Collects

One the things I like most about the Prayer Book Divine Office is the provision that at each Office the final collect said should be that used at Mass. In this, of course, it follows the usage of the whole Latin Church (except that it's a bit crude: for example, it doesn't apply accurately when a votive or ritual Mass has been said). It means that, in traditional Anglican spirituality, there is a "Collect of the Week" - last Sunday's collect which will be repeated on the followng ferias. But the Bugnini revision eliminates this usage, providing that at most offices a collect should be used which concentrates on the "time of Day". Thus a usage taken from Prime and Compline is universalised, and the Week's Collect only gets a look-in at the Office of Readings.

Perhaps the reason for this is an over-reaction against the corrupt pre-conciliar practice of saying all one's office in one great lump: some clergy cheerfully got lauds of the following day "done" just after noon the previous day. But for many of us Anglicans the loss of the constant (not in the least "vain") repetitions of those lovely old collects from the Roman Sacramentaries is the biggest wrench in the 'new' Office. It's made worse by a suspicion that most of the new 'temporal' collects are committee-compositions (I know they all aren't).

Is that true? Are there precedents in the Tradition for what Bugnini did? Where do we go from here?

VARIA

"St?" Alfred the Great has been raised in the comments attached to a recent post. Some time ago I did devote a post to the oddity that the RC Bishop of Northampton includes King Alfred as a Saint in his diocesan ORDO. Does the Northampton Liturgy Office know something that the rest of us don't? I think we should be told. Why not shower them with letters asking?

I don't know whether there are folks out there with spare capacity for prayers, Masses, application of indulgences, for the recently departed. Perhaps there are, especially among the retired and also among those who would otherwise spend too long on the blogosphere. So ...

Michael Melrose, priest, Vicar of S Giles, Reading (and thus a direct successor of Blessed John Eynon, OSB and sometime Vicar of S Giles's, martyred in 1539).
Johnnie Reidy, grocer, of Knightstown on Valentia Island in County Kerry.
Josephine.

Benedictine Liturgy

I'm sure there are much more eagle-eyed Vatican watchers than I am, who will probably correct me ...

... but I do notice two things which interest me. Benedict XVI seems to use Vespers more than I recall his immediate predecessors doing. When he goes on a pastoral visit, the event doesn't have to be a Eucharistic concelebration. It might be Vespers and sermon. I suppose this might be a conserving of the Holy Father's physical energies; I prefer to think it is a deliberate wish to draw attention to the fulness of the Church's liturgical riches and structures. (It also has an endearingly Anglican touch to it; if he employed the simple structure of Vespers, Sermon, Benediction, it would be the triumphalist Anglo-Catholicism of the 1930s redivivus.)

Secondly: he often draws attention to occluded or even suppressed feasts - this year, the Precious Blood and now most recently, S Annie, God's Grannie. Very preconciliar.

Apostolicae curae

Tomorrow, the second half of my piece on the status of the Catechism of the Catholic Church within Ordinariates should pop up. I am in two minds whether to follow it with a discussion of the present juridical status of Apostolicae cura and of the decree of assent which it is currently seen as demanding. But I suspect that this would be useless, because the two main groups have already decided what they're going to do; some people have decided that they need the Apostolic Constitution and that reordination is a perfectly sensible price to pay for having a sacerdotal ministry which is beyond anyone's doubt. They don't need a nit-picking survey of something that doesn't bother them. On the other hand, there are those who have no intention whatsoever under any circumstances of accepting Papa Ratzinger's shilling, and for whom a 'conscientious problem' about 'implying that their entire previous priestly life was invalid' is a useful and comfortable pretext for staying where they are. For them too, it would be a waste of my time. Then there are some rather fierce papists around for whom the invalidity of Anglican Orders appears to be the central dogma of the Christian Faith ... I have no desire to provide them with the enjoyment of ranting on my blog.

But if there really were those who are not just finding excuses to stay; are truly prepared for this leap into the unknown, but would find helpful a re-examination of what someone who accepts the Magisterium is expected to believe at the present moment about that particular papal pronouncement ...

Rupture

I have just been reading, courtesy of a reader, the list put out by the Congregation for Divine Worship of the Errata and Corrigenda for the Third Typical Edition of the Roman Missal. It is very long and is a telling indictment of the workmanship that went into the 2002 Missal.

