Actually, that I can't find anything better so far boosts my view of human nature, although I will say that Fr Ian Davies, the current rector of St Thomas Anglo-Catholic Hollywood, did say his inaugural mass there in Welsh. But I promised yesterday that I'd have more to say about "restorationism", or at least its kissin' cousin, ordinariate Anglican Catholicism, or whatever we can properly call it -- I'd be interested to hear suggestions here. Clearly the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society, Fr Hunwicke, and other outspoken advocates of this version of "Catholicism" see it as something beyond just the Divine Worship Missal, however vague whatever it is may be.
To get there, I'll cite an e-mail I received the other day from a visitor whom I believe is either a sedevacantist or something very similar (his comments are good-humored and often fun). In response to a remark I quoted from my regular correspondent regarding Article XXIV, he said,
Obviously your current correspondent doesn’t have a clue about the Anglican use of Latin amongst the educated.I forwarded this to my regular correspondent, who replied,I must have five different editions of the Latin BCP and two of the Greek. Also, you’re blessed to have Latin services in SF and in LA at Episcopal parishes, not to mention S. Thomas in NYC which uses a bit of Latin.
The irony is that the article was written in Latin. How to circumvent it? Study Latin!
Latin (and ancient Greek) BCPs are a curiosity along the lines of Winnie Ille Pu, although there was the occasional Latin CofE service at Oxford where Latin was fluently understood by some up to and including the early 20th C. That is the point—-that the hearers understand it. I think that trying to strike up a conversation in Latin with even a long-time TLM attendee would be a wash. And of course the Latin mass at OLA was not the BCP in Latin, but the OF of the Roman Rite. No element of the “Anglican Patrimony” there.I agree that some mixture of linguistic facility and excess leisure among the English educated classes did result in things like translations of Paradise Lost into Latin dactylic hexameter, when Milton himself had too much else to think about. But I think there's more to Latin Books of Common Prayer than that. The sedevacantist visitor sent me a link to a heavily annotated 1964 pamphlet cataloging the numerous Latin versions of the Book of Common Prayer. This is more serious than, say, 1066 and All That.
Why? Why should so many have done this, starting in 1559, with an authorized new translation in 1665 and an unauthorized one in 1865, much reprinted through the early 20th century? (The 1559 is the one the visitor mentions now used at St Thomas Hollywood during Advent.) The dates are certainly significant. Clearly 1559 and 1665 would have been times when such a translation would have lent prestige to the Church of England following political turmoil. The late 19th and early 20th centuries would have been the peak times for the Oxford Movement.
This is not a bagatelle on the order of a Klingon Bar Mitzvah. I think it reflects a deep insecurity in the Church of England that it should need to borrow authenticity via a Latin version of its liturgy, first to reestablish the credibility of the monarchy following periods of political turmoil, and then during the Oxford Movement to provide respectability for the arriviste industrialists who were beginning to marry into aristocratic families and travel in their circles. These people were, I suspect, deeply insecure. They endowed Gothic churches and Gothic university campuses from the same need to invent a pedigree for themselves.
There's a third motive, which I think is more recent, which is to bolster the Anglican "tree and branch" theory of the Christian church. It takes the East-West schism as a given, and then it asserts that if the Orthodox are a branch of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, the Anglicans must be the same thing. There's no more need for Anglicans to come back into the Church than for the Orthodox. (I was specificlally taught this in my TEC confirmation class in 1981.) This view is examined and refuted in detail by Bp Butler in The Church and Unity. Anglicanoum coetibus implicitly bypasses it by requiring Anglican laity to be received into the Church and clergy to be ordained, however perfunctory the process may be in practice.
The problem is that a certain hard core of Anglicans, represented by Fr Hunwicke and Mrs Gyapong, take the perfunctoriness of Anglicanorum coetibus's implementation to mean the Church has given up the fight, and in fact it's recognized that it must become more Anglican -- again, I can see no other interpretation for Fr Hunwicke's metaphorical implication last week that he, Mrs Gyapong, and others of like mind are figuratively traveling to Rome and unpacking the Anglican truths from their baggage finally to set the Church straight.
I briefly thought a worthwhile next step for fr Hunwicke might be to see that Thomas Cranmer, John Jewel, Matthew Parker, Richard Hooker, Lancelot Andrewes, and Jeremy Taylor are also translated into Latin to comport at an equal level with the Church Fathers, but on reflection, I'm sure Fr Hunwicke would dismiss such a step as utterly supererogatory. Rome will instead need to become more fluent in English fully to understand the precious treasures of the Anglican spiritual patrimony.
This, of course, is a movement for now closely allied to cradle Catholic "restorationists" and probably explains some of the appeal it has to cradle traddies. I think it's courting danger to go too close to either group.
