Since he received his PhD in 1995, we must assume he's had a 25-year academic career, but his list of publications contains only a 24-page article from 2004 on a George Herbert poem and a fawning 16-page reflection on the Pastoral Provision, both the original publication and a reprint. There's an article on the Divine Worship missal, but it isn't listed in his faculty profile for whatever reason. Twenty five years, two publications. If others besides that one are available, they're hard to find, and I have no idea why he hasn't included that one in his profile -- is he ashamed?
Well, actually, I would be. Let's look at it, courtesy of the link my regular correspondent sent me, "Very Members Incorporate: Reflections on the Sacral Language of Divine Worship", which appeared in Antiphon in 2015. The first thing I noticed was this man, who theoretically should be teaching undergraduates to write capably, himself has a style that can charitably be characterized as sappily viscous. For instance,
Among the first fruits of the liturgical provision according to the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus, the recently promulgated Missal for Ordinariate usage, under the title Divine Worship, represents a momentous development in the history of Catholic worship: for the first time, the Catholic Church has officially recognized, blessed, approved, and made her own in a sustained and permanent fashion a collection of liturgical texts that found voice and developed outside the bounds of her visible communion. (p 132)The sentences below could well have been written in peanut butter, but try to parse out the content, too:
As Msgr. Andrew Burnham has pointed out, in the Anglophone context, the norms of Liturgiam Authenticam had the effect of complicating the ecumenical sharing of common texts reflective of modern Anglican liturgical revision in contemporary English. At the same time, however, these norms auspiciously prepared the ground for another kind of ecumenical convergence, one that has now borne fruit through Anglicanorum Coetibus: in the sacral language of the traditional Books of Common Prayer, we find a ready-made, time-tested, carefully honed dialect of worship that, mutatis mutandis, with only a few adjustments, admirably answers to the promise of Sacrosanctum Concilium and the requirements of Liturgiam Authenticam. (p 135)He's saying basically that adding some thees and thous to the liturgy makes it special. Which even he acknowledges is subject to challenge and a matter of taste, although he wades through several pages of rhetorical crankcase oil to get there:
But quite aside from the context of ecclesial sanction and the attendant evangelizing responsibility, it may also be important to recognize that not everyone will immediately like or appreciate the language of Divine Worship, and some (including members of the Ordinariates coming from different liturgical backgrounds and accustomed to more contemporary language) may at first feel uneasy with the Ordinariate Missal’s consistent, uncompromising preference for a style of traditional, liturgical English derived from the classic Prayer Books. Some might question the pastoral effectiveness of such a hieratic liturgical dialect in the twenty-first century, and certain skeptics might dismiss Divine Worship as a “Tudorbethan fantasy,” “an exercise in mock-Tudor nostalgia,” or “a Cranmerian pastiche with limited appeal.” (p 138)Well, yes, they might. But that's OK:
Liturgy, of its very nature, as the public worship of God and the recollected enactment of divine mysteries, requires a language set apart from everyday communication, description, and commerce. Historically liturgical language, even when it aims at intelligibility and engaged participation in the vernacular, is inevitably, to one degree or another, a specialized idiom (a Sondersprache), a register of language purposefully situated and one that takes its place as an integral component in the overall Gestalt of enacted praise, thanksgiving, penitence, supplication, and sacramental participation. Liturgical language in the Catholic tradition is the verbal cognate of the stylized gestures, ritual actions, vestments, candlesticks, and architectural ordering of the sanctuary, themselves hearkening back to the historical character of ancient cultural forms and all of which work together with the dialect of proclaimed prayer to take the worshiping congregation out of the profane world into a sacred precinct for a dedicated and communal encounter with God. (pp 139-140)This reminds me of the Episcopal associate who lectured us at All Saints Beverly Hills that if we complained about the length of his homilies, we didn't get the point. At mass, we're in mythic time (yes, he said this), just as we are when we attend a performance of Hamlet. We don't complain that Hamlet lasts three hours, because we're in mythic time. Still less should we complain that Fr Fortescue's homilies take 40 minutes.
I sent Fr Fortescue a note saying that Shakespearean directors routinely perform a task in putting a play together for performance called "blocking", in which they specifically edit out passages in the interest of keeping the performance within a reasonable time frame. Fr Fortescue never acknowledged the note. Luckily for the parish, he moved on.
I pointed out to one of my angry pre-Conciliarist visitors that there's such a thing as elevated diction, for instance
Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.As opposed to precious archaism:
Ask not what thy country can do for thee; ask what thou canst do for thy country.The visitor asked me what made me the arbiter of such things. I guess I'm not, actually. What will make the difference will be whether this project succeeds even until the end of the current year. But ask as well how someone who writes as badly as Dr Brand can see the language of the DWM as being good.