I have posted on this, more than once, before, and am conscious that returning to this subject yet again may simply confirm some readers in their conviction that I am a repetitive bore. But I must say that I doubt whether the list is exhaustive - it fails to correct some errors that I had noticed and which are real errors and not just typos. And I would be very surprised if a Corrigenda of the Corrigenda did not become necessary.

But before you give up on this tetchy post, ask yourself: is it not something deeply preposterous when the people who are supposed to be custodians of the Latin Liturgy of most of the West - and are paid to be the mechanics responsible for its decent implementation and its development as a text which can both be used at the Altar and translated into vernaculars - combine a profound ignorance of the Latin language with a real incompetence in publishing Typical Editions?

Somebody decided that in the interest of promoting nobility of materials and workmanship in all the physical objects which accompany the Sacrifice of the Altar, the 2002 Missal should be a vast heavy and expensive volume bound in fancy red leather. You open it, and there are a very few words on each page surrounded by acres of good quality empty paper (I have noticed that those saying the Novus Ordo Latin Masses at Brompton almost always actually use the earlier, smaller, lighter editions: a celebrating priest is always more impressed by a Missal which is easily handled and obliges him to turn pages as rarely as possible). But - the schoolmaster in me will out - true quality and true nobility do not repose in mannered and ostentatious presentation.

More. That there are, in all the Latin Church, not enough people competent in Latin even to produce an Altar Book demonstrates the deepness of the cultural rupture of the last 40 years, and the enormous uphill struggle that faces those heroic individuals who desire to reconnect the fractured traditio of Roman Catholic Christendom. I do understand how unwisely irritating the SSPX seems when it arrogantly implies that the rest of the Church - and the Vatican - need humbly to allow themselves to be wagged by so small and eccentric a tail. But the fiasco which is called the Editio Typica Tertia Missalis Romani is a small yet dramatic symptom of just how disastrously bad things have become in the mainstream of the Roman Communion.

THE ANTICHRIST

I think I do understand the attitude of Dr Ian Paisley to the Roman Catholic Church. She uses the Bible; talks a great deal about God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ and the power of the Spirit; demonstrates in her members what look like the fruits of the Spirit; but, at her heart, underneath all this, she does not subscribe to the core Protestant superstition: the idea that a Christian is justified by fiducia alone. So she is a fraud made all the more horrendously perverted by the fact that that, by adorning herself in tatters and rags stolen from the Gospel, she looks like the real thing. It would be no use explaining to Dr P that the RC Church, for example, actually deploys a great deal more Bible in her life than Presbyterian Churches do; that is not the point. He would simply reply, in that splendid Ulster accent with all its diphthongised vowels, that this makes her all the more of a dangerous, blasphemous, fraud.

He has got the meaning of the term Antichrist right, whatever else he has got wrong. The essence of the concept of the Antichrist is that he, the ultimate manifestation of evil, is skilfully dressed up so as plausibly to appear the genuine article. It occurs to me to wonder if the movement known as Affirming Catholicism is exactly this. The enthusiasm and the technical mastery with which they deploy their props - the lace, the monstrances, the music, the incense, the 39 buttons down their soutanes - are they simply deceptions of the Evil One, designed to draw away the faithful from their Redeemer?

I mustn't let my rhetoric run away with me. Some of them are decent and well-meaning, but misguided, people. I am not their judge; I shall stand before the same tribunal as they do. But there are some of them who have a virulent hatred of us. They do not say "These people who reject women priests are decent and good Catholics with whom I would wish to collaborate in every possible way because - except in this one issue - we share the same faith; and I wish them well because - although they're just making this one mistake - they can share with us our mission to spread the Catholic Faith within the Church of England". They want to see us persecuted, they want to see us denied a place within the Provinces of Canterbury and York. Their hatred of us seems visceral.

Now that's where the devil really is.

Swine flu

I have implemented: Communion in the hand; Communion in one kind; discontinuance of the use of the Holy Water stoups; and during the Sanctus at Sunday Mass I surreptitiously rub the thumb and forefinger of my right hand with an alcoholic gel.

Is there ... keep your funnies to yourselves, this is a serious question ... anything else I could do (I should add that S Thomas's is in any case a Pax-free zone except among the Sacred Ministers)? Am I right in assuming that germs on hymn books and Sunday Mass Books will have died by next Sunday? Are the booklets I provide for my EF congregations inherently immune from contagia impiae novitatis?

