The Anglican Missals In Context

We've seen that the interdicasterial commission Anglicanae Traditiones, whose representative from the CDF was now-Bp Lopes, selected a version of the uniate missal, variously called the Anglican or English Missal, as the chief model for the Divine Worship Missal. Beyond that, we know very little, as in his 2017 address, Bp Lopes suggested there were things he would not be allowed to say about the process.

However, in the Wikipedia entries for Anglican Missal and English Missal, we can at least learn that the idea of a uniate missal that combined translations of the Roman Canon with passages from the Book of Common Prayer took root in the early 20th century. Something called The English Missal was published by W. Knott & Son Limited in 1912. I've already referred to The Anglican Missal, first produced in England in 1921 by the Society of SS. Peter and Paul.

There have been other variations on the idea. None has ever been adopted officially by any Anglican denomination. The adoption of a redacted version by Anglicanae Traditiones and its use under the auspices of Anglicanorum coetibus is certainly a belated development. However, we know nothing of which of the several versions was the point of departure, nor the nature of the deliberations that took place in making the decision or decisions. All we know is that the commission met three times per year over a five-year period, which suggests only that few details entered the debate, and it mostly ratified staff proposals on a perfunctory basis.

The belatedness of the Church's ratification of the idea is striking. The Anglican missal movement began a century before the adoption of the DWM, but among Anglicans it was highly controversial, and after the peak of Anglo-Catholicism in the 1920s and 30s, it seems to have become something of a specialized cult, similar in its way to vegetarianism, and as that sort of cult, it probably attracted devotees of other eccentric cults.

The Wikipedia entry for Anglican Missal contains a link to a low-Church Episcopalian tract on the American Missal edition that's undated but must date fairly close to its US publication in the 1920s. It contains reproductions of pages from the actual missal that look quite a bit like the pages of the DWM, another indication of its inspiration. Here's a passage from the tract:

The most candid and serious defense of the book has been put forth in The Churchman, by one of the Missal's editors, Dr. Douglas. It is worthy of the most thoughtful consideration. He claims that its purpose was to check the use of frankly Roman uses. Here is his exact language:

"Two new foreign publications found their way to American altars, The English Missal and the Anglican Missal. The latter claimed to contain the American rite, but did so only in a garbled and imperfect form. Both books were frankly Roman; rearranging the order of the Eucharist more Romano, interpolating the Canon of the Roman Mass before the Prayer of Consecration, and adopting the Roman Calendar even to such feasts as those of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin and of St. Peter's Chair at Rome. To many of us these books seemed alien in manner, inadequate in preparation, and disloyal not only to our formularies, but to our whole morale as a Church." To check this evil he agreed to co-operate with Bishop Ivins "in the preparation of an altar book not open to these grave objections." What an admission! This book that we find "so disloyal not only to our formularies but to our whole morale as a Church," to use Dr. Douglas's own language, with its propitiatory sacrifice of the Mass, its prayers to the Virgin and the Saints, its feast of the Conception of the Virgin and of the Chains, if not of the Chair of St. Peter, with its directions for signs of the Cross, holy water, incensing, genuflecting, kissing hands, with requiem masses for the dead and absolution for the dead, is, it is revealed to us, an effort on the part of the more conservative Anglo-Catholics to control their more [57/58] extreme brethren. These are the uses that have been practiced and are being recommended by the more moderate Anglo-Catholics. It is no wonder that the inauguration of an Anglo-Catholic rector is followed by the disruption of his parish and the secession from the parish of people grounded in the teachings of the Prayer Book.

How can the General Convention ignore the existence of such conditions, or the Bishops consent to visit in their Episcopal capacity parishes whose rectors are using such garbled and disloyal renditions of our Communion office? Bishop Parsons, one of our most liberal bishops, and an influential exponent of the mind of our Church at the Lausanne Conference, puts the case in a nutshell:

"Every congregation of this Church has the right to be protected from the individualism of the priest. We are not a conglomerate of. independent congregations but a church organized with a code of law."

We look to the General Convention to make those words good. If such overt lawlessness and disloyalty to the spirit of our Church escapes censure, we might as well give up legislating and abandon the pretence of having any discipline.

Those who defended the Roman style missals suggested they could be used as private supplements to the BCP liturgy, or that by adopting them, TEC could appease the Anglo-Catholic faction and prevent even worse abuse.

The low-church response had some merit, even if in an Anglican context it was unrealistic:

When an organization discards certain things by law it is sheer anarchy to permit their re-introduction without legal warrant. Mariolatry, Invocation of Saints and the unbloody sacrifice of the Mass were taken out of the devotions of the English Church at the Reformation and repudiated in the Articles. The omission is of itself sufficient to rule them out of the devotions, but the repudiation in the Articles double-locks the door. The prevalence of the Missal would mean that in an age which needs to be taught respect for law, the Church disregards its own law. The advocates of the Missal claim to be exponents of the claims of authority: their book is a manifestation of lawlessness and extreme individualism.

Frederick Kinsman's resignation as TEC Bishop of Delaware, though, was still fairly recent in the time of this debate, and he left TEC specifically because it had already proven itself unable to enforce authority.

But I keep coming back to the insights of Cardinal Mahony, faced with the petition of the Anglo-Catholic St Mary of the Angels parish to enter his archdiocese in 1986: if the parish had shown it couldn't adhere to Episcopalian authority -- which it hadn't, since it seceded from TEC -- what assurance could it give that it would conform to Roman Catholic authority? More than three decades later, we can see by that parish's subsequent record that Mahony was prescient. But the record of Fr Phillips and the Our Lady of the Atonement parish has been little different.

So I still wonder what the Church has brought in by encouraging a form of exclusive cultishness that had its origin in an anti-authoritarian movement. Keep in mind, if the people who favored a Roman Catholic liturgy in a Protestant denomination had actually been so sympathetic to Rome, they always had the door open to simple conversion. Why did they insist on remaining a faction? And why do they want in effect to continue as a faction, a special case, once they've actually made the move to Rome?

I continue to think Cardinal Mahony's had a bad rap.