Tuesday, July 7, 2015

"Anglcan Patrimony" Again

Fr Hunwicke has concluded his series of posts on the liturgy, and I'm mainly confused, since he seems to be appealing to a "principle" that I can't identify. This seems to be the thrust of his argument:
  • Around 1905, an English cleric developed a hybrid English Missal that combined Cranmerian prayers with an English version of the Latin Tridentine text, which was used in some English Anglo-Catholic parishes. (However, this liturgy had no official sanction and was used only because Anglican bishops looked the other way; they also looked the other way when other clerics denied the Creeds. In addition, other versions of hybrid missals were in use elsewhere, with equivalent lack of sanction.)
  • By the 1930s, other Anglo-Catholics or Anglo-Papalists (Fr Hunwicke is not precise in using these terms) decided the Missale Romanum was the truly lawful book of the Western Latin Church of which they felt they were members; the English Missal was a way of working towards that ideal. This view can most charitably be characterized as eccentric, since it was not sanctioned by Rome (which would probably have said on one hand, we can't stop you from using this as you please, but on the other, you should really simplify things and formally become Catholic); neither was it sanctioned by York or Canterbury. However, York and Canterbury had long since established the precedent that its clerics could get away with worse.
  • Anglo-Papalist clergy were persecuted (I assume very occasionally) nevertheless for using a liturgy without sanction. Ah, the humanity! (By 1920, however, Frederick Kinsman wrote that while he never had an instance of having to discipline clergy for departures from usage while he was Bishop of Delaware, the general custom in both the Church of England and PECUSA would have required him, in the interest of uniformity, to do nothing.)
  • Vatican II resulted in liturgical reform, but not in a direction Anglo-Papalists expected. However, the Anglo-Papalists were under York and Canterbury, not Rome. Nevertheless, in a remarkable Jedi-Jesuit mind trick, Rome forced them to stop using their hybrid missal, which in fact was sanctioned nowhere! Instead, although Fr Hunwicke raises this only by implication, Anglo-Papalists in the Church of England went to the Novus Ordo mass, with CofE bishops presumably continuing to look the other way.
  • However, under Anglicanorum coetibus, Rome has spoken, and the particular UK version of the hybrid liturgy, dating from 1905 or so, can now be used in Catholic parishes. (The evidence we see is that, when it's been introduced in the UK Ordinariate, the parishioners have rejected it and instead have moved to Novus Ordo diocesan masses. Evidence from North America is more fragmentary, but the Ordinariate there is not thriving by any stretch.)
Fr Hunwicke would have us thus celebrate the triumph of "Anglican Patrimony" and principle. But "Anglican Patrimony" covers everything from Thomas Cromwell to Bishop Robinson. Where's the principle? What's to celebrate?