[W]hen you write “Yuck is your reply to reverence and respect for the Blessed Sacrament?” You’re pretty much missing entirely what he likely meant, and you’re impugning to him objection to reverence. I would think you’d know that that’s not what he meant – otherwise we can’t have a good conversation when you derail it like this.One thing that's been at the back of my head since I started looking more carefully at this issue is the inexplicable significance of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer for a Catholic Ordinariate. I'm not a specialist in the history of Anglican factionalism, but my general understanding of English history is that from the Restoration until the mid 19th century, the style of the Church of England was definitely Protestant. Catholic albs, chasubles, birettas, and copes were not, as far as I'm aware, commonly used until they were re-introduced with the Oxford Movement. As late as the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874, Anglican clergy could be prosecuted for wearing Roman-style vestments.It seems clear to me that “Yuck” is the response to language that appears unreal, exotic, escapist, pretend world, etc. You don’t feel that way and that’s fine, but I hope you can hear what the critique really is from those who think differently. There are strong convictions that worship be real, that it speak to people today, that it take the ordinary things of life and elevate them to true dignity and beauty, and that the liturgy not be a museum or aesthetic escape that maybe attracts a few souls but overall impairs the image of the church.
The position of Catholics, even after the Restoration, was not good. St Oliver Plunkett, Archbishop of Armagh, the Irish primatial see, "was found guilty of high treason on June 1681 'for promoting the Roman faith', and was condemned to death [by hanging, drawing and quartering at Tyburn]. In passing judgement, the Chief Justice said: 'You have done as much as you could to dishonour God in this case; for the bottom of your treason was your setting up your false religion, than which there is not any thing more displeasing to God, or more pernicious to mankind in the world'."
Catholics were not granted full civil rights in the UK until 1829. When Edward Gibbon converted to Catholicism at Oxford in 1753, his father felt the need to stage an intervention and send him to Lausanne for Protestant reprogramming -- as a member of the gentry, he was expected to perform civic duties, which he could not as a Catholic.
What we're looking at in Ordinariate vestments and liturgy isn't any sort of historical reconstruction. No Anglican priest until quite recent times -- at least, none not liable for imprisonment or worse -- ever wore Tridentine vestments while celebrating a Catholic mass using anything like the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. It is simply chimerical, and in some ways a denial of historical reality, to imagine anything else. I would go so far as to say it's condescending to communicants to expect them to go along with this.
Beyond that, especially in the US and Canada, our legal and constitutional traditions were built up on principles of religious tolerance derived specifically in response to the bad examples of Britain in the 16th and 17th centuries. We do ourselves a disservice, especially as principles of tolerance are under renewed attack, to try to construct a false memory of a Merrie Olde England in which such things did not occur.
Communion vessels are made from noble metals, not fool's gold, because they contain the Real Presence. There should be nothing false or phony in the liturgy that invokes that Real Presence.
The Anglican Use Society, by the way, has issued a call for ideas on how they might occupy their time.
