Englishing Catholicism

Anglican Patrimony, Sacred Language, and the Recovery of Liturgical Culture

Over the course of its history, the liturgy of Christianity has found itself clinging to one horn or another of a peculiar medieval dilemma, a dilemma which has the Liturgy of the Eucharist at its very heart. The two horns of the dilemma were the preservation of a sacred and hierarchical liturgy at the cost of the people’s integral participation in it, and the restoration of intelligibility and participation at the cost of the liturgy’s sacral character and symbolic depth. This has led, by one course and another, to a loss, which has led to a liturgical crisis within the Church: the loss of a corporate and integral, yet sacral and hierarchical liturgical practice, which allows the faithful to participate, and to inform their lives and their culture with reference to it. The reappropriation of such a liturgical practice would, given the present state of the church, require the reinstatement of a sacral language and the restoration of the beauty of holiness within the Churches of the Anglosphere.

I am confident that it is possible to resolve this crisis. I am equally confident that the integration of the Anglican Patrimony into the Roman Church will be instrumental in fulfilling this resolution, as it is already.

We now come to the question of Anglican Patrimony, and its place in the church. Patrimony differs from “tradition” or “culture,” in its peculiar emphasis on the paternal-filial relationship between the giver and recipient. It stems directly from the Latin patrimonium “a paternal estate, inheritance from a father,” the suffix “monium” signifying an action, state, or condition. The meaning “property inherited from a father or ancestors” is attested from the late 14c. The Figurative sense of “immaterial things handed down from the past” is from 1580s. Patrimony, in its emphasis on the paternal-filial relationship, indicates that the thing received is intrinsically linked to the lives of both the giver and recipient. Its emphasis is familial. The Anglican Patrimony will thus be a way of approaching Christianity, bound by a particular tradition, one which responds to a real need peculiar to a people.

The place of such a patrimony, and how it might play a part in a larger movement underway aimed at correcting certain circumstances in the wider Roman Rite, is the concern of this essay. The establishment of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, and its flourishing in America, makes this question pertinent. In November 2009, Pope Benedict released the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus, creating a permanent home for Anglicans who wish to be reconciled to the Catholic Church but to retain portions of their “Anglican patrimony.” According to the document, part of the mission or charism of the Ordinariate is “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.”

A further definition of this patrimony appears in an interview published in 2009, then Monsignor, now Bishop of the Ordinariate for North America Steven Lopes of the CDF defined this distinctive “patrimony”. “Anglican liturgical patrimony is that which has nourished the Catholic Faith, within the Anglican tradition during the time of ecclesiastical separation, and has given rise to this new desire for full communion,”^[1] Mgr. Lopes said. In what way this nourishment was given, and how a development occurring without the bounds of the visibly united church will be discussed in this thesis. Mgr Lopes added that if an Ordinariate community simply uses the Roman Rite it becomes “indistinguishable” from the rest of Catholicism in the Anglosphere. The premise of such a distinction is that there is something distinctive, yet truly Catholic about the ordinariate liturgy, making it unique and valuable.

The substantial unity of the Roman Rite must be preserved in order for the Anglican Use of that Rite to be preserved and participated in. This is the great balancing act of the project of the Ordinariate as a whole and of its liturgy, with the Eucharistic Act at its center. In other words: the mission of the Ordinariate is to remain true to its distinct Patrimonial inheritance, while participating fully in the life of the universal Church.

