroes of the Oxford Movement: men like Keble and Pusey, priests of the Society of the Holy Cross, valiant men and women who formed religious communities, clergy selflessly committed to serve the poor, bringiing them social justice and a vision of the Kingdom through beautiful Catholic worship. Nor let us forget the brilliance of Dom Gregory Dix, Michael Ramsey, C.S. Lewis, Eric Mascall, T.S. Eliot and Dorothy Sayers. All of this heritage can enrich a unity of faith shared by all English-speaking Catholics. The bridge over the Tiber leads to that unity.
Though the recusants “bravely maintained what would have been part of Christian life had not communion with the Successor of St Peter been severed at the Reformation” (we must acknowledge that Tridentine/Counter Reformation Catholicism was itself just as much influenced by the rupture of the Great Rebellion), the parallel development of “Anglicanism” as it developed in the Established Church (and subsequently in the Anglican Diaspora) has been recognized by the Holy See as itself being a glorious tradition despite its development in disunity and discontinuity. This separated strand of English Catholicism is now to be restored to the whole cloth.
As Anglicanorum coetibis indicates, each Personal Ordinariate is meant to inter-relate with other Catholics of the Roman and Eastern Rites. It is not a kind of national park for a rare and endangered species. Yet I would suggest that, at the end of the day, the only significant communities with an authentic Oxford Movement tradition left on earth will be found in the Personal Ordinariates within the Catholic Church.
While some groups of Anglicans may now be skeptical of the Holy Father’s offer (after all, the Catholic bishops have not always done well by minority groups), in the end, having witnessed the success of the personal ordinariates in preserving an Anglican corporate identity, there will no longer be any justification for separation. In the end, there will be only Catholics and protestants.
Other Anglicans
At this time we are aware that many Evangelical Anglicans are also following their consciences and making decisions under the Word of God in Scripture. Our understanding of the Word of God may be different to theirs because we include Tradition alongside Scripture as making up one Word of God. At the same time we honour their fidelity to the Bible, fidelity to the great dogmas of the Incarnation, Redemption and Resurrection, to Gospel truths and to the ethics of Jesus Christ. Some Evangelicals are sending messages of encouragement to Anglo Catholics considering the Ordinariate. Do not imagine that because of greater numbers in some places that they are exempt from feelings of sorrow, hurt, scandal and rejection that you have suffered.
Good point. We are not the only Anglicans to suffer the breakdown of the Anglican Communion.
The difficult problem at present is surely resolving a tense relationship with mainstream Anglicans. Yes, I have heard unkind comments against those considering the Ordinariate (“You can have them…” etc.). But I have also heard words of good-will and understanding. Let us hope and pray that kindness and mutual respect may prevail.
If you choose the Ordinariate, the challenge will be to keep the doors open, not to set up clubs or cliques. Through established Ordinariates you can reach out with the love of Christ to another group, that unknown number of drifting and bewildered traditional Anglicans. But let us also respect those traditional Anglicans who choose to continue in their own circles. Some of them slide into uncharitable comments or play at logic chopping, even regarding the papal offer with suspicion. But “the ball is in their court”. The challenge is: “Well brothers and sisters, where are you now and where are you going?” Pray for them as you pray for all who consider making that short but decisive journey across the bridge of Anglicanorum coetibus.
As Archbishop Hepworth has written:
The Traditional Anglican Communion will not disappear, but will endure for the same purpose that it was created to fulfil, and which is so clearly described in the text of our petition.
The TAC is committed to caring for both those who are set to enter into the personal ordinariates and those who are not yet ready to make the transition. It is our hope that some form of genuine communion will allow us to maintain the bonds between these communities who will have, for a time, taken different — but parallel — paths.
While it is the mission of The Anglo-Catholic to present the truth about the Holy Father’s offer in the Apostolic Constitution, we do pray for those who, even at this moment, seek to dissuade Anglicans from heeding the call of our Shepherd and to undermine the foundation we have long labored to construct.
