Have you read this gentleman’s blog? He’s under the impression that the Anglican Church is Protestant. The opposite of you Ordinariate folks.This goes to one question that's long been forming in my head. I think back to probably the one sensible and factually correct statement I heard in any lecture as an undergraduate, a professor who said people have bought into a fantasy of Jollie Olde England, the Spectator, and the Pickwick Papers, when the English were actually murderously efficient people.
And this goes to some of the balderdash I was taught in graduate school, including EMW Tillyard's The Elizabethan World Picture, which asserts that Ulysses's "Take but degree away. . ." speech in Act I Scene iii of Troilus and Cressida shows that "Elizabethans believed" in a Great Chain of Being in which everything is ordered from lesser to greater. (Ulysses in the medieval tradition was a trickster.)
Except that Henry VIII broke with an ordered universe in leaving the Catholic Church, and his daughter Elizabeth, arguably a bastard heretic, was a regicide. Both, though, were murderously efficient. I did hard time in graduate school.
There's a fantasy that's still sold of Jollie Olde England, most recently with Harry Potter but certainly exploited by Disney with Sleeping Beauty's castle and The Wind in the Willows, of this sort of mythic comfy-cutesy place, and I think it carries over into a popular view of Anglicanism. Why don't we get all weepy about the Precious Treasures of the Presbyterian Spiritual Patrimony, after all?
This leads to a question I got from reading a post on Fr Z's blog yesterday, regarding the proper way to receive the Host kneeling on the tongue. He includes this handy diagram:
Fr Z notes that there is a “houseling cloth” draped over the rail in the illustration showing the Right Way to do things. In 30 years as an Episcopalian, in some very hoity-toity parishes and even some Anglo-Catholic ones, I've never seen a "houseling cloth", although all distributed the Host kneeling at the communion rail. Maybe this was because they were really Protestant, or maybe even the Anglo-Catholic ones never figured this out themselves.
The impression I have, most recently from my phytoplankton visitor, is that Ordinariate parishes do things the Olde Englishe Way, except insofar as they use the new 2015 liturgy instead of the 1962. So why haven't they adopted the houseling cloth? I would say that their observance of the Precious Treasures of the Anglican Spiritual Patrimony is slipshod indeed. But I'm a novice when it comes to the Catholic branch of "Angelicanism".
Maybe my phytoplankton friend can help me figure this one out.
