English Missal

Fr Hunwicke has begun a series of posts on the Anglo-Papalist English Missal on his blog. I will be following with great interest.

Anglo-Papalism vs Anglo-Catholicism

My reference to Anglo-Papalism yesterday has led me to a puzzling question of definition. I first encountered the term when someone, I forget who, made the point that Jeffrey Steenson is an Anglo-Papalist, not an Anglo-Catholic, and in context I took this to mean a nominal Anglican who believes that nominal Anglicans (not just members of the Church of England) belong under the authority of the Pope. Support for this position would probably be the idea that the 1534 schism between Henry VIII and the Pope was essentially political, not theological. If one follows Diarmaid MacCulloch, this is a historically incorrect view, although I've heard it expressed in person by one Episcopal bishop.

However, a visitor has pointed out to me that Anglo-Papalism in the US is not the same thing as Anglo-Papalism in the UK. My visitor describes the UK flavor (in nominally Church of England parishes) as follows:

This included saying the Breviary in Latin, using the English Missal, discouraging the laity from making any responses at Mass, wearing only fiddleback chasubles, praying for X our Pope, etc. After Vatican II it often meant the [Novus Ordo mass] and radical reconstruction of the sanctuary [presumably moving the altar and removing the communion rail].

If this was done in either Episcopal or "continuing" parishes in the US, other than moving the altar, it would be highly unusual. The tendency in the US among parishes calling themselves "Anglo-Catholic" would be to retain Tridentine vestments, but also to retain the communion rail, and sometimes to restore the altar to its pre-Conciliar position against the wall for celebration ad orientem. Latin was not normally used in the spoken liturgy, though the Latin wording might be used if music by Haydn, Mozart, etc was sung for the Gloria, Agnus Dei, and so forth.

The most important feature that I see discussed in the Wikipedia entry is a missal liturgy:

The English Missal has been widely used by Anglican Papalists. This volume, which is still in print, contains a form of the Tridentine Mass in English (though with an alternative Latin translation of the Canon) interspersed with sections of the Book of Common Prayer.

This appears to be essentially the same as the missal used at St John the Baptist Calgary, which appears to be nearly identical to the missal used at St Mary of the Angels, and which had probably been used at both Episcopal and "continuing" high-Anglican parishes such as Good Shepherd Rosemont, PA. My former Anglo-Catholic TEC parish, St Thomas Hollywood, used the 1979 Rite One with Tridentine vestments and etiquette (such as copes, birettas, and subdeacons) under Fr Barbour, but moved to an abridged missal (no threefold Lord-I-am-not-worthy, no Last Gospel) with the altar placed against the wall under Fr Davies.

My visitor points out that UK Anglo-Papalist parishes had been using the Novus Ordo mass since Vatican II, so for those entering the Ordinariate, the introduction of the English Missal hasn't been well received. For the UK Ordinariate parishes, as a result, there has been a tendency to gravitate to any Catholic parish that uses the Novus Ordo mass, as this is what they're used to, the schedule is probably more convenient, and it lasts only an hour in any case.

My own experience has been that, since both St Thomas Hollywood and St Mary's included extended musical performance in their high-mass liturgies, the abbreviated missal service at St Thomas typically lasted 90 minutes; the full English missal at St Mary's often took two hours. This is definitely longer than either Rites I or II in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer usually takes, yet the choice in the Ordinariates is now either Novus Ordo or the Whole Nine Yards.

It seems to me that this limited choice of liturgy is one obstacle to the growth of the Ordinariates. But also, based simply on my experience with an "Anglo-Catholic" TEC parish, as opposed to an "Anglo-Papalist" parish more typical of the Ordinariates, the difference in liturgies wasn't made clear as things began to get going, and the implications of using the one English missal may not have been thought through.

Proof Of Pudding

Thanks to a visitor, I've been given a pretty detailed insight into Diarmaid MacCulloch's thinking on the nature of "Anglicanism". I think if we back off and see it in survey-course stereotypes, there's no problem in looking at it as based on compromise. This also means that there's no simple way to characterize it, except by saying that during some historical periods, it permitted a limited and politically expedient spectrum of beliefs. As a result, logically speaking, there really can't be a single "Anglican patrimony", except to say that any "patrimony" consisted of a tendency to make political deals as needed.

In a 2004 lecture, MacCulloch summed up his views:

[T]he Church of England has over the last two centuries become increasingly adept at covering its tracks and concealing the fact that it springs from a Reformation which was Protestant in tooth and claw. This labour of obfuscation began with the aim of showing that Anglicans were as good if not better Catholics than followers of the pope. It then continued with the perhaps more worthy aim of finding a road back to unity with Rome, in the series of ecumenical discussions which began in 1970, known by the acronym ARCIC. . . The participants in these discussions have not been anxious to emphasise difference, and very often they have fallen back on the Anglo-Catholic rewriting of church history pioneered by John Keble and John Henry Newman in the 1830s, as the Oxford Movement took shape.

This opinion was delivered before (but not much) both the Portsmouth Letter and Anglicanorum coetibus, but I think subsequent developments have borne it out. John Hepworth presumably represented a "continuing Anglican" wing of what is correctly called Anglo-Papalism , while Jeffrey Steenson was its latter-day exponent within The Episcopal Church.

