There Are Actually Two Threads To The Anglican Prelature Story

This blog, heavily influenced by the published accounts of figures like Fr Barker and Msgr Stetson, has dwelt on the administrative history for Anglicanorum coetibus, seeing its start with the 1976 Episcopalian General Convention, the secessionist movement that resulted, then-Bp Law's work to form the Pastoral Provision, its imperfect record, and the 1993 proposal for an Anglican personal prelature that came to fruition under Benedict.

However, the angry visitor who's been sending me e-mails over the past couple of weeks is helping me focus on a second, and I think probably older, thread in the story, the uniate mass that became the basis for the Divine Worship Missal, which I'll call the liturgical thread as opposed to the administrative thread.

One issue I'm working through is that we're Catholics 24/7/365. Even if we go to daily mass -- in fact, even if we're priests -- we spend only a small fraction of that total time in liturgy. The rest is occupied with developing habits of virtue, constructive labor, acts of charity, study and reflection, recreation, and so forth. If I'm traveling, I still need to find a Sunday mass, whether that new parish is happy-clappy or not. Celebrating just exactly the right liturgy is pretty far down on my list of daily priorities, even as a serious Catholic.

I think this points to the visitor whom I quoted yesterday, who found that a diocesan parish was preferable to an ordinariate parish if he was going to prioritize issues like stability or support for a family. That again leaves me shaking my head over what the priorities are for angry guys like the other correspondent I quoted in yesterday's post. He went beyond what I quoted then to ask

[T]he only person who seems to think he was sold a bill of goods is the one person who seems not to have understood any of the goods he apparently witnessed at St Mary. Did you actually attend Mass there? Were you paying attention at all?

I assume the "goods" he's referring to are the uniate liturgy that was celebrated there, which was very close to what emerged in the Divine Worship Missal. It was the same over-the-top mixture of 1928 BCP, Roman Canon, Last Gospel, and communion on the tongue. Like the DW Missal, it incorporated non-Anglican features in the name of Anglican patrimony. At this point in history, I don't think anyone knows exactly when this started at St Mary of the Angels. The best Fr Kelley could come up with was that former parishioners who remembered the time about 1960 said such a mass had been in use there at the time.

It was generally understood when I was at that parish that a high mass using that liturgy took two hours. A number of us thought that was too long, and we mentioned it to Fr Kelley as something to be addressed in our plans to enter the ordinariate. I recognize that other people claim a DW high mass can be done in 1:15 or so, but this will inevitably vary with the parish, and two hours in my own experience is realistic.

But the angry visitor is clearly puzzled that I don't see this as a feature rather than a bug, and he takes it for granted that I'm misunderstanding the whole program if I think the point of Anglicanorum coetibus is to make Episcopalians want to become Catholic. In an earlier angry e-mail, he said

Again, these arguments require a grounding in history. Fond du Lac and Eau Claire had a majority of Missal parishes, and not just Douglas's fastidious non-Romish version but the full SSPP Anglican Missal at the altars. This was done with the full approbation of their bishops. Talking about middle of the road, Broad Church, Howard Johnson Rite II as somehow "patrimonial" requires us to act like a rite promulgated in 1976 bears the weight of tradition. The vast majority of Anglicans who took the Ordinariate offer seriously came from parishes with a history of Missal use, and who continued to use either one of the Missals (as did your own parish!) or Rite I with Roman enrichments like the Orate Fratres, the Domine, non sum dignus, and horror of horrors the Prayers at the Foot and the Last Gospel. These were not all "campy" aberrations, these were fairly mainstream Anglo-Catholic parishes. Your own favorite AC priest, Fr Moyer, used many of these enrichments as found in the privately printed Anglican Service Book at GSR. You should get a copy after you read more about actual Anglo Catholicism.

This idea that middle of the road suburban Anglicans that were happy with the ipsissima verba of the 1979 BCP would have been in anything approaching the majority of Anglicans in the US who advocated for the Ordinariate is risible. The idea that current or aspiring Ordinariate members should be scandalized that Fr Ousley is putting on a rite clearly indebted to the long history of Missalized liturgy in Anglicanism is . . . misguided, to say the least.

Except that uniate liturgies like the ones he mentions date from the early 20th century and were never authorized by any denomination. This was a persistent problem with Anglicanism, equivalent in its day to New Age Catholic priests inviting the laity to hold hands around the altar.

The missalized liturgy movement itself is something that as far as I'm aware hasn't been well documented, and we know still less about how it found its way into the process that led to Anglicanorum coetibus. What makes me uncomfortable is that the Anglo-Catholic or Anglican Papalist movement in the UK, which is where the angry visitor clearly traces its origins, was a hothouse version of Anglicanism that fully incorporated non-Catholic features like occultism and intergalactic amounts of same-sex attraction.

Exactly what precious treasures of the Anglican spiritual patrimony are we actually bringing in here? My spidey sense says there's an agenda. Yeah, if you want to support a family in a Catholic context, the ordinariate may well not be your best option.