Anglican Holy Week

A visitor asks a pertinent question:

I've never been to an Anglican or Episcopal service so I know absolutely nothing about the liturgy. But since this is Holy Week, I was wondering what type of liturgies are celebrated. For the RC Holy Thursday ends with exposition of the Eucharist ending at midnight. Obviously, that wouldn't have been possible in the Anglican tradition because the Eucharist is a symbol (I'm assuming).

Do the those worshipping in the Ordinariate that aren't cradle RCers believe that the Eucharist is indeed the Body & Blood of Our Lord?

I've assumed that the Ordinariate is made up of those that are unhappy with the way the Anglican church was going with social issues (women priest, etc)---judgmental of me, I know. If they had believed in the Real Presence wouldn't they have become RC?

I also wonder how confession is done in the Ordinariate. I'm assuming that there can't be a rite from the Anglicans. Do Anglicans confess to their priests?

This goes to the issues at the heart of the Anglican outreach project. For starters, the Episcopalian 1979 Book of Common Prayer, which is available on line, has Proper Liturgies for Special Days that track fairly well with Catholic liturgies. But there are gotchas related to the uncertainties the visitor has as to what Anglicans actually believe.

There's never been an Anglican equivalent of the Baltimore Catechism, and certainly no equivalent of the current CCC, so you won't find any section on the Real Presence or anything like it. The closest equivalent is the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of the Church of England. I find the Wikipedia entry overdetailed while missing certain important points, but it's convenient.

[U]pon the coronation of Elizabeth I and the re-establishment of the Church of England as separate from the Roman Catholic Church, the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion were initiated by the Convocation of 1563, under the direction of Matthew Parker, the Archbishop of Canterbury. The articles pulled back from some of the more extreme Calvinist thinking and created the peculiar English reformed doctrine.

The Thirty-nine Articles were finalised in 1571, and incorporated into the Book of Common Prayer.

The spelling makes it plain that this is a Church of England perspective. The 1979 TEC Book of Common Prayer removed the Articles from the main body of the book and placed them (with the Athanasian Creed) into a new section called "Historical Documents of the Church". This is probably a realistic reflection of historical developments. Several of the Articles that cover the sacraments are in fact radically anti-Catholic. For instance:

XXV. Of the Sacraments.

. . . The Sacraments were not ordained of Christ to be gazed upon, or to be carried about, but that we should duly use them. . . .

XXVIII. Of the Lord's Supper.

. . . Transubstantiation (or the change of the substance of Bread and Wine) in the Supper of the Lord, cannot be proved by Holy Writ; but is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions. . . .

However, these views were never more than loosely enforced, primarily via the Test Acts, which denied public office to non-Anglicans until they were repealed in 1828. On one hand, for the US BCP to place them among "historical documents of the Church" indicates that they are doctrinally now a dead letter -- except for low-church Anglicans, who frequently cite the Articles as continuing to define the divide between low-church and high-church.

But this leaves open the question of whether high-church Anglicans actually endorse the Catholic view of the Real Presence. The 1979 BCP contains this rubric in the Maundy Thursday liturgy:

Where it is desired to administer Holy Communion from the reserved Sacrament on Good Friday, the Sacrament for that purpose is consecrated at this service.

Reserving the Sacrament at all would be a violation of the Articles, but it's provided for here, "where it is desired", which allows parishes that object not to do it. But even if the celebrant does it, what does that mean? Even high-church Episcopalians may simply feel this is wonderfully quaint, along with the foot washing and such, and not pay much mind to the Real Presence. In fact, they'd almost certainly regard anyone who asked them about the issue too closely as gauche.

So the preference is one of style, and that makes it a very close cousin to wearing chapel veils at Catholic mass -- a form of supererogation for Episcopalians, for whom belief in the Real Presence is purely optional, and traddy Catholics, for whom chapel veils are never actually required, notwithstanding having baskets in back for everyone to take one suggests that, at least at that parish, they're compulsory.

The difficulty with Anglicanism is this accretion of vague belief, the sense that everything is optional, and that it's primarily a matter of style. On one hand, Anglicans themselves see Catholicism is basically foreign to this view, and they've stayed away from Anglicanorum coetibus. On the other, the focus on ostentatious style over substance has apparently had its own appeal to the traddies.

Regarding confession, while Anglicanism does recognize all seven Catholic sacraments, confession is seldom practiced, and very few Episcopalian naves have confessionals. An Episcopalian priest would have no training, either in moral theology or practical advice, on how to do the sacrament. This is only one reason I would never go near an ordinariate parish.