My final appeal is that you should lay to rest anguish and polemics over the liberal agenda that at present divides the Anglican Communion. One of the effects of unity with Rome through the Ordinariate should be freedom from the recent past and a healing of memories, inner peace. Jesus Christ calls us all to peace, and to a renewed commitment to his mission, above all the ministry of charity to the poor and bringing good news to the spiritually poor in our secularised society. All the structures in Holy Church should serve this glorious cause of his Kingdom. To him we raise our eyes as we prayerfully look forward in hope.
In my regular — generally daily — conversations with my ordinary, Bishop Louis Campese, either or both of us never fail to express the hope that this process of reunification will shortly be concluded, that we may experience that peace of finally having attained the goal for which our forebears have so long prayed, worked, and sacrificed.
A Postcript: The Future Liturgy of the Ordinariates
Anglianorum coetibus authorizes the Ordinariates to use books that carry the Anglican liturgical heritage: “so as to maintain the liturgical, spiritual and pastoral traditions of the Anglican Communion within the Catholic Church as a precious gift nourishing the faith of the members of the Ordinariate and as a treasure to be shared.” Note those last words. What the distinctive “Anglican rite” liturgy of the Ordinariate will be is yet to be worked out. When that project is completed it will need the recognition of the Holy See. But some speculation at this stage may be of interest.
Considering its history and strong influence in the first editions of the Book of Common Prayer, the Sarum Rite might well be a major source. Queen Mary I published a national edition of the Sarum Missal to replace all those missals for the diocesan uses that went into the fire when the first Book of Common Prayer appeared in 1549. Therefore the Sarum Use was the last version of the Roman Rite in England before the universal Missale Romanum, Roman Missal, was authorised by St Pius V in 1570. At the end of the nineteenth century when Westminster cathedral was being built, it was proposed that the Sarum Rite be revived as the use proper to the cathedral. Nothing came of this project, lost I suspect in the cross-currents of liturgical controversies and an Ultramontane trend to standardise liturgy along Counter-Reformation lines, even down to the shape of chasubles.
In 1541 (eight years before the publication of the Book of Common Prayer), Henry VIII ordered Convocation to suppress the uses of York, Bangor, and Hereford and ordered the universal adoption of the use of the diocese of Salisbury (the “Sarum Use”). This Use was the sacred liturgy of the Mass elaborated by St. Osmund around the year 1085. St. Osmund had come over to England with William the Conqueror in 1066 and was consecrated bishop of Salisbury in 1079.
The various editions of the Book of Common Prayer will obviously influence the preparation of this use for the Ordinariates. Yet a note of caution is necessary. Cranmer’s prose is majestic, but all his doctrine is not sound. Some editing will be needed to deal with expressions which are not in harmony with Catholic Faith, particularly those that come down from his severely Protestant 1552 edition of the Book of Common Prayer. In Anglo Catholic circles you have tried to manage these matters, as may be seen in the English Missal and the Anglican Missal.
It should be noted that the American 1928 Book of Common Prayer was accepted for use in the Western “rites” of several Orthodox jurisdictions with only very minor emendations and additions. For any traditional edition of the Book of Common Prayer, the edits required should be minor; I believe that this concern gets blown out of proportion. The rites of the Prayer-book should be judged by the text alone — not by the questionable private theological opinions of her editors.
I give one example that concerns me as a sacramental theologian. “Do this in remembrance of me” should never appear in a Catholic rite. “Do this in memory of me” is a more accurate rendering of the original languages and takes us away from “memorialism”. The meaning of the Eucharist as the great sacrificial Memorial is set out in the Catechism of the Catholic Church 1362-1367.
I would counter that “remembrance,” “memorial,” and “in memory” are all interchangeable in this context; they certainly are in the Prayer-book and in the Authorized Version of the Bible. Any confusion should be resolved — as it has been amongst Catholic Anglicans for centuries — through catechesis rather than the mutilation of the text.
From The Catholic Religion by Vernon Staley (pp. 247-249):
The Holy Eucharist is a feast upon a sacrifice. The Body and the Blood of Christ are first offered to the Eternal Father, and then partaken of by the communicants. This offering is termed by St. Paul “the shewing the Lord’s death.”"
In saying “This do in remembrance of Me,” our Lord used words which here really mean,—
“OFFER THIS AS MY MEMORIAL BEFORE GOD.”
