How Things Looked In 2011

A visitor found a link to the USCCB's page, still up on their site, covering the report of Cardinal Wuerl to the November 2011 General Assembly on the implementation of Anglicanorum coetibus. In hindsight, several things stand out. Perhaps the biggest is what a psychologist might call "flat affect".

What is Anglicanorum coetibus?

This is an apostolic constitution issued by Pope Benedict XVI in November 2009 that authorized the creation of "ordinariates," geographic regions similar to dioceses but typically national in scope. Parishes in these ordinariates are to be Catholic yet retain elements of the Anglican heritage and liturgical practices. They are to be led by an "ordinary," who will have a role similar to a bishop, but who may be either a bishop or a priest.

Note: Anglicanorum coetibus is pronounced Anglican-orum chay-tee-boose.

While the weepy grandiosity we often now see from spokespeople for the ordinariate is happily not to be found here, the lack of any particular enthusiasm for the project is also apparent.

• In September 2010, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, Archbishop of Washington, was asked by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) to be its delegate for the implementation of Anglicanorum coetibus in the United States.
• The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops created an ad hoc committee that includes Cardinal Wuerl, Bishop Kevin Vann of Fort Worth and Bishop Robert McManus of Worcester to assist the CDF with implementation of the document and to assess interest in an ordinariate for the United States. Fr. Scott Hurd, a priest of the Archdiocese of Washington, was named as a staff liaison to the committee.

(Note the reference to "in the United States". Even by November 2011, there was an expectation that there would be a separate Canadian ordinariate, something that appears to have been disapproved by Cardinal Collins at the last minute, but which was never discussed publicly.)

Another item that stands out for two big reasons is this:

Has an ordinary been named yet?

No. The canonical establishment of the ordinariate will take place on January 1, 2012, the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God. An ordinary for the United States will be named at that time.

The first issue is that the identity of the presumptive ordinary had to have been known to all in the loop since his resignation as Episcopal Bishop of the Rio Grande in 2007, moving to Rome under the auspices of Cardinal Law, whose pet project had always been the Anglican personal prelature. Jeffrey Steenson, who had attended the 1993 meeting with Cardinal Ratzinger that effectively presented a draft of Anglicanorum coetibus, was the clear choice for the job once TEC Bp Clarence Pope's failing health rendered him unsuitable.

So why the big secret? I would guess that ecumenical issues were in play, and Rome didn't want to present a picture of poaching an Episcopalian bishop directly to become a Catholic ordinary. But if Steenson left TEC in 2007, and the North American ordinariate wasn't erected until 2012, couldn't someone have decided there'd been a decent enough interval and announced his designation in, say, mid 2011?

I ask this because, in hindsight, the process of setting up the North American ordinariate was in fact ongoing, with an ad hoc committee and a staff liaison at work from 2010. The fact was that a Yale-Nashotah House clique that included Scott Hurd, Jon Chalmers, and his wife, as well as the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth clergy who'd previously surrounded Steenson, all had an inside track, and it's not unreasonable to assume that the parishes to be formed and the clergy who'd be appointed to them were all known well before January 2012.

So the process was anything but transparent. Oddly, though, nearly all those who were on the inside track. from Hurd to Steenson, flamed out within a few years of the ordinariate's erection. Might the project have benefited from better personnel procedures? Not only that, but I think the implementation suffered from the assumption that everything would start up just fine on January 1, 2012. Before that magic date, nobody was in charge, there was no clear line of authority, and people were looking, for instance, to David Moyer for guidance on how TAC parishes should prepare, when Moyer, preoccupied by that time with his own legal problems, could be of no help.

The second question was simply Steenson's suitability for the job. While he was a member of an Anglo-Catholic clique within TEC, he wasn't an inspiring leadership figure, and his public utterances were few and in fact highly politic. His essay "The New Donatists", which has apparently gone down the memory hole (does anyone have a copy?) implied that those who objected to gay TEC bishops were schismatic. (Why call them Donatists otherwise?) Yet he himself made what from an Episcopalian point of view was a schismatic move only a few years later, when his career prospects improved in Rome.

