The Day of the Great Ejection, in 1662, of those two or three thousand Protestant Ministers who would not accept Sacerdotal Ordination by a Bishop in the Church of England; a day also to remember because of the concomitant 'sacerdotalising' changes to her rites of Ordination. This initiated an era only ended by the unhappy 'Porvoo Agreement' in which the Church of England herself formally declared, as Leo XIII had declared a century earlier, that her Orders were identical with those of Continental Protestantism (1995).
Granting the views expressed by Dermot MacCulloch about the Protestant character of the Elizabethan Reformation, should we see S Bartholomew's Day as the moment when the Church of England definitively and formally set out upon a course distinguishing herself from Common Protestantism? A course upon which she remained until the events of last two or three decades concluded it (Women priests, Porvoo, Anglican-Methodist Covenant, Women Bishops).
August 24 1662: one of a number of significant steps in the long journey from Elizabeth Tudor's coup d'etat to Benedict XVI's Ordinariate.
Dies calculo notandus.
Dear Father H,
ReplyDeletePerhaps off topic. Tonight I watched a film "Life with Father" 1947, with Irene Dunn and William Powell. An entertaining comedy of manners. In it, a younger child in 1883 New York is compelled to learn his Episcopal Catechism in order to be confirmed. I may be an ignorant man, but does the Anglican Church still have a catechism? And how does it compare with the Catholic Catechism?
The catechism is printed in classic versions of the Book of Common Prayer. It is vastly shorter than the Catechism of the Catholic Church (or indeed than the Catechism of the Council of Trent), and was designed to be learnt by rote in preparation for confirmation. In 1883 New York, this would be the 1789 Book of Common Prayer whose catechism can be found on-line: http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/1789/Catechism.htm
ReplyDeleteI suspect that this would have been identical to the English (1662) B.C.P., which is still technically a doctrinal standard in the Church of England (in which phrase the word 'technically' is doing some rather heavy lifting).
What is your name ? N or M. Who gave you that name ? My godfathers and my godmother at my baptism wherein I was made a member of Christ, the child of God and an inheritor of eternal life. What did your godfathers and your godmother then for you....
ReplyDelete