It has often been shewn that the word translated “do,” is very frequently used in the Greek Version of the Old Testament for “offer.” It is so used in the following passages to which the reader may refer for himself: Ex. xxix. 36, 38, 39, 41; Lev. ix. 7, 16, 22 : xiv. 19: etc. In each of these places, the word translated “offer,” is the same as that used by our Lord when He said, “Do this.”
The Greek word for “remembrance” has likewise a distinctly sacrificial meaning. It is used but twice in the Old Testament, and but four times in the New. Three times in the New Testament the reference is to the Holy Eucharist. Let us briefly examine the three remaining passages, where the Greek word 1 I Cor. xi. 23, etc. * Ibid. 26.
In Heb. x. 3, we read,—”But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance again made of sins every year.” The allusion is to the sacrifices offered yearly on the Day of Atonement. These sacrifices were offered to God, to procure pardon of the sins of the priesthood and of the nation. The high priest entered the Holy of Holies, where, unseen by man, he made “a remembrance of sins” before God. The same word is again used.
We have now examined the only three passages in the Bible in which the Greek word for “remembrance” is found, apart from the accounts of the institution of the Holy Eucharist. In each case it is used of A REMEMBRANCE BEFORE GOD, AND NOT BEFORE MAN; and it is only reasonable therefore to suppose that in those instances in which it is used of the Holy Eucharist, it is intended to express the same meaning which it has elsewhere in Holy Scripture, viz.; that of A MEMORIAL BEFORE GOD. That this is the true idea is confirmed by St. Paul’s words spoken of the Holy Eucharist,— “For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till He come.” (I Cor. ix. 26.) In connection with this important subject the reader is asked to refer to what was said on pages 195, 196, concerning the relation which exists between the Eucharistic Sacrifice and our Lord’s pleading in heaven.
Next year a new ICEL translation of the Mass of the Roman Rite will come into effect. More gracious poetic English will mean that the beauty of the language used in the Ordinariates will not clash with the banal and inaccurate old ICEL “translation” we currently endure.
Deo gratias!
Let me add that an “Anglican use” will add to the diversity of uses that already exists within the Roman Rite, starting with the two forms. “ordinary” (Novus Ordo) and “extraordinary” (Usus antiquior, traditional Latin liturgy), and including efforts to revive the uses of religious orders and regional uses. In Milan there are now two forms of the venerable Ambrosian Rite, ordinary and extraordinary. This variety is reported from time to time in the New Liturgical Movement website, also an indicator of Pope Benedict’s liturgical project and vision.
One dream of mine is that the churches of the Ordinariate will resound with fine music – from Stanford to Palestrina, from Vaughan Williams to Bruckner. We need the kind of music that gives greater glory to God and also “a treasure to be shared” by all Catholics.
Sacred Music, Liturgy and Sacred Time
Feb 13th
One of my favorite bloggers is David B. Goldman, aka “Spengler” over at First Things. This morning I discovered a wonderful post about the loss of the cantorial tradition in Judaism. My oh my does what he writes resonate with what has happened in the Catholic Church and the Anglican (Canterbury) Communion. He writes (my bolds):
Cantorial preparation, the school thinks, simply isn’t as important as it used to be. According to Marissa Brostoff’s Feb. 11 note in The Tablet:
These tensions come to the fore in the institution of the cantorate. In the immediate postwar years, most Reform and Conservative congregations boasted a charismatic, operatic cantor, who sometimes even eclipsed the rabbi. Reform Judaism began a move away from this model toward more participatory services in the 1960s and ’70s. The Conservative movement has been caught in something of a bind: while it has more recently embraced the shift in an effort to lure a younger audience, doing so has served to further blur the line that divided it from the Reform movement.
Traditional chazzanut, or Jewish cantorial art, plays a crucial role in Orthodox liturgy, particularly in the Eastern European (Ashkenazic) tradition. It is perfectly acceptable to pray without the leadership of a cantor, or chazzan, but a skilled cantor adds a dimension to prayer. Conservative congregations are important more popular music into liturgy: Israeli folk music, pseudo-Hasidic melodies, and material derived from Hollywood. This suits the “lightly affiliated” Jews who make up the bulk of the membership at Conservative synagogues. To contemporary ears, traditional synagogue chant sounds jarring and anachronistic. “Participatory services” are about participating, not about praying. Having thrown out the bathwater, the Conservative movement now is throwing out the baby.
