So OK, the Catholic Church doesn't ordain women, but that in itself was never much of an attraction for Protestants. The actual bait on the hook was liturgy: it was felt that Episcopalians who mourned the loss of the 1928 BCP might come over if the Catholic Church could offer them a liturgy that reminded them of it, or something. One problem there was that the 1979 BCP retained the 1928 liturgy as Rite One.
But there could have been a hidden problem, although nobody ever mentioned it when I was an Episcopalian, which was that the 1979 BCP, inspired in general by Vatican II, adopted the three-year lectionary. (A TEC priest who was for a time celebrating Sunday masses at both St Thomas Hollywood and St Mary of the Angels was surprised to discover that the readings for the same Sunday differed between the 1979 and 1928 BCPs. I don't think this was general knowledge; it was certainly new to me.) More below.
But given the idea that a version of the Catholic mass that looked like the 1928 BCP might prove attractive, why did the creators of the Divine Worship Missal use the Roman Canon as the pattern, when Anglican Books of Common Prayer, especially the 1928, did not? The service is noticeably longer and contains features like the long list of saints in the anamnesis and the Last Gospel that are not familiar to Episcopalians.
And these features appear only in Eucharistic Prayer I, when according to the General Instructions for the Roman Missal, Eucharistic Prayer III is the normal Sunday mass. Mutatis mutandis, the OF Eucharistic Prayer III with Cranmerian insertions sould be very hard to distinguish from 1979 Rite Two; with some thees and thous emended, it would be hard to tell from Rite One.
My wife and I had no trouble adjusting to an OF Eucharistic Prayer III mass, so much so that we frequently comment that our parish is basically a TEC Rite Two parish with fuller pews and better music. We comment to each other, but would never tell them this, that our good friends there are actually honorary Episcopalians.
But this brought me to ask over the course of the past week how the Divine Worship Missal, so unfamiliar to Anglicans, is "Anglican patrimony". I got several remarkably angry responses from ordinariate lay visitors. One e-mail, under the title "Anglican Papalism is patrimonial", said
I don't know if your latest post is serious or just trolling, but this is where your lack of knowledge of advanced Anglo-Catholicism in the UK and US is most glaring. Many, many advanced AC parishes in the UK used Tudor English translations of the preconciliar Roman Missal. . . . You have this idea that all Anglicans have your middlebrow aversion to "stuffy," extensive Romish liturgy and ceremonial, but historically that was not the case for many UK and US AC parishes.In a second e-mail, he said
If you need specific examples the entire Episcopal dioceses of Fond du Lac (campily known as "Fond of Lace") and Eau Claire were quite advanced and used Missals throughout the 20th century. In the UK, parishes on the South Coast and in London were often advanced, like St Cyprian Clarence Gate, St Peter's London Docks, St Alban's Holborn, St Saviour Hoxton, I could go on. Here on the East Coast St Clement Philadelphia has used the Knott Missal for about a century.So the visitor is referring to "advanced" Anglco Catholicism in the same context as the preconciliar Roman missal! I think we're getting closer to the actual agenda here. (Let's leave aside the potential implication that an "advanced" Anglo Catholic is another way of saying a gay guy.) I replied that Anglicanism includes both high church and low, Rite One and Rite Two, but he'd hear none of it. Advanced Anglo Catholics use one or anoher version of the uniate liturgy that includes the Roman Canon, the Last Gospel, and heaven knows what else.
So we're at a peculiar place where an abusive correspondent can call me "middlebrow" and "suburban" if don't agree that the "Anglican patrimony" is to have a mass that includes elements that not even devout cradle Catholics normally see, and have it every Sunday. Remember, the Divine Worhsip Missal specifically excluded a version of Eucharistic Prayer III that would have been very close to 1979 Rite One, indistinguishable from 1928.
Apparently this angry guy is shaking at the same frequency as the DW Missal, and he regards even conservative Episcopalians who prefer Rite One or 1928 as middlebrow suburbanites!
Clearly what he and those who vibrate on that frequency want is a pre-Conciliar Roman Canon every Sunday, the Sacrament received kneeling and on the tongue. Any idea that there was a Second Vatican Council that represented the workings of the Holy Spirit is dismissed, it would seem, with a haughty wave.
Could the objection to the 1979 BCP include not just modernized language in one version of the liturgy, but its use of the post-Conciliar lectionary? Certainly this has been an under-the-radar feature of pre-Conciliarism and apparently a sub rosa complaint about the DW Missal itself -=- it isn't "advanced" enough that way!
How is this even Catholic? But this pre-Conciliar agenda is being pushed in the guise of bringing "Anglican patrimony" into the Catholic Church, when many parts of the agenda -- use of the Roman Canon in the mass and reception no the tongue, for example, aren't Anglican at all except in the fantasies of certain advanced Anglo Papalists, who for whatever reason have always been Catholic wannabes but never quite got around to becoming Catholic. He mentions camp himself.
There's a hidden agenda here. It has very little to do with bringing any large numbers of Anglicans into the Catholic Church, which is one good explanation for why so few have responded to Anglicanorum coetibus.