A few aspects of the medieval liturgical development are worthy of note: first, that the Western Church suffered from bipolarity. A lay devotional practice arose in which the liturgical life of the faithful was distanced from the central eucharistic action itself, in which the principle factors were the common employment of the Low Mass, and the ubiquitous use of Latin, probably past an advisable point, in Liturgical life. There is evidence that a change of circumstance was desired by both the laity and the clergy, at least enough for there to be distributed paraphrases of certain parts of the mass, and “compilations of supplementary prayers, devotions and aspirations…. to occupy their thoughts”^[2] while the liturgical drama moved on without them. This was a noble attempt, but a half-hearted one, especially considering that the vernaculars of Europe were sufficiently mature, (as we see in the later work of Cranmer’s prayer book, and the various attempts by the reformers to translate the Bible into French and German) so that such a tool would have been a great boon to the old religion throughout Europe. “It would have released the evangelizing powers of the liturgy itself upon the masses, just awakening. Probably nothing else would have sufficed adequately to meet the need of their instruction then. As it was, this potent instrument was left entirely to the Reformers, and the masses’ ignorance of their own religion left them much more receptive to the new teaching.”^[3] The fresh “fear of Lollardy had made most Church leaders nervous of translations of scripture, even of such basics as the Lord’s Prayer, and the Hail Mary, and the ‘De Profundis Psalm recited for the dead.”^[4] This created a phenomenon in many ways peculiar to the Medieval period of Christianity religion: while liturgical ignorance was ubiquitous, an incredibly rich and expressive superstructure of symbols, rituals, stories, poems, images, grew up around the liturgy, which mitigated the effects of this ignorance. This phenomenon was especially active in England during the late medieval period, and was solidified both in Protestant and Catholic Practice before, during, and after the Reformation.

On the whole, this situation came close to achieving a practical divorce between the “complementary ideas of the corporate offering and the priesthood of the priest, whose combination is essential to any organic doctrine of the church as well as of the eucharist.” It is true that the priest’s being in holy orders, and all that that implies, is absolutely necessary for the celebration of the eucharist as the corporate act of the church; “but it is only one ‘order’ within a hierarchical unity which is incomplete, without the cooperation of the other orders in the organic Body of Christ.” The broader point is that nearly every “method” of hearing mass was developed along purely devotional, rather than liturgical lines.^[5] Most of the prayers developed according to this method were elevation prayers, and would often contain explications of eucharistic theology. Most people who could read would spend the majority of a mass reading, while the rest would keep their eyes closely trained upon their beads, in a highly mediative and highly interior devotion. Those who read were not reading anything qualitatively different from their neighbors, and even those who could not read well or even at all might still own and make use of a Primer,

which was jammed with highly conventional phrases, metaphors and images which were a part of the stock repertoire of devotion topoi, derived from or echoed in the liturgy itself, and in the paintings, screens, carvings and windows of the church.... The illiterate gazing during Mass on a cheap indulgence woodcut of the Image of Pity was not necessarily worlds away from the gentleman reading Latin prayers to the wounds of Jesus, and both of them would have responded in much the same way when summoned to put aside book or block-print to gaze at the Host.^[6]

However, as we can see the deeper problem lies not in a kind of esoteric elitism between different economic classes, but in the fact that a widespread abstention and incomprehension of the liturgy itself except at the moment of the “sacring” or consecration. Again, this method of hearing mass would have applied predominantly to the Low Mass, which was in many respects the mainstay of liturgical life. Dom Gregory Dix’s logic on this matter is incisive. The near elimination of the layman’s liturgy of offering and communion, and the subsequent emphasis on devotion directed towards the consecration and transubstantiation of elements, “coupled with the reduction of the laity’s part in the rite to ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ (the latter being reduced very much in importance through the use of Latin, which placed an over emphasis on ‘seeing’ the consecrated sacrament)”^[7] all these laid the groundwork for many of the Protestant claims about the Real Presence.^[8]

Cranmer’s liturgy would prove to be the best liturgical iteration of Zwingli’s Eucharistic theology. Just as he saw his first book of common prayer as an explicit denials of the doctrine of the Real Presence and of the sacrificial nature of the mass, so his extra-liturgical reforms obliterated both the ceremonial of the mass, and the complex web of ritual and devotion out of which the lives of Englishmen had been woven.