It seems to me that both promoted a misleading idea, that dissatisfaction with policies in the mainstream Anglican Communion by a fairly wide spectrum of nominal Anglicans could be translated into a wish by many of those same disaffected Anglicans to become Catholic. That outcome simply hasn't taken place. In part this is because Hepworth and Steenson both seem not to have understood the true nature of Anglicanism, which I think MacCulloch understands much better.

The desire to become Catholic simply hasn't been a practical ingredient of the real-world decisions by the great majority of nominal Anglicans, no matter how dissatisfied they may have been with the formal actions of their denominational bodies. There are very good reasons to become Catholic, but a sentimental appeal to an "Anglican patrimony" isn't really one of them.

Those who may now see themselves tasked with salvaging the disappointing outcome of Anglicanorum coetibus need to take this into account.

And What Do We Mean When We Say "Ordinariate"?

Since I've been stopping by Ordinariate Expats more regularly, I've been realizing that it's unfair and incorrect to generalize about the Ordinariates set up under Anglicanorum coetibus. To start with, there are three of them, and although the US-Canadian Ordinariate seems to be the most prominent, perhaps due to its coverage of the two biggest Anglophone countries, the one in the UK is actually of equal size, and the Australian one punches well above its weight. A visitor notes,

The UK and the North American Ordinariates have about an equal lay membership (1500-1600). The OOLW has more priests than the OCSP, although many of those (perhaps a third) are doing diocesan work, (while many Ordinariate groups are leaderless). The Australian Ordinariate is tiny, with perhaps 200 lay members. The UK and the Australian Ordinariates do seem to present far more impressive façades than the OCSP, however. I am at a loss as to why the latter appears content to have no meaningful internet presence, no mechanism by which potential members can connect with a local group in formation, no nothing really in the way of communication and publicity.

Visits to Ordinariate Expats reveal remarkable efforts in individual US and Canadian Ordinariate groups and parishes. Most recently, there's a report of a new organ at St Barnabas, Omaha, which contains a remarkable story of a local Presbyterian parish, closing but preferring to make its organ available for use in the city, and St Barnabas's energetic response.

My hat is off to this effort, as well as the efforts of others like those at the Fellowship of St Alban in Rochester, NY. The difficulty is that we hear about these things mainly from individual parish newsletters and Facebook pages, sometimes carried over to Ordinariate Expats, but the publicity efforts in Houston are minimal. This is damaging the case for the Ordinariates overall. I've been looking mainly at the actual numbers vs those initially projected, which presents a dismal picture especially in North America, but it's not the only picture.

A couple of weeks ago, I heard at second hand a report from an individual apparently familiar with opinions in the Vatican regarding the Ordinariates, primarily disappointed that the impression created by the less than stellar performance in North America is detracting from the somewhat better news in the UK. Based only on what I see in Ordinariate Expats, this appears to be a legitimate concern.

My visitor continues,

Msgr Newton in the UK has been on a tour of UK Catholic cathedrals speaking about the OOLW. The UK Ordinariate is gearing up for several national events which will presumably rally the faithful while getting publicity in the Catholic press. A diary of Msgr Newton's official activities appears in the monthly magazine. What is Msgr Steenson doing? Occasionally we learn from a parish newsletter that he has paid a visit, but officially he is all but invisible. . . . I note that Fr Sellers, the former Episcopal Dean of Fargo, ND who was recruited by Msgr Steenson to come to Houston, where he has been the (unpaid, I hope) Director of Communications for OCSP since the Ordinariate was erected, now has a job as the chaplain of a local Catholic school. He is also trying to get a parish started. Perhaps if he succeeds he will find that he can no longer handle the onerous burden of Communications Director and someone new can be found who can at least update a website.

It does seem to me that a fairly minimal effort at publicizing the actual achievements of North American Ordinariate groups and parishes could make a start at correcting impressions that may be mistaken.

So Who's An Anglican, And Why Do They Weasel-Word It? -- V

A visitor very kindly sent me a collection of scholarly articles by Diarmaid MacCulloch relating to Anglican history and the Church of England, which add perspective to his more popularly aimed The Reformation. To some degree, his opinions seem to vary over time and according to his audience: in an earlier article, he takes the position that "Anglicanism" itself is a term that came into general use only in the 19th century, while certainly during the reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth I, the Church of England thought of itself as part of the general European "Reformed" or Calvinist movement.

MacCulloch variously calls more Catholic-leaning figures like Hooker, Andrewes, and Laud "conforming avant-garde" or "Arminians", although he also makes it clear that neither Laud nor Charles I was ever quite Catholic. (I think he's correct in saying that Charles wasn't Catholic, but he was stupid. James II, on the other hand, was both Catholic and stupid.) I think we can draw a general impression from MacCulloch that from time to time there's been a Catholic-leaning faction in the Church of England that could more recently be called "Anglo-Catholicism", although even this is hard to pin down. The move toward Tridentine vestments, candles at the altar, and altar rails, which over the past century or so has become nearly universal in The Episcopal Church and many "continuing" groups, clearly doesn't imply an acceptance of the Catholic catechism. Instead, TEC has kept its Tridentine style but moved farther away from Rome over two generations, and even the more conservative "continuing" groups clearly prefer to retain positions on issues like membership in the Freemasons or divorce and remarriage that are not consistent with Rome.