His later essay "The Causes For My Becoming Catholic" is obscure and disingenuous, since it makes no mention of his still-secret position as ordinary-in-waiting, while he also sees the need to dance away from his prior accusation that those who disagree with TEC's current course are schismatics.

I continue to think the assumptions at the basis of Anglicanorum coetibus are flawed, but it's hard to avoid thinking that the project could have been implemented better if more capable people had been identified and the process had been more transparent, with clear lines of authority, from the start.

“You Can’t Find A Directory Of Reverent OF Masses.”

A visitor quoted this remark from yesterday's post and added,

And therein lies the rub. You will also get a pretty varied response if you call the Chancery of most mainline dioceses. The response to that question will vary between an unending shuffling/on hold/ someone will call you back and no one ever does, to that sort of thing doesn’t exist/isn’t tracked or all our Masses are reverent, what do you mean?

Knowing what I know about Bp. Barron (which is only what I have gleaned from news reports, some of his own written essays and from taped presentations/online, Youtube type videos he has produced) I would guess he would say the truth will win out. He seems to be the type who will put out his message and respond if engaged but he is not out actively searching for folks to judge or pick a fight with, just to share Christ’s message.

The Michael Vorises of the world seem to have a different, more confrontational mission. Scaring or shaming folks into the Church can be an imperfect solution until they can grow into a more perfect understanding of the Church. Each has a path to round up lost sheep but I think Bp. Barron prompts people to make up their own minds to follow the Lord or they are not really exercising free will.

The people who are fixated on single file, cookie-cutter paths to Heaven and prayer are not getting the benefit of the wonderful, sometimes beautiful, sometimes obscured, mostly unfathomable complexity with which God works in the world and draws all men to Himself.

Besides, I would also guess Bp. Barron and Abp Gómez have too many fires to put out and much larger fish to fry just trying to get the USCCB on the same page, much less random bloggers, media-ites and otherwise Faithful, practicing Catholics with different opinions and a microphone.

I wasn't completely serious in referencing a non-existent directory of reverent OF masses yesterday, simply because parish resources (and legitimate interests) differ widely. We're actually fairly familiar with another parish in northern California as well as our own, and this serves a highly diverse community ranging from wealthy Hollywood types to gentleman vintners to farm workers. The atmosphere is completely different there, but the mass is reverent, although in a different way. So I don't know if it would even be possible to list a single "directory" of reverent masses, and I don't actually blame a chancery that finds creative ways not to answer such questions.

But this does suggest to me that there ought to be reason for people to go exploring if they don't feel the mass at a nearby parish is satisfactory. The thing not to do would be suppose there's an abstract thing called an "ordinariate" that does things right, and until they can find or start an "ordinariate" evensong group or some such thing, they aren't going to look for a better parish in the diocese.

My regular correspondent adds,

The existence of a few OCSP communities with music more towards the “praise band” end of things, one of them the large (by Ordinariate standards) full parish of Christ the King, Towson, suggests that a directory of “capable music programs” in a diocese would be not as straightforward as a directory of EF liturgies. Of course Christ the King’s “Anglican” credentials were never robust to begin with, but that’s another issue. The point is that if one were searching for a Mass with liturgy and music of high quality and traditional style, one could not assume that it could be found at a local Ordinariate community, not just because it might be worshipping in a cafetorium or other space with no organ, or because it might not have enough competent singers to form a choir, or anyone to lead them, or some other logistical reason. They might just prefer something else. The composer of “Shine, Jesus, Shine” is CofE, after all.

UPDATE: A visitor points out that the Anglo-Catholic English Church Union published Travellers' Directories and Church Guides for Tourists, listing good masses with acceptable music and so forth, for many years, for example here.

UPDATE; My regular correspondent reports,

The Church Travellers’ Directory and its antecedents directed Catholic-minded Anglicans to parishes with Daily/Sunday Mass, scheduled Confessions, etc. It made no claims for the quality of the liturgy or the music. Indeed, it pointed out that “[a] change in the manner of the presentation of the Holy Mysteries may be no bad thing for any of us, when away from our accustomed altars...” “The information is intended to be factual, and must not be taken to imply any particular churchmanship. . .”

