Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Notes On The Divine Worship Missal

One problem in having a good discussion of the language in Divine Worship: The Missal is that it is copyrighted material, and as far as I can determine, the only available edition sells for over US$400.

A visitor reports that the Divine Worship order of mass (but not the rest of the missal) is available on scribd. This appears to be a copy of the pew missal used at St Thomas More Toronto. A search also shows a version used at St Gregory the Great available on Wordpress, although again, this is a pew missal with just the order of mass.

Of the text approved in Divine Worship, a visitor says

Are you aware that for a considerable amount of time, until 2015 I think, there were actually two parallel Mass-rites being drafted for what became the Ordinariates? Rome did not give any hint of what it wanted, and seemed to be inclined to let two "drafting groups" go ahead separately.

First, there was an "English option," the drafting committee of which included Msgr. Andrew Burnham, former bishop of Ebbsfleet in the Church of England, Fr. Aidan Nichols, OP, and others whose names are unknown to me. From one angle, these guys were realistic: they knew that a lot of English Anglo-Catholics had abandoned the "Cranmerian" or "Prayer Book" tradition pretty completely, and that a simple resort to the English Missal with some "tweakings" would not be the most appealing thing to many English semi-papalist Anglo-Catholics. What they came up with was a hybrid (or "mongrel") rite, drawing its bits from various Prayer Books, English (1549, 1662), Scottish, and the 1954 South Africa BCP, but also the Medieval English Sarum Use, etc. The idea was, that there would be a "contemporary English" version and a "Cranmerese" one, but when word began to reach them that Rome wasn't keen on any "contemporary English" version - if they wanted that, then let them use the Roman Rite, was Rome's view - they decided to do it into "Cranmerese," but as intelligible and straight-forwardly comprehensible a one as possible.

Second, there was the "colonial option," which in practice to a great extent was what TAC and its non-TAC friends and advocates wanted, an English-Missal-like rite, but with as many Anglican BCP prayers as possible. (People kept using the phrase "English Missal" to describe this, but the original "English Missal" [aka the Knott Missal, from its publisher] had no Anglican bits, although a few were added in later editions; it actually sounds more like something called the "Anglican missal," which had lots more Anglican bits in it.)

Then around 2015 Rome let it be known (a) that it wanted one, and one only, Mass rite for the Ordinariates world-wide, (b) in the politest possible way rejected the "English option rite" for being, as a member of its drafting committee put it to me, "too eclectic" and "not Anglican enough," and (c) said it had to be "Cranmerese only;" those who want contemporary English must use the Roman Rite. (I have been promised a copy of this rejected "English" version, but I have not yet rec'd it.) This left standing only the "colonial option" (which its drafting committee had not yet been completed) and when Rome put the members of both drafting committees together to come up with something acceptable, there was a great deal of pushing-and-shoving (e.g., much controversy over whether to have one Eucharistic Prayer only, the Roman Canon, or whether "something shorter" was needed for weekday Masses; the majority of the committee wanted the Roman Canon only, some wanted Eucharistic Prayer III from the 1970 Mass Rite, and it seemed to surprise almost all of them that Rome insisted that they use EP II from the 1970 Mass Rite - and then also whether put back "in these Holy Mysteries" into the Prayer of Humble Access) until they finally came up with the DW Missal.

I've got to say that I can imagine it would be only slightly more feckless a project to translate the mass into Klingon -- and remember, if this were done, there would probably be several dozen earnest little groups of Trekkies meeting in chapels all over the world to hear the Klingon liturgy. Except that there would be equivalent battles over which dialect, and which pronunciation, would be most acceptable. And by all means don't forget the Klingon Mass Society, or perhaps it might be best not to think about it.