I learned much more recently that the three-year lectionary also comes from Vatican II, and the 1928 Book of Common Prayer had a one-year lectionary. I frankly can't imagine how anyone would think the three-year lectionary is a bad thing. As I pay more attention, for instance, I found the stress on the Lucan material that isn't in the other synoptics in the Year C just past was highly instructive. But nobody, Catholic or Anglican, mentions this as a good, and I've been reflecting on why the ELCA (and on research, a good many others) also went to the three-year lectionary at some point after Vatican II.
Hasn't this in fact been a great ecumenical step forward? How come nobody seems to notice?
But this brought me back to the issue Gavin Ashenden raised in the interview I quoted on Sunday. He sees the North American ordinariate as a liturgical movement based on Anglican "liturgical roots", by which he certainly means the 1928 BCP, although he makes it clear that the UK ordinariate is based on a clearer wish to become fully Catholic. But the more I look at Vatican II liturgical reforms, like mass in the vernacular with reveent but not archaic diction, choices in eucharistic prayers, and the three-year lectionary, the more I sense that the 1979 BCP was moving in a Catholic liturgical direction, on multiple fronts.
So what was the source of objection among Episcopalian fringe factions to the 1979 prayer book revisions? As we've seen here repeatedly, the size of the dissident factions has always been overrated, and the "continuing" movement has steadily shrunk as the actuarial tables do their work. Among Episcopalians, the 1979 prayer book revisions are no longer controversial, and even when the ACNA left TEC, although it objected to gay bishops, it retained the 1979 BCP. I'm among a small group of Catholic converts that remain fans of the 1979 prayer book as well.
So who on earth had the bright idea of trying to attract Episcopalians to the Church by coming up with not one, but two successive prayer books that mimicked the 1928 BCP, including its archaic language and one-size-fits-all liturgy, when the mainstream Catholic Church had moved away from it? And again, I think of Bp Barron, whose erudite, thoughtful, and carefully written Letter to a Suffering Church somehow inexplicably fails to mention either Anglicanorum coetibus or Summorum Pontificum as potential sources of renewal.
The 1928 BCP is a totem. A visitor pointed me to a link at a conservative forum to a discussion of David Virtue's The Seduction of the Episcopal Church, in which the first post on the thread was someone (almost certainly an octogenarian) saying flatly, "They need to go back to the 1928 Book of Common Prayer", clearly implying that that's where everything started to go wrong. And David Virtue would, I think, certainly claim that among the clear errors in the 1979 prayer book would have been its move toward Popery.
So I've got to continue to think Anglicanorum coetibus has sent an incoherent message from the start. Why is the Church trying to attract Anglicans, when the line it's taking is based on a misunderstanding of the Anglican audience, and in fact it represents an attempt to reverse, if not entirely the substance, at least the productive style of Vatican II? Can someone help me figure this out?
