Anglo-Catholicism: There's Never Been A There There

A visitor e-mailed me the other day:

I've just come across your light-hearted blog of 24 April 2019: So Why Not Houseling Cloths? I'm reading Eamon Duffy's Stripping of the Altars in which he mentions houseling towels and my subsequent search of the term led to you and your question about whether houseling cloths were ever in Anglican or Anglo-Catholic usage.

Until I left the area a couple of years ago I worshipped at Our Lady Saint Mary South Creake in Norfolk, Diocese of Norwich. OLSM is an example of the late flowering in the 1920s of the Oxford Movement in Norfolk (it's just a few miles from Walsingham). There indeed a houseling cloth is permanently attached to the sanctuary side of the communion rails (see for instance https://flic.kr/p/Jh6hYr - note these rails are placed in front of a nave altar) and, until she had to go into sheltered accommodation a few years ago, the sacristan would pull the cloth over the rail to cover her hands as she received communion.

If such matters interest you, the history of OLSM and its encounter with Anglo-Catholicism in the last 100 years are worth exploring. Fr Roger Arguile has written a short but scholarly history of the church 'A Church in a Lanscape: A History of South Creake Church'; a much abbreviated version of this can be found on the church website, and you can buy a copy of the book if you contact Barbara Allen, one of the Churchwardens, via morleysfarm@afiweb.net. I think she asks for £5 plus postage.

Although Anglo-Catholic ritual continues in the liturgy at OLSM, I think it's fair to say that the original fervour has faded somewhat over the years. The worshipping congregation enjoy the smells, bells, and Angelus and works hard to sustain the pre-Reformation look and atmosphere of the interior complete with rood and images. But I suspect there is limited understanding of what it's all about, certainly so speaking for myself. Although I did discover that what the aforementioned sacristan was doing was to save fragments of the Host falling to the floor, I didn't know until now that she was using something called a houseling cloth. No-one else ever used the cloth and its presence was never discussed or questioned.

I have moved to London where coincidentally the nearby parish church of S. Paul's Deptford sustains a far more vigorous and rigorous Anglo-Catholic tradition. However whilst I'm not certain of this, I don't think the ritual includes a houseling cloth.

This account presents at best a puzzling picture. Anglican papalists in the UK, from everything I've been told, went to the novus ordo mass when Rome did, since their intent was to do as the Romans. Thus there has been relatively less interest in the Divine Worship missal, since that is itself an artifact of the late flowering in the 1920s of the Oxford Movement that the visitor mentions. something that was never really Catholic, as opposed to Anglicn Papalism, which tries to follow contemporary Rome more closely.

What the visitor describes strikes me as eccentrically English, and I think the visitor suggests as much in referring to the sacristan befpre she went to sheltered accommodation. But even as Anglo-Catholicism, it's clearly something at the fringe.

I replied ro the visitor asking whether any UK parishes carrying out this punctiliouis quasi-Catholic observation had any interest in the UK ordinariate, but he didn't reply. And on a day's reflection, I can't imagine they would. They're living out a fantasy of Catholicism, and even the rubrics of the Divine Worship missal would break the spell.

But this brings me to news from my regular correspondent. The Daily Office volume of the Divine Worship missal, we recall, has been delayed due to disagreements between Houston and the other ordinariates.

I refer to Divine Worship: The Daily Office, which is apparently nearing completion, at least the “Commonwealth Edition,” to be used by the UK and Australian ordinariates. Still no word on progress on the Houston version. Canadians just starting to become aware that for purposes of Divine Worship, they are not in the Commonwealth. These are people who still haven’t recovered from the fact that Dominion Day was renamed Canada Day in 1982. Personally they are having none of that. I predict a howl of protest when it all sinks in.

Bemused, I asked from how many the howls would actually emanate, since I don't believe there are more than a few hundred total Canadians in the North American ordinariate, if even that many.

This whole enterprise is a fantasy, a sort of group reification of something that has only an abstract existence.

UPDATE: A visitor comments,

My own impression is that English "Anglo-Catholic" parishes that tried to revive this sort of pre-Reformation stuff - houselling cloths, Easter sepulchres, "Sarumy" stuff - tended to be in the non- or even anti-papalist Anglo-Catholic camp, followers of Percy Dearmer and others like him

These tended to "sarumize" rather than "romanize." Many of these sort of "Anglo-Catholics" have accepted priestesses (so long as they're willing to do so "Medieval Fayre" style church services - and there are a few such priestesses in the Church of England); a few (in England) became Orthodox in the 1990s; and a few tried to start up English "Continuing Anglican" cheuiches, without much success.

And this is specific to the UK. In North America, it's less precise. My regular correspondent says,

OCSP adopters of disparate English Catholic/Anglican/Anglo-Catholic liturgies and vestments are happily piecing together Canterbury caps and lace albs, St Swithun and E. B. Pusey, because it’s all English and therefore somehow “Patrimonial.” People who actually live in the UK don’t have the same romantic notions.

Or perhaps their romantic notions are more particularly specified.