One of the mistaken assumptions behind what was at least the naïve public reception of Anglicanorum coetibus was the idea that any significant number of Anglicans was ready to make this move. No one can be completely sure if even Clarence Pope or John Hepworth was delusional or intentionally misleading in estimating that this would amount to hundreds of thousands. However, I think it's safe to say that the influence of Tridentine style in contemporary Anglicanism has been far greater than the actual numbers in the "Anglo-Papalist" faction. This probably helps prove the point that MacCulloch sometimes makes, that "Anglicanism" is not a single entity, and it's unhelpful to look at it as a term that means much of anything at all.

In this context, it's worth noting once again that the US-Canadian Ordinariate has been filling out its distressingly small numbers with Spanish-speakers who haven't normally used English prayer book liturgy, and former members and clergy of other Protestant denominations. Again, "Anglican patrimony", a vague, elusive, and ultimately meaningless idea, doesn't seem to be what's involved here.

So Who's An Anglican, And Why Do They Weasel-Word It? -- IV

While I thought the issue had been resolved, the discussion in the comments at Ordinariate Expats that I mentioned yesterday has continued, and it's brought up the issue I've been thinking about as well: the group of 45 Spanish-speaking Episcopalians who were received, apparently as an Ordinariate parish, at St Michael's Church in Flushing, NY at the Easter Vigil mass this year. The diocesan news release describes them as "former members of St. George’s parish", but the Ordinariate site still doesn't list the group, so I simply don't know how they're properly identified -- it looks like we have no choice but to call them the Flushing group.

In fact, they're the second Spanish-speaking Anglican Ordinariate group. Both use the Spanish Ordinary Form liturgy; the Flushing group has the additional complication that, as far as I'm aware, they worship in the regular Spanish mass at the St Michael's diocesan parish. As a result, the difference between a Flushing Ordinariate member and a member of the diocesan parish is purely juridical. As far as I can understand this, should there arise a need to deny a sacrament to one of the Flushing Ordinariate members, this would be an issue for the Ordinary, not the diocesan bishop, although a diocesan priest would be the one doing the denying, since they have no Ordinariate priest (their Anglican Fr Gonzalez y Perez is not mentioned in the diocesan announcement, and his status is not clear). There's the subsidiary issue of whether the members in Flushing have a separate corporate entity to which they can pledge -- and there's the potential that cash in the basket might all go to the diocesan parish, when strictly speaking, some formula might be agreed on that would allocate a proportion to the Ordinariate group.

But beyond that, given the wording of the diocesan announcement, although the group initially identified itself as an Ordinariate group-in-formation, it's not completely clear if they were ultimately received via Anglicanorum coetibus or RCIA.

William of Ockham! Thou should'st be living at this hour!

But this naturally leads once again to the bigger question, into which it seems to me the Holy See has inadvertently inserted itself: what is an Anglican? The idea of an "Anglican patrimony" looks more and more like a hypostatization. The Ordinarite has clearly already run into the missionary efforts among several Anglican denominations to minister to Spanish-speakers. So sweetening any putative Anglican deal by adding "thee" and "thou" to English-language Catholic liturgy isn't necessarily to the point. And if that's not exactly the point, then what is?

Well, a bunch of former Anglicans, in the US mostly from the former Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth, got to check off some items on a personal bucket list. I'm not sure what else, at least in the US, is really involved.

So Who's An Anglican, And Why Do They Weasel-Word It? -- III

I want to be clear that as far as I understand things, all of the announcements of ordinations or confirmations we've seen are, strictly speaking, licit under Anglicanorum coetibus and the Complementary Norms. I got involved in an exchange of comments on a thread at Ordinariate Expats where some of these issues were teased out.

Without rehearsing the details, I now recognize that, say, a nominal Mormon could be attracted to an Ordinariate parish or group, be catechized, baptized, receive first communion and be confirmed in that group, and become a member. Praise be. A baptized Episcopalian can be attracted to an Ordinariate group, but must still be catechized, receive first communion, and be confirmed in that group to become a member. Neither the prospective Mormon nor the prospective Episcopalian, however, would be eligible to receive communion in that group's mass until he or she is confirmed. A former Episcopalian who'd previously become Catholic via RCIA is eligible both to receive communion with the group and to become a member, although exactly what benefits accrue to "membership" is simply unclear to me. A cradle Catholic who had already been confirmed, or a former Lutheran who'd already been confirmed Catholic, would be eligible to receive communion but would not be eligible to become a "member", for whatever that's worth. (If someone can explain what it's worth, I'll be most interested.)

I have a feeling that the basis for all these fine distinctions stems from the need to circumscribe the presence of married clergy in the Ordinariates. My concern is not whether some of the cases that have come to light are licit or illicit, but what they say about how the Ordinariates (especially the one in North America) have actually developed. If the Ordinariates were prospering, these instances would be minimally visible and unimportant.