It is a dreadful loss, in my opinion.
How is it possible to repeat the same prayers every day and every Sabbath, and yet hear them in a fresh way? Yet that is what the rabbinical authorities require. The great 11th-century Torah commentator Rashi derives this injunction from Exodus 19:1; in in that chapter the Israelites gather below Mt. Sinai and hear the voice of God declare the Ten Commandments. The verse reads, “ In the third month of the children of Israel’s departure from Egypt, on this day they arrived in the desert of Sinai.”
Rashi asks, “On the New Moon (Mechilta, Shab. 86b). It could have said only, ‘on that day.’ What is the meaning of ‘on this day’? That the words of the Torah shall be new to you, as if they were given just today.”
Judaism above all else is the recreation of the moment of revelation at Sinai in all of time, such that time itself dissolves into a single eternal moment. The reading of the Torah in its annual cycle and the study of Torah, which the rabbis called the most important of all obligations, is sacramental rather than scholarly: all Israel continues to stand before God at Sinai.
Hmmmm. Reminds me of what we are taught, or supposed to be taught, about our entering into the once-and-for-all sacrifice of Jesus in the Eucharist. And I see so many parallels as well with what has happened in the Christian musical tradition.
Then this response in the Forum from a Roman Catholic who also happens to be a musician. Again my bolds.
I say all this to suggest that I’m in a decent position to say that in my faith (Roman Catholic), sacred music has been, and remains, in a deplorable state. The reasons for this would require more space than this forum warrants, but much of it has to do with the over-reliance in church on a sort of Cheerleader American Idol Folksy Model of Amplified Cantor, whose lack of ability and histrionic gestures make the average person in the pew roll his or her eyes in (immediately pietized) suffering. That said, they are doing their job honestly, with little serious direction or support. I feel for them as much as I feel profound and protracted chagrin.
The collapse of musical training nationwide, widespread musical illiteracy, dominance of homophonic ‘pop’ forms, and (in our faith) an entrenched skepticism of anything that smacks of standards and quality, has bludgeoned sacred music into a watery mixture of banality, amateurism, and kitsch. There is nothing whatsoever that elevates or inspires, and the attempts to achieve those things by recourse to folk music (mostly faux-Irish tunes in 6/8) end up ossifying into something indistinguishable from obscure b-side records from the Seventies. Running headlong in the other direction, i.e. into Anglican precisions, or the sophisticated bombast of Haydn Masses (however lovely) isn’t really an option either, because those things tend to connote “performance” very strongly, rather than spiritual and liturgical intensity.
In short, I lament what is described in your post. A cantor, or schola, or choir, singing beautifully and precisely, at a very high level, with complete spiritual conviction, is not only an “enhancement” to religious services, but *embodies* the collective prayer of of that service in a profoundly uplifting way. It is only when the singer is so technically and spiritually advanced that he or she ‘disappears into the music’ that a congregation’s collective longing can hear itself clearly.
My father used to sing in some of the best Episcopal choirs in the Boston area, the paid choirs that attracted professional soloists who at other times would sing with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. So I grew up hearing the very best professionally-rendered sacred music. But I recall the dissonance when, attending a Christmas Eve service at the well-musically-endowed but liberal Episcopal church, the minister (can’t bring myself to call him a priest, sorry) then talked about this wonderful historical figure named Jesus who was born 2,000 years ago. The hippie in sandals who preached social justice once upon a time. Well, maybe I’m exaggerating, but let’s just say I was not edified by the homily, I was shocked by its dismissal of the supernatural in the Incarnation, and of the nature of Christ as God the Son, who humbled himself to be born as an infant, as one of us.
I hope the Anglican Ordinariates can return us to the practice of real musicianship as worship, and the practice of real art — requiring long periods of apprenticeship — as worship, too.