Even still, as the long shadow of the Tudor Kings and Queens, with their restorations, purgations, civil wars and heresy hunts moved over the face of England, some vestige of Traditional Catholicism remained.

As communities sought in the prayer-book what they had found in [the Catholic] missal and manual…. the prayer-book itself would be to some extent absorbed into the practice of traditional religion…. Slowly, falteringly, much reduced in scope, depth and coherence, [traditional religion] re-formed itself around the rituals and words of the prayer book…. As the godly [puritan faction] came to see in the prayer-book, with its saints’ days, its kneeling, its litany, its prescribed fasts, its signing with the Cross, little else but the rags of popery, and sought their abandonment, so adherence to the prayer-book became the one way of preserving such observances.^[9]

A strong sense of locality, of attachment to a single parish, and a sense of one’s religion being “rooted in one dear perpetual place”^[10] kept many of the otherwise traditional clergy from rebelling, entering into exile or the secular life. “Cranmer’s somberly magnificent prose, read week by week… became the fabric of their prayer, the utterance of their most solemn and their most vulnerable moments.”^[11] Within twenty years of Mary’s fall and Elizabeth’s accession, “a generation was growing up which had known nothing else… which did not look to the Catholic past as their own, but another country, another world.”^[12]

Following upon the Reformation, the Council of Trent was itself the prelude to an eccentricity in the attitude of the Church toward its own liturgical culture. In the reform following upon Trent and the papal bull Quo Primum a centralizing tendency which, while reinforcing doctrine, tended, in the long term, to wreak havoc upon the already dwindling liturgical diversity of Catholic Europe. In Trent and Quo Primum, “the first time during the one-thousand, five hundred and seventy years of the Church’s history that a Council or Pope had legislated on the subject of the liturgy,”^[13] a process of increasing uniformity and centralized control over the liturgies of Christendom took the away both the liberty, the responsibility, and therefore the ability of Catholic Europe to be more than passive attendants of their own liturgies, was solidified.^[14] Moreover, the reformations in the wake of Trent did nothing to alleviate the position in which the layman had been placed by the Medieval development, and in fact “liturgical forms, as they had developed up to that point, had now become permanent, making further, organic development impossible.”

A distinctive, catholic-minded and traditional thread throughout the history of Anglicanism, one which defined itself against puritanism, showed susceptibility to union with Rome, and has sustained in the Church of England a genuinely Catholic religion, of one degree or another. It would be foolish to pretend that this has been the dominant understanding of Anglicanism, nor would it prove anything about it if that were the case. All we are doing is tracing origins of the truly catholic “patrimony” which the Ordinariate possesses. And what has been the fruit of the patrimony?
In the final summation, it is the Tractarians and Anglo-Papalists whose legacy is most commonly shared by those in the Anglican Communion who seek union with Rome under the Ordinariate. It is they who sought to unify their own peculiar blend of Anglicanism with the One Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, with a sadly imperfect success. Yet Newman himself “divined correctly that, as he put it in his lectures on the ‘difficulties felt by Anglicans,’ the natural outcome, or, in his words, the ‘legitimate issue,’ of the movement of 1833 would be union with the Holy See.” Thus we see along with Aiden Nichols that “Anglicanorum Coetibus represents the logical outcome when the High Church party reinvents itself in Tractarianism as a Catholic movement which, of its nature, cannot consent to be a mere tolerated minority, but essentially aims to take over the entire Church.”

There have been recent developments in the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, such as the appointment of Bishop Steven Lopes to the position of ordinary in 2016, and the recent extension of potential membership to all unconfirmed catholics, as a way of confirming “the place of the Personal Ordinariates within the mission of the wider Catholic Church, not simply as a jurisdiction for those from the Anglican tradition, but as a contributor to the urgent work of the New Evangelisation.”^[15] The primary contribution, is the language of Cranmer’s liturgy, and his liturgical style. Cranmers prose, originally intended merely that the people should worship in the vernacular, has acquired over time, not merely a deep meaning for those who have worshiped with it, but the aspects of a sacral language. This, combined with an “Anglo-Papist” sensibility in aesthetics, liturgical carriage, and a general concern for the beautiful and mysterious in worship, is precisely the kind of culture required by the Church at this point in time; one stemming from a corporate and integral, yet sacral and hierarchical liturgical practice, which allows the faithful to participate, and to inform their lives and their culture with reference to it.