One indication of this problem is how quickly statements of policy from the Holy See or Houston appear to have been overtaken by realities on the ground. So we see in Anglcianorum coetibus itself:

§4 The Ordinariate is composed of lay faithful, clerics and members of Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, originally belonging to the Anglican Communion and now in full communion with the Catholic Church, or those who receive the Sacraments of Initiation within the jurisdiction of the Ordinariate.

This can be read to mean what it seems to say -- the Ordinariate contains former Anglicans, broadly defined, who come into the Church -- but, at least according to the discussion at Ordinariate Expats, it can also cover anyone else who's been given the sacraments of initiation by an Ordinariate priest. (My own view as a grammarian is that the reference for the pronoun "those" is clearly to the faithful, etc "originally belonging to the Anglican Communion", but I'll let it go.) So, in the liberal reading, if a Buddhist wanders into an Ordinariate parish and discovers that chapel veils, threefold Lord-I-am-not-worthies, the Last Gospel, and the Angelus all fill an unmet need, then by all means, he soon enough becomes a "member", whatever that actually means (other than that he's a good, confirmed Catholic who can receive the sacrament anywhere, of course).

Or the Q&A page of the US Ordinariate site says,

[T]he Ordinariate was formed in response to repeated and persistent inquiries from Anglican groups who were seeking to become Catholic, and is intended for those coming from an Anglican tradition.

and

[B]ecause we maintain our own distinct heritage and traditions, we are Catholics who maintain our distinct Anglican Tradition within the Roman Catholic Church.

Except, of course, that an essentially Tridentine mass with some Cranmerian prayers and faux "Tudor" usage grafted on isn't all that Anglican.

This all came up because Ordinariate Expats linked to the June 2015 Ordinariate house organ, the Ordinariate Observer, which reported that the St John Vianney group in Cleburne, TX confirmed one teenage cradle Catholic, two former Baptists, and three former Episcopalians. It's good news when anyone becomes Catholic, and it's licit that the two former Baptists were confirmed -- though given the fairly plain language in the policy statements above, this doesn't seem to be what Ordinariates were necessarily intended to do.

The issue, as far as I can see, is that in practice, there's been so little interest in Ordinariates nationally that the occasional Baptist outlier is enough to bulk up statistics, which badly need bulking up. To put this in context, in the US, excluding Canada, there were 39,654 catechumens and 66,831 candidates in 2013, mostly entering the Church via RCIA. Even the former Anglicans received among these must surely outnumber by orders of magnitude those received as "members" in the Ordinariate during the same period.

Whether or not a few Baptists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Nazarenes, or whatever find their way in shouldn't have made much difference as things were originally thought through. Now, though, the outliers are needed just to keep the numbers somewhere above zero.

So Who's An Anglican, And Why Do They Weasel-Word It? -- II

It seems to me that there are two separate but related questions here. The first is who is eligible to become a married Catholic priest under the provisions of Anglicanorum coetibus, and the second is who is eligible to become a "member" of an Ordinariate parish. (A third is why a distinction as to membership exists, and this is a puzzling question as well.) Clearly the most pressing issue is the first, since in Latin Catholicism, married priests are a rare and carefully circumscribed exception, never to be regarded as a precedent.

Let's take Fr Randy Sly, who was in an early wave of US-Canadian Ordinariate ordinations in June 2012. The announcement in the Catholic press, "Local man ordained to Anglican ordinariate", carries the subhead, "Former Anglican Archbishop Randy Sly enters into the Catholic priesthood." Phew! Would he be an intimate of Rowan Williams, say? Well, no. Instead,

A former Anglican archbishop, Father Sly, 63, was raised in the Episcopal Church. For more than 30 years, he worked in parish and denominational ministry in the Wesleyan Methodist Church and in an Anglican jurisdiction serving churches in Michigan, Oklahoma, Kansas and Virginia. In 2006, while serving as an archbishop for the Eastern Province of the Charismatic Episcopal Church, he entered into the Catholic Church, along with his wife of 39 years.

As we saw yesterday, the Charismatic Episcopal Church is not an Anglican denomination, since it is not and never was a member of the Anglican Communion, and it is not a splinter group from any current or former member of the communion. So why the need to weasel-word Fr Sly's background? This might be due to the possible insecurity Houston might feel over the ineligibility of CEC priests for the Pastoral Provision. I'm also puzzled at the reference to the Wesleyan Methodist Church, otherwise unexplained -- according to Wikipedia,

The Wesleyan Methodist Church was a Methodist denomination in the United States organized on May 13, 1841. It was composed of ministers and laypeople who withdrew from the Methodist Episcopal Church because of disagreements regarding slavery, church government, and the doctrine of holiness according to the Discipline of the Wesleyan Methodist Connection (1841). . . . The Wesleyan Methodist Church merged with the Pilgrim Holiness Church, and became known as the Wesleyan Church. Several conferences in both merging denominations refused to be a part of the merged church over differences about modesty and worldliness (some of the conferences did not permit their members to have television sets, and required the women to have uncut hair).

Well, if I'd had anything to do with vocations in the US-Canadian Ordinariate, I think I'd want to probe carefully into Archbishop Sly's formation. I assume this was done.

