A Brief Digression Into Theological And Liturgical Confusion

I'd been on the fence about posting on a recent entry by Fr Hunwicke in which he comes down, quite definitively at least in his view, on what constitutes the Anglican Patrimony. (This was forwarded by a visitor; I'm not normally curious about what's on that man's mind.)

What is that Anglican Patrimony which we are supposed to have brought into the Ordinariates? I feel that it must be more than just a few little liturgical goodies. . . [1000 or so unnecessary words omitted}

[Now he gets to his original point.] I think the most succinct summary I know of what the Anglican Patrimony must mean is in a phrase which Cardinal Manning used ... I'm afraid ... in condemnation of Blessed John Henry Newman."I see much danger of an English Catholicism of which Newman is the highest type. It is the old Anglican, patristic, literary, Oxford tone transplanted into the Church"*. Exactly. That is precisely what we are, and what we have brought into the Church packed into our luggage. I pray that we may be able to make our own powerful contribution to the essential reconstruction of a Catholic Church . . .

Although his wording is absurdly imprecise -- the Anglican Patrimony is precisely (huh?) what Cardinal Manning says it is not, viz, a certain Oxford tone transplanted into the Church. Well, shut my mouth! Can't get more precise than that! And to think I've been under the impression that this man was unserious all these years!

But notice the metaphor Hunwicke uses throughout: the Anglican Patrimony is being brought into the Church. It's transplanted. It's packed into our luggage. The odd thing is that as a convert, I'm attracted to the things in the Church I never had and never was taught, or at best understood very imperfectly. I'm acutely aware that I have no qualifications to correct the Holy Father on anything (unless, of course, he claims that it's raining, when I've just come from a sunny day outside, but with the Holy Father, I'll be polite).

Thanks to a very thoughtful visitor, I'm steadily working my way through B C Butler's The Idea of the Church and The Church and Unity. Butler, himself a convert from Anglicanism, argues throughout these books that Anglicans are schismatics. Indeed, he goes to great trouble to show the extent to which the Church Fathers struggled with schisms like Arianism and Donatism, but Fr Hunwicke praises the "patristic" Oxford tone. Huh?

As far as I can see, Fr Hunwicke is taking an imprecise position that a certain Anglo-Catholic tone, polished of course largely by schismatics, is to be brought into the church as a "powerful contribution" to its "reconstruction". As far as I can tell, this can only be interpreted by saying that certain charming schismatics who know how to vest themselves and which way to face, are here to bring their pecuiiar heresies into the Church to help with its reconstruction. As the wag posted on a forum, Anglicanorum coetibus means the Church is to become gayer. We'll see how that works out in Calgary. But indeed, many Oxonian divines of just the stripe Fr Hunwicke admires were gay. Will Fr Hunwicke clarify?

What convinced me to post on Fr Hunwicke, though, was a link my regular correspondent sent me to a recent post by Russell Stutler, That Mysterious Ordinariate in Japan, Stutler, a US expatriate living in Japan, is, like me, a former Episcopalian who expected more of Anglicanorum coetibus than it delivered, became impatient, and instead became Catholic the usual way. His vision is quite a bit clearer than Fr Hunwicke's.

Stutler discusses his experiences visiting the Japanese deanery of the Australian ordinariate, clearly a Potemkin village with two former Anglican Japanese priests and something fewer than two dozen laity, although they've received some type of dispensation (at least, this is the claim) that allows them to provide the Sacrament to not-yet-converted Anglicans, so the exact numbers there, as everywhere else, are not clear.

He addresses, not quite as directly as I would perhaps like, the most peculiar question of what the appeal is to Japanese speakers of a mass in archaic English. In fact, there is a stapled Japanese-language translation (or such is claimed) of the DW Missal in use, but it's primarily from the Japanese novus ordo with the Cranmerian prayers taken from the Japanese edition of the TEC BCP. Apparently it might be possible to rewrite some of the Japanese in a more archaic form than thus appears, but this is not done, and I'm not entirely sure why this would be a good idea.

Stutler thinks it might fix things some if the Japanese ordinariate mass were celebrated ad orientem, but this simply takes us back to the question of "what problem are we trying to solve?" And this gets us back to the conundrum posed by Fr Hunwicke's formulation, such as it is, of what the Precious Treasures of the Anglican Spiritual Patrimony actually consist of. He's correct on one hand: if you can translate the Divine Worship Missal into Japanese (or claim to have done so) leaving out thee and thou, then the "few little liturgical goodies" actually don't mean much, and it's just a dozen Japanese dressing up and attending a somewhat questionable event (it appears there are "obstacles" that aren't elaborated to celebrating this thing in Tokyo, but I suspect the obstacles have something to do with the bishop).

Maybe, Stutler concludes, this would have more appeal if you hold it in a bigger space. .