Burying the Alleluia
Feb 13th
For those who follow the traditional calendar with the “Gesima” Sundays, you would have done this on the day before Septuagesima. But for those of us who follow the revised Latin Rite calendar, on Shrove Tuesday all the children will place their decoratively written Alleluias in a small coffin near the entrance of the church. We’ll sing the “Alleluia dulce carmen” at the end of Mass, as we process to the Lady Chapel, where the coffin will remain until the great Easter Vigil.
There are many local traditions surrounding the “Burying of the Alleluia,” but the purpose is always the same: to mark the cessation of singing or saying the Alleluia during the penitential season, so that it can break out as a new song at Easter. As the 13th century bishop, William Duranti, wrote, “We desist from saying Alleluia, the song chanted by angels, because we have been excluded from the company of the angels on account of Adam’s sin. In the Babylon of our earthly life we sit by the streams, weeping as we remember Sion. For as the children of Israel in an alien land hung their harps upon the willows, so we too must forget the Alleluia song in the season of sadness, of penance, and bitterness of heart.”
The students in our parish school get ready for this every year, and take it very seriously. In fact, a few years ago just after Lent had begun, one of our very young students asked if he could see me because he had to tell me something “very, very important.” When he came to me, he wanted to tell me what one of the other boys had done earlier that day. It sounded serious, so I encouraged him to tell me about it. In a half-whispered voice the offence was reported: “He said the ‘A’ word!”
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Lenten Array
Feb 12th
Lenten Array is the characteristic veiling of the altars and statues of churches following the English Use, which follows medieval north European precedent. The purple you see in many churches is a Roman Catholic custom which was only followed universally from the nineteenth century. Lenten Array negates colour to a large extent, marking the penitential character of Lent. It is highly effective.
The material is usually unbleached linen, but I found an off-white cotton that looks almost identical to linen, but much cheaper. The red is crimson as used in Passiontide, rather than the scarlet used for Martyrs and Sundays outside Eastertide, Advent and Lent. Unlike the Roman Rite, in the English Use, the statues and icons are veiled not only in Passiontide but also throughout Lent. The altar cross should also be veiled if the figure of Christ shows a triumphant character. The veil bears a black cross. I veil the altar crosses for Passiontide.
The photo opposite is my own chapel, appointed in “Wareham Guild” style.
Why is English Lenten Array different from the Roman violet (with violet veils in Passiontide)? I refer the reader to look at this lovely article in the New Liturgical Movement.
I also found this explanation (see Full Homely Divinity – Lenten Customs):
“In [the Sarum] tradition “according to the rules that in all the churches of England be observed, all images [are] to be hid from Ash Wednesday to Easter Day in the morning.” This is called the Lenten Array and it includes a curtain which hides the reredos, a frontal which covers the altar, and veils which cover other statues and pictures in the church. The colour was Lenten white which was natural linen material, sometimes referred to as ash colour. According to An Introduction to English Liturgical Colours, “The explanation of this use of white, which is closely akin to ashen, is ‘in this time of Lent, which is a time of mourning, all things that make to the adornment of the church are either laid aside or else covered, to put us in remembrance that we ought now to lament and mourn for our souls dead in sin, and continually to watch, fast, pray, give alms….,’ wherefore ‘the clothes that are hanged up this time of Lent in the church have painted on them nothing else but the pains, torments, passion, bloodshedding, and death of Christ, that now we should only have our minds fixed on the passion of Christ, by whom only we were redeemed.” This practice made a startling transformation of the church for the whole of the Lenten season so that Easter literally burst forth like the Lord from the tomb when the church was returned to normal state.”
A Sceptical Catholic Expresses His Views
Feb 10th
I have had some correspondence with a person telling me he is a religious brother and at one time worked in the Roman Curia. He is now living more or less in retirement. I believe he is being genuine despite at first having attempted to post a comment that seemed very negative. The comment had been sent on January 25th.
If I know Rome, and I do, no Ordinariate will be erected UNTIL the new, uniform Anglican liturgy is authorised. Let me stress the word New:
It WILL – have no doubt – be uniform and allow no deviation or diversity. It will be neither 1928 nor 1662 but 2010/11, taking due inspiration from and paying due homage to the preceding Anglican liturgical texts.