In May 2015, Fr Sly was appointed Parochial Vicar for St. Therese Parish in Kansas City, Missouri and Parochial Administrator for the Ordinariate Community of Our Lady of Hope, which meets at Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church in Kansas City, replacing a Pastoral Provision priest already there. The Potomac Falls, VA group he had led was merged with the St Luke's group in the District of Columbia.

If this is all copacetic, why the need to weasel-word? Why not tell it like it is? I'm not sure if his holy orders were ever in an Anglican denomination, though naturally I'll be happy to defer to clarifications and corrections. But why the apparent need to overcompensate and make him an Anglican archbishop? Just asking.

But this case isn't all that unusual. More tomorrow.

So Who's An Anglican, And Why Do They Weasel-Word It? -- I

A couple of issues have been at the back of my mind since I first saw the announcement that the Ordinariate intended to ordain a former Presbyterian pastor. One is that the definition of "Anglican" differs between the Anglican Use Pastoral Provision and the Ordinariate, and this difference has shown up in practice.

According to the Pastoral Provision FAQ page,

Initially, the Pastoral Provision applied only to married clergymen of the Episcopal Church. In 2007, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith determined that the Pastoral Provision applies to ecclesial communities that, in some form or other, have broken with the Episcopal Church USA. They sometimes are referred to as “continuing Anglican communities.” These are The Reformed Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church in America, The Anglican Catholic Church – Original Province, The Anglican Province of Christ the King, the Episcopal Missionary Church, and the Christian Episcopal Church. Since 2007, other ecclesial communities have separated from the Episcopal Church USA. Clergymen of these ecclesial communities may inquire of the Ecclesiastical Delegate whether the Pastoral Provision may apply to them. The Pastoral Provision does not apply to the International Communion of the Charismatic Episcopal Church.

The exclusion of the CEC from the Pastoral Provision -- something that seems to have come from the CDF -- appears to have a good basis. According to Wikipedia,

The Charismatic Episcopal Church, more officially known as the International Communion of the Charismatic Episcopal Church (ICCEC), is an international Christian denomination established as an autocephalous communion in 1992. The ICCEC states that it is not a splinter group of any other denomination or communion, but is a convergence of the sacramental, evangelical, and charismatic traditions that it perceives in the church from the apostolic era until present times.

Wikipedia points out, "The word episcopal is used to describe its hierarchy of bishops (see table). Many churches in the ICCEC, however, claim an Anglican identity and many use the American Book of Common Prayer (1979). A new sacramentary, now in broad trial use, contains modified Roman, Anglican, and Eastern rites." At least for the CDF, claiming an "Anglican identity" isn't enough. This, of course, is a debate raging elsewhere in our public life.

The Pastoral Provision was set up to avoid the appearance of opening the door to a general married priesthood. For Anglicanorum coetibus to define itself as intended for existing groups of Anglicans would be just a similar safeguard. However, the Ordinariate is, unlike the reawakened Pastoral Provision, pushing the definition of Anglican by ordaining married priests in the Charismatic Episcopal Church (specifically excluded by the Pastoral Provision) and now proposing ordaining a former Presbyterian pastor who is “Anglican” by virtue of having been ordained for less than a year in the ACNA, itself iffy in the view of the Pastoral Provision. The practical result is that at least the US Ordinariate could potentially creep into having significant non-Anglican membership, ministered to by non-Anglican married priests not under close diocesan supervision.

On one hand, you might say "not that there's anything wrong with that!" And my intent is not to be snooty about this -- I used to be Episcopalian, but I became Catholic via RCIA, and I'm delighted to be a member of a very diverse diocesan parish. But if non-Anglican priests are OK, why do so many statements from, or on behalf of, the Ordinariate find the need to fuzz over this issue and weasel-word the announcements? I'll look at this tomorrow.

I've Been Reading Diarmaid MacCulloch's The Reformation

Although MacCulloch makes it clear that he's not a practicing Christian, and the book is often frustrating in its attempt to be encyclopedic but not well-organized, his admiration for the Council of Trent shows through. It seems to me that he finds several factors that led to its ultimate success in preserving the Catholic faith:

• De-emphasizing the role of friars in parish ministry and replacing them with largely secular priests under diocesan authority, formed via diocesan seminaries
• Emphasizing the ultimate authority of diocesan bishops in many matters
• Introducing modern systems of bureaucratic control, while emphasizing centralized policymaking.

I've been scratching my head all along about Anglicanorum coetibus, but MacCulloch's view of the Council of Trent has helped to focus my reservations about it. It basically sets up a system that bypasses diocesan authority, taking as its example the non-territorial Archdiocese for the Military Services. However, the armed forces aren't a parallel situation, since military members and their families often find themselves on military bases or in other situations under unique military authority, which gives them a quasi-territorial status. Law enforcement is handled in a parallel fashion in military situations as well.

In contrast, Ordinariate parishes can pop up in Anytown, USA (or Canada), for no good reason except that someone got it into his head to start one. If anyone -- and we're seeing it can be pretty much anyone with good contacts in Houston -- wants to become a Catholic priest, the Ordinary and his prebendaries will find a way to wangle it, although they may need to go some distance to shop for a sympathetic bishop to do the deed.

