SARUM ... 1549

Oh dear ... yet again the dread word "Sarum" has been waggled around over the prospect of Ordinariate liturgical revision. I will risk the wrath of the Pastor of the Adur Valley by expressing a sense of horror.

I am capable of juggling with the EF in Latin, the EF in English, the OF in Latin, the OF in English, and of leaping in mid-circus from an ICEL horse to a Common Worship one. 1662 holds no terrors for me. Nor does the imminent New ICEL.

Have I really got to add another option to all this?

And I'm even less keen when 1549 raises its ugly head. Dix demonstrated conclusively that Cranmer was very heterodox; McCullough proved the same without apparently being aware that Dix had got in decades before him. 1549 made the common folk of England rise in rebellion; Cranmer's foreign friends persuaded him that it was, from their point of view, flawed, and so it was soon replaced by the rite which (apart from minor changes) has had statutory authority ever since. 1549 must have been the most short-lived liturgy in Anglican history; nobody loved it, nobody wanted it, and I don't want it now.