So this would be very similar to what we have in masstimes.org.

How Things Looked In Early 2013

A visitor sent me a copy of a 2013 essay by Aidan Nichols, OP, "Catholics of the Anglican Patrimony: The Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham". It's worth pointing out that he makes clear that he's talking about the UK ordinariate exclusively, but this skirts a basic problem that Anglicanorum coetibus as it emerged began as an American initiative that had been proposed by Bernard Law in the late 1970s. His idea was of a personal prelature from the start, and the Pastoral Provision was only a partial realization of Law's original proposal.

The actual constitution was drafted as a result of a meeting between TEC bishop Clarence Pope and Fr Jeffrey Steenson and Cardinal Ratzinger in 1993, and the work product resulting from that meeting appears to have formed the eventual text of Anglicanorum coetibus and the Complementary Norms. Nichols's narrative relies largely on hypostatized Trends, a Catholic element, a Protestant element, a Latitudinarian element, Catholic-minded Anglicanism, ecumenism, and so forth. The puzzling thing is how few individuals, specific events, or actual documents are referenced -- there's just Henrician Reformation and other cloud-like entities drifting over the narrative.

The one thing that strikes me is the section on Pope Benedict and His Vision. On one hand, I think it's hard to attribute a vision to Benedict when Anglicanorum coetibus appears to have been drafted primarily by the American Jeffrey Steenson at the instigation of the American Cardinal Law, with the intent of addressing a specifically American set of circumstances, to wit, the 1970s Episcopalian prayer book revisions and ordination of women, which had created a specifically American dissident movement that Law's proposals were meant to address.

It's worth pointing out that Nichols requires the Traditional Anglican Communion. which he characterizes as "a worldwide (if somewhat ramshackle) body of Continuing Anglicans" to justify his postulating a larger intrnational movement, though he doesn't identify John Hepworth as the main actor, he doesn't mention that Hepworth's initiatives were almost immediately repudiated by the TAC bishops, and he seems to be completely unaware of the 1993 meeting between Pope, Steenson, and Ratzinger.

The real puzzle is that Nichols imputes a much larger agenda to Benedict, an evangelization project that would embrace not just Anglicans, but Lutherans, Lefebvrists, and Eastern Orthodox. Well, this was written in 2012 and overtaken by events early the following year. Someone may be able to help me out here, but I'm not aware of any concrete proposal for evangelizing any of these other groups that involved any sort of personal prelature or other special structure to bring them into the Church. And as of 2013, for reasons that aren't at all clear, Benedict seems simply to have dropped the project and abdicated. Whatever his agenda. other things clearly supervened.

I've exchanged e-mails with a friendly ELCA pastor who plans to retire this summer. He describes himself as an "Anglican wannabe" and seems to be a high-church Lutheran who vests in alb and chasuble. I don't think I'll ask him about the prospects he might see in an equivalent evangelization move toward Lutherans from some future pope until he's well and truly retired, because I have a feeling that just about any observation he might make could be problematic otherwise.

My guess is that, if he's aware at all of how Anglicanorum coetibus has fared in the US, tearing parishes apart as it has, attracting only those clergy who had few career prospects as Protestants, with insignificant interest among its target market of disgruntled Episcopalians, he would simply respond that the idea as it's emerged has proven unworkable from a practical standpoint. Maybe if the CDF went back to the drawing board, something better could be developed.

So I find Nichols's essay an odd artifact of an optimism that simply hasn't proved justified.

More Context From San Antonio

A former parishioner at Our Lady of the Atonement adds more context to the current situation in the archdiocese there. My impressions as a fairly new Catholic tend to bear out her view that the Church has been changing more than some people will acknowledge:

When Archbishop Flores presided over San Antonio, the liturgical abuses of even the larger, mainstream parishes were egregious. At one parish I attended, for the feast of Pentecost, a procession (if you could call it that) where some people with fishing pole-type things with strings attached to bird things were waved around vigorously as the people ran up and down the main and side aisles of the church while the congregation sang and clapped, I suppose to evoke the feeling of the Holy Spirit descending like a dove. The feeling it evoked for me was, “You gotta be kidding me.” It was at that same parish the priests all but refused to give communicants the Host on the tongue. I recall once Fr. Tony became so incensed when I refused to put out my hand, he angrily pressed the Host against the side of my face with his thumb, I guess thinking I would have to grab it with my hand after all. Unfortunately for Fr. Tony, I have a pretty dexterous tongue and was able to snake it out and lick the Host off my face. It was a pretty sad spectacle I’m sure.