These new priests, whose formation is as a practical matter wildly inconsistent, then function thousands of miles from supervision. I've worked in corporate environments where the boss is on the other side of the country, and I guarantee you, it's a situation ripe for abuse. It's only a matter of time before this thing blows up. I think the diocesan bishop who, as my visitor suggested, worries about the priest on the six-o-clock news who's in his territory but not his guy has a legitimate concern.

I'm more and more convinced that the Pastoral Provision had things right: it's inspired to find a way to bring in Anglican (repeat, Anglican) priests who meet the proper criteria. But their formation and their ministry should be supervised by diocesan bishops.

Remember that Jeffrey Steenson presumably kept his mouth shut in 1993 when Clarence Pope gave Cardinal Ratzinger an estimate of 250,000 Episcopalians who'd come over to a US Anglican Ordinariate. John Hepworth suggested the TAC would come over with half a million. I believe both gave Pope Benedict the mistaken impression that the Ordinariates would be far larger than they actually have been, and a personal prelature may have been a better idea in that case.

The Anglican Use Pastoral Provision Reawakens

I'm not sure how recent this is -- the page is copyrighted 2014 -- but the Pastoral Provision web site has a new home page that says,

Welcome to the new and recently refurbished web site for the Pastoral Provision. I hope that this newly updated website will help anyone seeking answers to questions about the Pastoral Provision.

Farther down, after a summary of what the Pastoral Provision is about, it says in bold,

Even with the establishment of the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, the Pastoral Provision remains available for individuals and married former Episcopalian priests to become Catholic priests in a diocese.

Bishop of Orange, CA Kevin Vann is now the delegate for the Pastoral Provision, having presumably replaced Cardinal Bernard Law.

This raises a number of interesting questions. First, there continues to be a critical shortage of diocesan clergy. My own parish has had to cancel masses and rearrange a reduced mass schedule due to a shortage of priests. Other local parishes are having to scramble to fill in for vacations and retreats. On the other hand, there has been a great surplus of Episcopal priests for several generations.

In addition, the ordination process for Ordinariate priests is sclerotic, with a chaotic situation of priests without groups and groups without priests. I'm aware of several good and sincere former Episcopal candidates who appear to have been placed on indefinite hold, while in one case a former Presbyterian pastor with only technical qualifications for the Ordinariate seems to be fast-tracked, while in another a former Charismatic Episcopal Church priest has in fact been ordained despite the fact that the CEC is not an Anglican denomination, and CEC priests are specifically excluded from the Pastoral Provision.

The main difference between married priests ordained as Catholics in the Ordinariate vs the Pastoral Provision is that Pastoral Provision priests are under diocesan authority. (The Pastoral Provision also applies only within the US.) The home page cited says, "Since 1983 over 100 men have been ordained for priestly ministry in Catholic dioceses of the United States" under it. The problem for the Church from the start has been to avoid a perception that the Pastoral Provision is a back door to a general married priesthood. As a result, Pastoral Provision priests have usually been put in non-parish work, such as hospital chaplains, but naturally there are prominent exceptions.

The problem I see throughout Ordinariates and the Pastoral Provision is the inconsistency with which policy is applied. Fr Chori Seraiah, one of the earliest Ordinariate priests, was ordained without an accompanying group in Iowa, first put in hospital chaplain work, and eventually placed as pastor of a diocesan parish, where he presumably says Novus Ordo masses exclusively. In effect, he's functioning as a Pastoral Provision priest, but I believe he's still in the Ordinariate. But other Ordinariate priests and candidates without groups are without duties, when they might be better utilized in diocesan work of some kind.

As a visitor puts it, "[I]it is understandable that a Catholic bishop would not be particularly happy about the idea of priests functioning within the boundaries of his dioceses but not under his control. This is before we get to the desperate manpower shortage he may be facing while an OCSP priest ministers to his congregation of twenty-two. But if something goes wrong, who will make the distinction that the priest on the 6 o'clock news is actually from another jurisdiction? No upside for the local bishop here."

I hope that Bishop Vann can begin to rationalize this situation while increasing the opportunities for former Episcopal priests in the Pastoral Provision.

Veils!

A report from mass at the principal parish of the US-Canadian Ordinariate says, "Many of the young women wear veils. White for unmarried women, black for married ones. Everyone is dressed to the nines."

This sent me, first, to my wife, to ask exactly when ladies stopped wearing veils to church. I have only the faintest memory, in fact, of any women in my family wearing any veils at all, and I believe they were in my grandparents' generation. My wife says this generally stopped in the 1950s or early 60s, maybe about the same time gentlemen stopped wearing fedoras. This is Houston, though, but I would still say it's something out of Flannery O'Connor, who of course was a Catholo-Catholic and thought this sort of thing was silly. White for unmarried women, black for married ones. My wife suggested I do some research.

In a recent post, Fr Z noted,

Yes, there is an exact way for the veil to be worn and when it should be put on.

As far as the act of veiling is concerned, it should be done no farther than 20 meters from the lowest step of the church’s door.