To imagine BCP or the English Missal are about to simply pass through a ‘rubber stamp’ process is quite misguided, and the truth may be that the earliest Ordinariate is at least two years away – and that would be going hell for leather down at Divine Worship & Sacraments.
On the subject of CDWS I smell no special enthusiasm or Anglican sympathy there, and I’ve sniffed around there a lot on other business, so the much-recommended patience will be the absolute order of the day, because -to repeat- there’ll be no Ordinariate until the liturgy’s in place.
The author of the trashed comment was of the impression that we do this to all comments with whose expressed opinions we disagree. I have had some very nasty stuff by e-mail, including a series of poisonous messages from someone who claimed to be an Anglican lay parishioner in northern England until I proved that his e-mails came from the USA (IP address and time zone). I’m sure you will understand why I sometimes tense up when people lack tact. I am not going to reveal the identity of this person.
Initially, the person stated – perhaps a little clumsily – that the Ordinariate scheme would never work or at least would take years. This was apparent in some private e-mails. He is still persuaded that the “process between now and effective operation of the Ordinariate will be a profoundly more complex, long, and challenging one than the current runaway enthusiasm seems to suggest”.
I simply quote the rest of this person’s e-mail.
I have nothing against runaway enthusiasm actually, but if it goes unchecked it can lead to disappointment. Rome is a slow grumbling old housedog, you try prodding it and it will just snarl at you. Tonnes of patience will be needed, it’s a case of a gargantuan chicken and a bigger egg: liturgy, Ordinary, locations vis-a-vis need; there’ll be no piecemeal introduction, it all needs to be assembled before launch like an Airfix Dreadnought.
But I think these are all things your readers know, or should be reminded of in their groups/parishes. I don’t think this is ‘bait and switch’ either, it is what it is. It’s an accommodation for Anglicans (former-Anglicans according to some interpretations), a new structure. It has its merits and demerits – these should all be discussed now while there is plenty of time – and there certainly is that.
If you think I’d help by ordering some of these thoughts and submitting it then I will, but I’d be wary of just repeating others’ words that might have escaped my eyes.
I have before now commented on “conventional wisdom” and the idea that everything has to be perfect before it can exist at all. We have read eloquent comments on how the liturgy must be perfectly defined, together with every jot and tittle of the “particular norms” for each group or future Ordinariate. I cannot help thinking that if this process must take several years, the impetus of this whole project will be lost together with many vocations and even souls. Can the Church afford the luxury of the better rather than the good? I have the feeling that if everything is not up and running before Pope Benedict XVI dies, all could well be up in the air if the “Kasperites” get their candidate in! Something that exists is much harder to suppress than something that is still on the drawing board.
I would be grateful for reasoned and measured comments. We do need to go into these things and they do need to be reasoned out on the basis of what we already know about Rome and the Vatican and what we deduce. Please, nothing hasty or unhelpful.
Apologia for Christianity
Feb 8th
One of my favourite quotes from Pope Benedict XVI is in The Ratzinger Report, published in 1985, pp. 129-30:
The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb. Better witness is borne to the Lord by the splendour of holiness and art . . . than by the clever excuses which apologetics has come up with to justify the dark sides which, sadly, are so frequent in the Church’s human history.
A couple of months ago, I sent a few articles to The Anglo-Catholic about the liturgy. I have been somewhat dismayed to find discussions on liturgy bogged down in discussions on how liturgical texts express this or that doctrine. I found some strings of comments on the epiclesis quite boring! I wrote the posting to invite discussion from a strictly liturgical and historical point of view – and much of it swung to apologetics and the usual single-issues.
I would love to see us moving away from “armchair apologetics” and to the contemplation of God through liturgy and beauty. Has anyone read any of Dom Odo Casel’s works? The most well-known has been translated into English under the title The Mystery of Christian Worship. Dom Casel was a German Benedictine monk and died in 1848 as he bore the triple candle on Holy Saturday to the chant of Lumen Christi. He wrote some of the most beautiful theology of the liturgy I have ever read along with Fr Alexander Schmemann.
Has anyone reading The Anglo-Catholic been converted through the beauty of the liturgy, and can you relate your experience?
