But the key point as I see it is that, although another member of the commission, Herr Doktor Professor Feulner, writes in less than idiomatic Englisch, Lang's work is published in translation. Two native German speakers were on the commission meant to determine Anglican liturgy. I can't imagine that, had Germans 80 years ago had the chance they sought to rewrite the Book of Common Prayer, even they would have been so clumsy.
This reinforces the question another visitor raised last week: what was the agenda behind the Divine Worship Missal? He asked this due to his experience on the ground in the ordinariate, which he outlined in an e-mail yesterday;
We belonged to a Cadillac Episcopal parish and were frustrated that while the vehicle was really nice, we didn’t seem to be going anywhere, especially toward heaven. We joined an ordinariate community in the early years and found it a really good experience. We traded the Cadillac for a Buick, but at least it was going somewhere good.Over the past few years, I've heard from at least a few people who've left ordinariate parishes out of dissatisfaction after becoming familiar with them. This seems to be yet another. The bone of contention here is that a liturgy that looked like the 1979 BCP was familiar and got the job done. It was replaced with something exotic, a hobby item. What interests me is that one of my angry pre-Conciliar hobbyists seems to be saying that's not a bug, it's a feature:Then along comes a change in the Mass from the BDW (low to the ground, easy transition for our kids) to DW. And one day we looked in the garage and instead of the Buick there was an MG roadster. Interesting until you try to start it and keep it running.
I’m thinking about a line from the movie, IQ, where the mechanic looks under the hood/bonnet of a sputtering roadster: "You see, you have a Lucas type four generator on a 12-volt system, and you know the British. They'd rather spend time gluing wood on a dashboard than getting the electrical system right."
And the message we were being told was that the MG was better than the Buick, much better. And we’re wondering, where do we put the kids? Where’s the trunk? Is it going to start when we want it to? Can we drive it in the rain? Yes, its got a load of character, but character is overrated as your primary driver. We were not looking for a hobby vehicle. Even the people I know who have MGs don’t use them as their daily commuter.
So now we’re in a parish that's more like a comfortable old Chevy. There’s no wood on the dash but it gets the job done. The Buick got us into the church, and we're grateful.
Fr Lang is well regarded not as an expert in Anglican liturgy but as a proponent of reforming the Novus Ordo to make it more consistent with the traditional Mass - his most popular book is on restoring ad orientem worship. Ask yourself why he was put on the commission?Elsewhere, the same visitor has angrily denounced my perspective as "middlebrow" and favoring a "Howard Johnson's" demographic, so I suppose he'd also sneer at the visitor above who prefers Buicks and Chevies for family transportation. But this is the same guy who, by his own account, attended the St Clement's openly gay Anglo-Catholic parish in Philadelphia for some number of years, giving the impression that he was a communicant there, while, by his account, nevertheless fulfilling his weekly obligation in a Catholic mass.. . . My point is Lang represents a certain tendency in the Roman Rite to try to restore pre-conciliar ceremonial. Someone like yourself who has this theory that the Ordinariate is trying to smuggle in as much of pre-conciliar liturgy as possible might ask why Lang was put on the commission. It might be that the people in Rome who staffed the commission were sympathetic to his views[.]
Well, there are classic car buffs who carry their MGs between meets on a trailer, huh?
But this yet again raises the question of what the Vatican had in mind with Anglicanorum coetibus. My regular correspondent has frequently pointed out that Houston has increasingly been airbrushing the Anglicanorum out of coetibus. The ordinariate is now just a diocese for Catholics who have their faith deepened, or something like that, and a couple of native German speakers are showing the way. My regular correspondent comments,
Young women who don’t remember having a Kleenex attached to their hair with a bobbie-pin by an aggrieved nun because they had forgotten to bring a hat on a day that the class was going into the church think that chapel veils are a cool idea. The fact remains that in, say, the Archdiocese of Toronto there are 226 parishes and quasi-parishes of which four offer at least a weekly TLM. It’s a niche market.All I can say to those who seem to have settled on