Moving on, the edge of the veil should be drawn precisely 4.25cm from the critical angle of the hairdo’s forward arc. Centimeters, mind you.

More seriously, this account, which seems informed and wise, suggests that it is of course no longer a requirement of any sort in the Catholic Church; that when it was, any sort of head covering would do, not just black veils for married ladies and white for virgins; most recently, it's common at Extraordinary Form masses and a matter of courtesy to wear one then.

There is no mention of the proper covering at the Ordinariate rite, but since the usage at the place where the Ordinary sits must be normative, I assume it's done frequently in the US-Canadian franchise. I will be interested to hear any reports from elsewhere on our continent.

In general, though, it seems more and more like this Ordinariate stuff ain't for me.

Archaism And Fantasy

A visitor pointed me to this thread at a forum reacting to the announcement of the new Ordinariate mass in 2013. The reactions were diverse and heated, with some contention over one poster's use of the word "yuck". A Catholic priest remarked,

[W]hen you write “Yuck is your reply to reverence and respect for the Blessed Sacrament?” You’re pretty much missing entirely what he likely meant, and you’re impugning to him objection to reverence. I would think you’d know that that’s not what he meant – otherwise we can’t have a good conversation when you derail it like this.

It seems clear to me that “Yuck” is the response to language that appears unreal, exotic, escapist, pretend world, etc. You don’t feel that way and that’s fine, but I hope you can hear what the critique really is from those who think differently. There are strong convictions that worship be real, that it speak to people today, that it take the ordinary things of life and elevate them to true dignity and beauty, and that the liturgy not be a museum or aesthetic escape that maybe attracts a few souls but overall impairs the image of the church.

One thing that's been at the back of my head since I started looking more carefully at this issue is the inexplicable significance of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer for a Catholic Ordinariate. I'm not a specialist in the history of Anglican factionalism, but my general understanding of English history is that from the Restoration until the mid 19th century, the style of the Church of England was definitely Protestant. Catholic albs, chasubles, birettas, and copes were not, as far as I'm aware, commonly used until they were re-introduced with the Oxford Movement. As late as the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874, Anglican clergy could be prosecuted for wearing Roman-style vestments.

The position of Catholics, even after the Restoration, was not good. St Oliver Plunkett, Archbishop of Armagh, the Irish primatial see, "was found guilty of high treason on June 1681 'for promoting the Roman faith', and was condemned to death [by hanging, drawing and quartering at Tyburn]. In passing judgement, the Chief Justice said: 'You have done as much as you could to dishonour God in this case; for the bottom of your treason was your setting up your false religion, than which there is not any thing more displeasing to God, or more pernicious to mankind in the world'."

Catholics were not granted full civil rights in the UK until 1829. When Edward Gibbon converted to Catholicism at Oxford in 1753, his father felt the need to stage an intervention and send him to Lausanne for Protestant reprogramming -- as a member of the gentry, he was expected to perform civic duties, which he could not as a Catholic.

What we're looking at in Ordinariate vestments and liturgy isn't any sort of historical reconstruction. No Anglican priest until quite recent times -- at least, none not liable for imprisonment or worse -- ever wore Tridentine vestments while celebrating a Catholic mass using anything like the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. It is simply chimerical, and in some ways a denial of historical reality, to imagine anything else. I would go so far as to say it's condescending to communicants to expect them to go along with this.

Beyond that, especially in the US and Canada, our legal and constitutional traditions were built up on principles of religious tolerance derived specifically in response to the bad examples of Britain in the 16th and 17th centuries. We do ourselves a disservice, especially as principles of tolerance are under renewed attack, to try to construct a false memory of a Merrie Olde England in which such things did not occur.

Communion vessels are made from noble metals, not fool's gold, because they contain the Real Presence. There should be nothing false or phony in the liturgy that invokes that Real Presence.

The Anglican Use Society, by the way, has issued a call for ideas on how they might occupy their time.

The Text And Rubrics For The Ordinariate Rite Mass,

although approved for use and supplanting both rites in the 2003 Book of Divine Worship, haven't been published.

The full text of the Order of Mass will not to be made [sic] public online until the groups have got accustomed to celebrating it and the Missal has been published (hopefully some time in 2015).

The "hopefully" is something we've gotten used to from Houston, as by now it's understood that things there are done neither expeditiously nor well.

The problem is that the occasional defenses of the rite we've seen in comments at Ordinariate News and elsewhere say that, in reality, the rite provides a great deal of flexibility. But if we still won't see the rubrics for some time to come, we won't know for sure. An anonymous correspondent, though, has very kindly sent me a link to a bulletin-missalette-order-of-service for this past Trinity Sunday at St John the Evangelist, Calgary, AB. Without a published set of rubrics for reference, I simply can't tell what options, where these exist, are being exercised in this service, and exactly how this might relate to the time needed to conduct it.