Interestingly. the liberal-evangelical 'bishop of Oxford' recommends, without any hesitation, Communion in One Kind, while the Apostolic Administrator cautiously suggests that the chalice should be available 'at another station'. But who is going to consume the remains, if we do that, and take the ablutions? I am too old to die young.

Incidentally, my Associate PP discovered a zucchetto under his dalmatic as he was vesting for Mass on the Sunday before last. Is this a miracle? Is it a supernatural intimation that the Lord is summoning him to episcopal ministry?

Fr Zed

I enjoyed Fr Zed's accounts of his bonanza in London; but it embarrassesd me to realise how we English clearly give an impression that the essence of Englishness is a life punctuated by frequent recourse to "a pint". Personally, I would have to say that for me Englishness consists of the Tridentine Mass, memories of Good Queen Mary (let us trust that the cause for her beatification be not long delayed) and her Spanish consort, the rose wines of Provence, Bouillabaisse, lobster and smoked salmon from Co Kerry, the white wine made in his prize-winning vineyard just south of Oxford by my friend and one-time pupil Richard Liwicki, the art of Boucher and Tiepolo, the Lady Altar in the Brompton Oratory with the statue at the side of S Pius V, reading Ovid, reading Horace, translating the Leading Articles in the Irish Times into Ciceronian Latin, the Baroque High Altar of S Thomas's, reading Callimachus, eating spetsofai in the Greek Deli up Walton Street, the Architecture of Inigo Jones ... somehow, pints don't seem much to come into it.

Uncritical - moi?

Friends tell me that a Representative of the Continuum - whatever that is - has left a comment somewhere on my blog accusing me of being an 'uncritical' papalist - whether that means Uncritical of the RC Church in general or of this Pontiff in particular, I'm uncertain. I am shattered. I would have thought that anybody who had ever read any of my blog would be aware that I am extremely critical of about two thirds of what has happened in the RC Church since the Council - particularly in liturgical matters - and even more shrill about the conceptual underpinnings of those changes: the idea that an omnipotent papacy possesses uncircumscribed power and a competence to debauch the Tradition at will: a papacy maximalised beyond even the wildest dreams of Manning and Ward and the ultramontane faction at Vatican I.

I would have difficulty denying that I am much happier about the current regime ... the Benedict-and-Newman era ... making me in a sense a Man of this Moment ... but that is simply because in the last five years Senior Management in the RC Church has moved decisively in a Hunwickewards direction.

My only sense of guilt lies in my awareness that my prayers have finally been answered.

Who is he?

I have just seen an email text from someone called "Robert Hart", in which he dismisses four recent books on Queen Mary I with half a dozen words of hysterical abuse against that monarch.

Who on earth is this person Hart? What are his historical credentials? Is there anything I can do to stop any more of his views cropping up on my computer screen?

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.

More primates

Although, in the old days, primates were really big men (to this day, in Anglican Canon Law, when a primate is in another diocese on Visitation, all jurisdiction is suspended including that of the diocesan bishop, and the Primate functions as Ordinary), they did not always get things their own way. One of my heroes, Bishop John de Grandisson of Exeter, a very grand and wealthy member of an important cosmopolitan family and a buddy of the reigning Sovereign Pontiff, was told that the Archbishop of Canterbury, with armed retinue, was approaching his see city on Visitation. He sent his own rather superior armed force out to give the Archbishop a bloody nose.

Ah, those were the days. One has visions of Vincent Nichols, in his delightful new role as the pope's right-hand man, coming to the end of the three-hour train journey from Paddington down to Plymouth ... the train is stopped by a large force of heavily armed Liberals ... shots are fired ... the invaders retire, carrying their wounded with them ... an exultant Mr Budd re-enters his see city in triumph to sit down to a victory banquet. Medieval church life had a solid reality and rootedness to it which we lack nowadays.

Primacy lost out to the tendency of the nineteenth century papacy to absorb other jurisdictions, and in the twentieth century many of the functions which might have seemed appropriate to primates drifted into the hands of Episcopal Conferences. It might be thought that a certain accountablity was lost when a personally discharged primacy was replaced by the impenetrable bureaucratic miasma of an episcopal conference. Primacy certainly existed in the first five centuries (v. the 'Apostolic Constitutions') as it does now both in Anglicanism and in the Eastern Churches (both 'uniate' and 'separated'). Its role in the future is, I believe, part of the dialogue taking place between the R C Church and Byzantine Orthodoxy.