LITURGY FOR UNITING ANGLICANS
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Proposal for English / Anglican Use for Ordinariate-inclined folk. V Anti-Cranmer -Ἰ☩☕
LITURGY FOR UNITING ANGLICANS
I there is ever to be an entity for Anglicans in full Communion with the Holy See, I suspect it will need a proper liturgical provision. This is not easy to prescribe, since Anglicanism itself, in its different provinces not to say its different tendencies, has widely different attitudes both to liturgical style and to text. I suspect that three provisions might need to be made; and here I am speaking only of the Mass.
(1) There will be those who are very happy simply to use the new ICEL texts when they are authorised. A considerable majority of Anglican Catholics in England tend to use the current ICEL texts and would naturally in the course of time accept the new, vastly improved, translation. They will themselves have to answer the inevitable question "So, if your worship is going to be identical to ours, what exactly is this Anglican patrimony you say you want to bring with you?" They will have to explain that it is not just a question of liturgy; there is a whole spirituality which goes with the Anglican Faith-History. This is true ... even if it is a bit intangible.
(2) There should be a provision for something like the Novus Ordo, but in an English idiom which is Cranmerian. Where Cranmer has rendered a text (e.g. the Sunday collects per annum) his versions should be used even when he has slightly mistranslated the Latin. Their 450 year use is now itself part of the history and reception of these texts. They evolved and mutated in the early Latin Sacramentaries and in many cases were changed, not always wisely, by the post-conciliar Roman revisers; their post-reformation evolution in Anglicanism should not be dismissed out of hand. Texts like Gloria, Credo, Preface, Sanctus-Benedictus, Agnus, Blessing, should be Cranmer's, invisibly mended to the smallest degree possible. One advantage here is that the new ICEL texts - because they seek to be literal renderings - have moved distinctly closer to Cranmer's versions.
The Confession is a problem. There is a consensus that the Confession as Cranmer left it is unusable, but the replacements offered throughout the world must by now run into dozens (the C of E's Common Worship itself offers several). I suggest that a single text, crafted from phrases in and with echoes from Cranmer's, will have to be confected. Throughout the medieval period, the text of the Confiteor was fluid, and the post-conciliar Roman revisers felt free to rewrite it. There is no reason why there should not be an Anglican variant.
And, of course, the Eucharistic Prayer. There should be two. The first should be the translation of the Roman Canon in the Book of Divine Worship. The second should be a new prayer, unambiguously orthodox, with the structure which is common to the new EPs in the post-conciliar Missal, but confected as much as possible from phrases in Cranmer and in the non-Juror/Scottish/American tradition. Since one of its purposes would be to provide a EP for contexts in which the Roman Canon was deemed too long, it should be careful about its length. But it should not be as short as 'Hippolytan' EPs, since their brevity is itself a scandal.
Collects should be for the most part from the Prayer Book, together with their associated Secrets and Postcommunions as translated in the English Missal. The modern Roman Lectionary should be used.
(3) The English Missal in one of its most recent pre-conciliar editions should be authorised but with the single proviso that Cranmer's Consecration Prayer (and the combination of his Consecration Prayer with his Prayer of Oblation, once known as the Interim Rite) should be excluded because it is not orthodox. It should be replaced by the prayer suggested in the previous section. The Canon Romanus, in the same translation as that mentioned above, should remain on offer. Since the EM includes the whole of the Tridentine Missal translated into pastiche Cranmer (often extremely skilfully) and the whole of the 1662 Mass, the authorisation of this book thus modified would provide a liturgy suitable for those who wished to use the Tridentine Mass simpliciter in English; and for those who wished to use the historical rite of 1662, sanctified by the memories of Charles I and Laud, of Cosin and Kenn, of Pusey and Keble, in an unaltered form (except for the Consecration Prayer); and for those who wished to combine elements from both.
Option 3 would not, perhaps, be widely used, at least in England. But I think it would be worth fighting for such a rite both for those souls who would love it, and as a monument to the 450 years of Anglican Faith-History, in which, by the grace of God, although much has been amiss, not all has been flawed. It would also be a resource for the whole Anglophone Roman Rite, since it is not inevitable that the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite will never be desired in English.