More On The Divine Worship Missal vs The Roman Canon

I'm going to postpone the post I'd originally intended to put up today until tomorrow, because I've had several thought-provoking comments on the Roman Canon as discussed in yesterday's post. I'm beginning to realize that we're in not fully explored territory when we try to compare the Roman Canon as a eucharistic prayer, one of four options in the OF English mass, with the Divine Worship Missal, which effectively contains the Roman Canon as the only option for Sunday mass. (I don't know what would happen if an ordinariate priest used the version of EP II in the DW Missal for a Sunday mass, but it would presumably create some type of problem.)

A visitor comments,

When you wrote "the pre-Conciliar Roman Canon took about an hour and a half on Sunday" I think you mean that the whole High Mass took about an hour and a half on Sunday, not the Roman Canon itself. That is, admittedly, a long prayer, whether you begin it, as was done in the Middle Ages, with the "Te igitur" after the Sanctus, or whether (in both pre-Medieval and post-Vatican II manner) with the dialogue, preface and Sanctus, and so on - but I doubt if it would take much more than 8 to 10 minutes (and possibly a bit less) if recited silently or sotto voce in Latin and maybe 10 to 11 minutes if recited aloud but briskly in English.

Yes, on reflection, there's a problem with pulling the Roman Canon out of its contexts, which I'll discuss below.

Another visitor comments,

In reality, the length of mass depends on how quickly the priest can get through it. I know priests who can say the Roman Canon reverently on a Sunday, but fly through the same Roman Canon on the weekday, in Latin. . . . Remember also "Eucharistic Prayer I" is a direct translation of the Roman Canon, they didn't add or subtract anything. The Post Conciliar reforms did make some parts "optional", but those options have fallen by the wayside and most priests include the optional parts. A quick read of the DW Roman Canon and it appears that they didn't add anything, they sprinkled it liberally with "thees" and "thous"

But the Divine Worship Roman canon can't be separated from the rest of the mass as presented in the DW Missal. A visitor does point out,

I decided to take up your challenge and compare the lengths of three Eucharistic Prayers: Eucharistic Prayer I (the Roman Canon, 2011 translation), Eucharistic Prayer II (the shortest), and the Roman Canon used in Divine Worship. The word counts begin immediately after the Preface and end at the Amen immediately prior to the Lord's Prayer.

The results:
EP I:2011 clocks in at 744 words.
II:2011 at 525 words.
I:DW at 831 words.

Summary:
I:DW has 87 (12%) more words than EP I:2011, and 306 (58%) more words than EP II
I:2011 has 250 (48%) more words than EP II.

EP III:2011 and EP IV:2011 doubtless fall somewhere between these extremes. I leave it to you as an exercise to work out how long it takes to read aloud 87, 219 or 306 words, but I think you will find all of them to be between one and three minutes, even at the deliberate pace of a Catholic priest saying Mass.

You can't just interchange the DW Roman canon into the rest of the OF mass, as you can with the OF eucharistic prayers. If you use the DW Roman Canon, you are also using the rest of the DW mass. So although they aren't in the part of the mass specifically designated the Roman Canon, which as the visitor says begins "immediately after the Preface and end[s] at the Amen immediately prior to the Lord's Prayer", if you want the thees and thous and the extra 87 words in the DW Roman Canon, you are inevitably stuck with the following other parts of a full DW mass:

• The Comfortable Words
• The Penitential Rite
• The Prayer of Humble Access
• The Prayer of Thanksgiving
• The Last Gospel (optional in the EF; I'm not sure if it's optional in DW.)

I may have left something out here; let me know if I have. It isn't possible to establish the exact length of any theoretical mass, since the readings vary from day to day, parts of the readings are optional, the collects and prefaces vary, the length of the homilies varies, the music varies, and the length of the announcements varies. So although as the visitor points out, the Roman Canon in the DW missal is 12% longer than that in the OF English mass, the use of the DW Roman Canon implies a considerable additional length for the rest of the DW mass -- leaving aside, as both visitors acknowledge, the individual speed or not of the priest.

But it's hard to avoid the extra pieces that are in the DW missal but not in either the OF English mass or Books of Common Prayer. I think most middle-of-the-road Episcopalians who've come into the Catholic Church are familiar with 1979 BCP masses that take about an hour, as they are with OF EP III English masses, reverent and with good music, that take about the same. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a DW mass conducted with music and ordinary purpose to take close to two hours.

It's a matter of taste. I like to ride trains, but I don't like it when a train is four hours late. I know people who like riding trains so much that if the train is four hours late, they're delighted that they got four extra hours on the train.