Msgr Lopes is evidently very familiar with the elements of the Anglican liturgy which were considered in the preparation of Divine Worship:The Missal. I doubt that he knows much about Anglican hymns, simnel cake, embroidered kneelers, vestry meetings, or all the other trappings of parish life in the Church of England or its former colonies. I think his appointment signals that the Vatican sees the Ordinariate Use of the Latin Rite as the focus of the Ordinariates' identity, a message which must be discouraging to the OOLW for obvious reasons. While the OCSP should be fine with the liturgical agenda as far as it goes, I am not sure that will be enough to offset the sense that the promise of "united, not absorbed" just got a little less realistic. I am sure the OCSP will be better, more professionally run under soon-to-be Bishop Lopes. Whether it will be more attractive to current Episcopalians/Anglicans is another matter.Bishop-Elect Lopes has already appeared in this blog as Msgr Lopes, quoted in The Portal in 2013 remarks on Anglican patrimony.
. . . these expressions from the Anglican prayer books and how they are interpreted through the years - I’m thinking of the Comfortable Words, the Summary of the Law, the Collect for Purity, the Prayer of Humble Access - these are not museum pieces.So I think the English Missal version of the mass will continue in the US-Canadian Ordinariate. Another visitor writes,
. . . I see no Anglican "chops." He's a young man of 40. And his mission simply mentions "nurturing beauty in liturgy." Maybe he will cast out the overbearing mass and get things moving.My own view is that the idea of 250,000 Episcopalians chomping at the bit to cross the Tiber was always a complete misappraisal. The New Evangelization is going to take work -- Bp Barron, for instance, sees himself as an instrument of New Evangelization, and his is clearly a non-trivial effort. Something along that line is going to be needed to attract any significant numbers of new converts to the Ordinariates.
I still think the choice in liturgy between the 1905 English Missal mass and the Ordinary Form is unfortunate. It's either chapel veils, threefold Lord I Am Not Worthies, or the same product you get down the street. Why not a reverent adaptation of 1979 Rite Two that doesn't take two hours?
A service with a sense of beauty and reverence that uses something like the 1940 PECUSA Hymnal and loses the guitar and tambourine, but without all the extra agony, ought to be a selling point.