Christine Mohrmann followed de Saussure and Bally in pointing out that “language by no means serves only to communicate actual facts but is also ... a medium of expression. Whereas ... language used purely as a means of communication normally strives towards a certain degree of efficiency, which results in linguistic simplification and standardisation, language as expression usually shows a tendency to become richer and more subtle. It aims at becoming, by every possible means, more expressive and more picturesque, and it may try to attain this heightened power of expression ... by the preservation of antiquated elements already abandoned by the language as communication”. It is on these grounds that she resisted the introduction of the vernacular into the liturgy (except for the readings); modern languages, in her view, develop their efficiency as media of communication, but this makes them less suitable for sacred stylisation.^[16]

This aspect, so important for worship across the history of Christianity, might have an opportunity to inculcate the largely “low-church” Catholics of North America with a renewed sense of the sacred, and to revitalise a traditional, ritual understanding of the Liturgy. After all, (especially in the context of liturgy) why wear traditional chasubles, celebrate in traditional buildings, or keep traditional feasts if the very speech one uses is modern? It is the unity of the Anglican Liturgical Patrimony in this regard which makes it such a boon to the church. There is no clash between speech and ritual, between the consciousness of mystery in the sacrament, and the form of worship. This solution will allow the church to have the best of both worlds: an intelligibility acceptable to the past two generations of Catholics, and the restoration of the Sacred in language, and hence in the liturgy. Archaic English is particularly well suited to this task. This solution will go a long way to revitalising the Liturgical life of the Church, as the Ordinariate continues to grow its communities and spread its liturgical influence in the Anglosphere.^[17][18]

The liturgical tradition initiated by Dr Cranmer’s Prayer Books had provided just such a vernacular sacred dialect. A couple of years ago, the Ordinariate Missal came on stream, so that Cranmer’s hieratic English - although not his heterodox theology - is now a liturgical usage in good standing within the liturgical community of the Roman Catholic Church.^[19]

It’s very Englishness is in fact a strength, rather than a weakness, even as far as universality is concerned. One of the great problems of Catholic culture in England, (and thus to some extent in the Americas) is Catholicism’s inability to represent the last five centuries of the English people on a number of levels. Yet the Anglican Patrimony (taken in terms of it’s primary figures, from Charles I to C.S. Lewis, as well as the much lauded Catholic Literary Revival, which is almost entirely populated by former members of the Church of England) can do exactly that. Just as the Latin Rite embodies, in a sacral style, the formal structure of the ancient pagan prayers of Rome, and could thus represent in the very language of the liturgy, the “binding” nature of their religion as the new inheritors of the Pax Romana, so the Anglican Patrimony can “represent” in liturgical language the wealth of the English language, of a literary history unlike any other, to English-speaking Catholics. This would “tap into” something new for Catholicism. It is arguable (though I will not argue it here) that the Catholic Literary Revival would not have existed without the Oxford Movement, which claimed a place in England and in the modern English tongue for Catholicism and orthodoxy. Though Roman Catholics already claim Newman, Chesterton, and even (strangely enough) C.S. Lewis, they have yet to marry the language in which these great men, including Shakespeare, thought spoke and wrote into a sacral/liturgical dialect. They are now in a position to do so. After a number of feints, midnight landings, frontal assaults and retreats, Roman Catholicism is now able to mobilize the English Language.