However, as an attendee at Anglo-Catholic masses at two parishes in Los Angeles, I find this bulletin very familiar in both style and content. I would say that the service in Calgary covers the whole nine yards (another expression might be b*lls to the wall) of the most formal Anglo-Catholic practice. Among other things, I've found that, based on my experience with this type of highly complex liturgy, a normal prayer book style breviary is almost impossible to use -- to save the need to juggle books and hymnals around, you must have this type of missal for all but the most accustomed regular parishioners. This alone is an expense. Calgary, from the evidence I see, publishes a version of this missalette, 36 pages, each week. My previous Episcopal parish, St Thomas the Apostle Hollywood, issued a very similar booklet with the admonition to take it home, keep it or recycle it, because it was out of date by the Monday.

I would also say that the mass as prescribed in the missalette contains asperges, the Summary of the Law, all the prayers, the comfortable words, every verse of every hymn, the Prayer of Humble Access, the Prayer of Thanksgiving, the Last Gospel, and the Angelus. I don't see a threefold "Lord, I am not worthy", so this may be a legitimate option. (UPDATE: My correspondent says it's there; I missed it!) But at St Mary of the Angels, which used all these, a high mass with two dozen or so communicants took at least two hours, unless the announcements were copious and/or the homilist got a bee in his bonnet, in which case all bets were off. My correspondent suggests 90 minutes could be possible, but I haven't seen it, and my wife notes that Fr Kelley actually moved things along.

When I noted to my correspondent that this was not a thing to bring kids to, he suggested that among Anglo-Catholics, kids are unusual. "So many men -- so few fathers!" observed Fr Davies at St Thomas Hollywood one Father's Day. The fact that so many communicants may be beyond childbearing, or possibly indisposed to it, strikes me as a structural problem underlying the Ordinariate's mission, and perhaps something that hadn't been fully addressed in establishing the Apostolic constitution in the first place.

Is This Thing An Edsel?

Again, there's been almost no discussion, anywhere, of the Ordinariate liturgy, its current status, and where the final version may be headed. A scholarly article by Prof Hans-Jürgen Feulner sums up the current situation (p 61):

In the transitional period until the final approbation and confirmation of an entire liturgical order for the Personal Ordinariates with their own liturgical books (Anglican Use Liturgy), next to the allowable use of the Roman Rite (in both its forms), it is possible in the United States to celebrate the Eucharist, Baptism, Matrimony, Funerals, and the Daily Office according to the BDW (with a few additions and corrections)—but only in the form of Rite One with its traditional “Prayer Book English.”

Except that, as we've seen, the "Prayer Book English" isn't even that, but a Jurassic Park reconstruction of grammar and usage as of 1662, as if the text had come from then (but it hasn't), although typically, the commenter I cited yesterday who approves of this erroneously calls it "Tudor". In 1662, it should be "Stuart", or maybe "Restoration", but that wouldn't have the proper God-wotter ring.

The problem, which we're coming to see only in bits and snatches, is that apparently not all that many people like this "Rite I" liturgy. (Properly speaking, of course, "Rite I" is a creature of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, borrowed by the 2003 Book of Divine Worship; in 1662 nobody thought of a "Rite I".) The 1928 Book of Common Prayer Eucharist, and the 1979 Rite I, do not contain threefold repetitions, kissings of the altar, or a Last Gospel, but my Texas correspondent reported the presence of all three, a situation that sends him to diocesan parishes for relief, since without a Rite II, those without the time or patience for the Ordinariate form must use the Novus Ordo.

Ordinariate News links to the current issue of the UK-Australian Ordinariate publication The Portal, which on pp 11-12 contains a report from the UK Salisbury Ordinariate group. Their pastor says,

As you may have found, the Ordinariate Rite is not the wish of the majority of the people in our Group. We used it exclusively through Lent last year, and in the main, most people were relieved when we went back to the Novus Ordo.

Last week I linked to another report from the UK, suggesting that the tendency of members to seek out the Ordinary Form damages the cohesion of Ordinariate groups. This could theoretically be a problem even for diocesan parishes, since Ordinariate members might be assumed to pledge to their groups, but many Sundays attend mass at diocesan parishes instead, where their offerings in the basket might not be as substantial as if they pledged as members there -- and their Ordinariate groups would also not be obligated to contribute to diocesan campaigns. The only mitigating factor is that there are so few Ordinariate groups, and their typical membership is so small, that this is not a practical problem for dioceses.

So will there ever be a Rite Two in a finalized Book of Divine Worship? Der Professor schweigt. If not, of course, it's incorrect even to call the present version a Rite I, since it's the only available Ordinariate rite. If one ever appears, it presumably will not be soon. At this point, though, it strikes me as one more peculiar contradiction in how the Ordinariates have been set up: the Anglicans who come over get their own liturgy, but not the one they like. In fact, it's enough of a negative that the fragmentary reports we receive suggest that the made-up "Prayer Book" rite is so cumbersome that, where it's used, it restricts the ability of the Anglicans to stay in their groups during worship.

Instead, they go to Roman rite parishes for relief or use the Roman rite themselves. Wasn't it the point of Anglicanorum coetibus that the Anglicans should retain their own groups in their own style of worship? Except, of course, that a Jurassic Park version of a 1662 mass was never their style of worship.

Many thanks to my anonymous correspondent for the time he has most generously taken to forward links to research materials for this subject.

The Anglican Use Society, by the way, has issued a call for ideas on how they might occupy their time.