But what Protestant laity very often wanted was the return of Morning Prayer instead of the Eucharist as the main service on a Sunday morning; if not that, they desired at least the removal of incense, chanting, servers, candles, bells. Their list of desired 'reforms' would almost certainly not include the removal of the Canon of the Mass, for the very simple reason that the Vicar said it silently during the singing of the Sanctus and Benedictus. They had never heard it and so they didn't even realise that they ought to be violently against it!The thrust here seems to be that certain "ritualist" CofE clergy were inserting -- perhaps we might use the word "sneaking" -- Roman Catholic elements into the prayer book liturgy; indeed, in one case, saying the daily offices in Latin if nobody else was around to hear it done. Fr Hunwicke's implication seems to be that this was a bit naughty, but the clergy involved by and large got away with it, because the bishops looked the other way.
I've got to refer to my visitor's observation that Anglo-Papalism in the US took a different form than what Fr Hunwicke is describing for the UK. On the other hand, another visitor has very kindly sent me a copy of a book by Frederick Joseph Kinsman, Salve Mater. Kinsman (1868-1944) was a professor of church history at General Theological Seminary and then Episcopal Bishop of Delaware from 1908 to 1919.
After becoming a bishop, he fairly quickly became disaffected with his position as an Anglican and began to see that the view of Anglicanism as a Protestant denomination with superficially Catholic features was the correct one (very similar to the views we now see from Diarmaid MacCulloch). He concluded that the need for political compromise over many points of doctrine, especially the tendency to "tolerate" the ritualistic tendency that emerged with the Oxford Movement, essentially meant that Anglicanism didn't stand for anything. In 1919, he resigned as bishop and became a Catholic.
One bit of prescience in Salve Mater stands out: he brings up a series of scandals in the Episcopal Church and the Church of England about 1910, in which clergy in both denominations publicly renounced key aspects of doctrine, very similar to what James Pike and Jack Spong did later in the century, and much like Pike and Spong, they basically got away with it (a John W Suter in Massachusetts seems to have been eased out, much like Pike, but like Pike, he kept his social prestige).
Kinsman's point at the time was that, if you tolerate all sorts of things, you're going to get all sorts of things. Pike and Spong shouldn't have surprised anyone, given the nature of Anglicanism as some perceptive people like Kinsman have seen it. In this context, that Church of England bishops should have been tolerating all sorts of insertions into the prayer book liturgy, Roman Catholic or druidical or satanist, ought to be seen as a problem. Fr Z on his Catholic blog, after all, promotes the idea of "Say the black, do the red." If you see special prayers to the Easter bunny in your parish, take it as high as you can until it's fixed.
This appears to be the Catholic position. The Anglicans who were monkeying with the prayer book liturgy in the Church of England strike me as eccentrics of a particular English sort.