---

^[1] http://www.anglican.ink/article/anglican-patrimony-defined-vatican

^[2] Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, Dacre Press, Westminster, 1945

^[3] See Appendix: A Case for a Sacral Liturgical Vernacular

^[4] Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580, Second Edition

^[5] For an explanation of the distinction between liturgical and devotional practice, see the Appendix.

^[6] Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580, Second Edition

^[7] Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, Dacre Press, Westminster, 1945

^[8] Indeed, a similar, intemperately Augustinian, (anti-patristic) theory of Justification and Grace supports them both: God is the irresistible informer of grace, before whom vital humanity begins to pale. From a sermon by Luther on Titus 3:4-8“So he [Paul in Titus 3:5-7] discards all boasted free will, all humaxcn virtue, righteousness, and good works. He concludes that they are all nothing and are wholly perverted, however brilliant and worthy they may appear, and teaches that we must be saved solely by the grace of God, which is effective for all believers who desire it from a correct conception of their own ruin and nothingness.” See Appendix.

^[9] Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580, Second Edition

^[10] Ibid

^[11] Ibid

^[12] Ibid

^[13] Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, Dacre Press, Westminster, 1945, IX, The Meaning of the Eucharist

^[14] However, we must draw a careful distinction between what was enjoined upon Catholic Christendom by the council and Quo Primum, and what was carried out. To accuse Pope St. Pius of deliberate suppression of variant rites is to misunderstand the goals of the Council entirely.
“This new rite alone is to be used unless approval of the practice of saying Mass differently was given at the very time of the institution and confirmation of the church by Apostolic See at least 200 years ago, or unless there has prevailed a custom of a similar kind which has been continuously followed for a period of not less than 200 years, in which most cases We in no wise rescind their above-mentioned prerogative or custom. However, if this Missal, which we have seen fit to publish, be more agreeable to these latter, We grant them permission to celebrate Mass according to its rite, provided they have the consent of their bishop or prelate or of their whole Chapter, everything else to the contrary notwithstanding.”

^[15]https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/pope-says-catholics-seeking-confirmation-can-join-anglican-ordinariate

^[16]

http://liturgicalnotes.blogspot.com/

^[17] It is interesting to note that such communities have succeeded quite well in the South of North America, where a strong immigrant population is sipping at the same stream that has fed the English Language for centuries: Cramners translation of the Roman Missal.

^[18] “The Ordinariate Mass gives us back a great deal of our lost ancient glories. The language is the Tudor English which Archbishop Cranmer and King James’s Bible translators created to be the superb sacral dialect in which our worship commonly took place. It is a mirror image of the artificial hieratic Latin in which the Old Rite is written. And, in the Ordinariate Use, we have recovered a vast amount of ‘Tridentine’ material which the Western Church so sadly lost when the Novus Ordo came marching in: most particularly, the Tridentine emphasis on the Mass as a true propitiatory Sacrifice, to be offered with awe and reverence rather than with folksy chumminess. We can start off humbling ourselves with the Praeparatio at the foot of the altar; we honour the Altar each time with a kiss before we turn away from it; we are able to use the Tridentine Offertory Prayers with their unambiguously sacrificial language; we genuflect both before after each Elevation and after touching the Most Holy; we are encouraged always to use the Roman Canon, and the Libera nos as it was before Archbishop Bugnini ‘improved’ it; we can end on the magnificently triumphal note of the Last Gospel to bridge that gap between the Incarnate Word and World He was incarnated to redeem. We all truly face God’s East, and are not bullied by a laity which demands its rights to watch Father’s thoroughly repulsive face at every moment in the Mass. There is a magnificent schola and much of what it sings is, as Vatican II encouraged, in Latin. Patrimonial early Tudor English Church music is one of our specialities. The Ordinariate Rite is an example to the whole of the Latin Rite Church.” — Fr. J. Hunwicke, Fr. Hunwicke’s Mutual Enrichment, http://liturgicalnotes.blogspot.com/

^[19]

http://liturgicalnotes.blogspot.com/