So, I moved into a new parish. Here the songs were awful, there were always about 12 people behind the priest at the altar for the final elevation as Eucharistic Ministers (which should have been Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion in front of the altar) and lots of milling around. Aside from all the distractions at Mass, this parish also has communal penance services where the congregation would gather, have a few prayers and some scripture readings, maybe a song, then the group would pray aloud a prayer similar to the Confiteor where we admitted we were guilty of sin generally, then the priest would confer absolution on the entire congregation without anyone having to actually confess their sins to the priest. Someone must have pointed out that general absolution without individual confession could only be used in dire circumstances because they later modified the service to have each congregant go up to the priest in a line like for communion and individually confess only one sin, hopefully their most serious, before the general absolution was granted. It was during the parental class for Baptism at this parish we were told the Church no longer believes that one of purposes of Baptism is to wash away Original Sin. Needless to say, I wanted to find a new parish. So we moved again.

My next parish had some serious touchy–feely priests. In addition to all the Eucharistic Ministers they had behind the altar, the clapping and tambourine playing and arms held up swaying during the songs, the priests in this parish were wont to ad lib all through the Mass. During the consecration, these priests, who had banished gender references to God as much as possible, because there were only male disciples I am guessing, would say that Jesus “..broke the bread, gave it to His FRIENDS and said…”. Same thing with the Chalice. And speaking of the chalice, these priests would not use chalices made of precious metals or especially fine crystal but rather simple ceramic vessels because Jesus was just a poor carpenter. Gadzooks! I could hardly get through Mass without some serious unchristian thoughts so I had to find another parish…

Eventually, a brand new parish sprung up that had a conservative priest, who offered a reverent OF Mass and had a lovely small choir. It was difficult to go to this Church as it was not close and family members who had grown up with all the liturgical abuses and did not know any better were not very supportive. There were so few other Catholics that I knew in any of the parishes I attended that even recognized any of these things as abuse of the Liturgy that I was mocked and belittled because when I mentioned them or pointed them out, I “thought I was more Catholic than the Pope” and “knew more than the priests who were actually saying Mass”. Well, perhaps I did, but then came Abp. Jose Gomez. In the extremely short time he was in San Antonio, these Liturgical abuses were discontinued, phased out and otherwise reversed. It was wonderful. We were able to return to our home parish. Of course, there were lots of folks who did not understand that those things were abusive and pushed back hard on the changes and still do. Unfortunately, when Abp. Gomez moved to LA, the attention to those things began to wane. Abp. Garcia-Siller coasted for awhile along the path Abp. Gomez charted but then Abp. Gustavo, as he likes to be called, began to create his own legacy which seems to be studied silence on difficult moral or theological issues and speaking out occasionally about some political issue now and again. Don’t get me wrong, Abp. Gustavo has done some really good things for San Antonio like opening up a confessional downtown that is open almost all day every day of the week. What a blessing! On the whole though, we don’t hear much from our Archbishop unless he is asking for money. But the seeds of reform had already sprouted and now are beginning to grow and blossom.

My experience is not unique. That is why Fr. Phillips was able to attract “disaffected” Catholics, because there really were so few options available in San Antonio when he arrived in the mid 1980s. With Abp. Gomez, things changed but that wasn’t until 2005. More and more parishes and priests began then to become more reverent, more uniform, more in line with Catholic doctrine and social teaching. Parishes began to offer Adoration and Bible study programs promulgated by Bp. Baron and Jeff Cavins and the like. As that occurred, most of the disaffected Catholics had the opportunity to return to their old parishes and a lot of them did. The need to seek out a “boutique Liturgy” which was really a desire for most folks to find a non-abusive Liturgy began to dry up. The abuses at OLA were not Liturgical but they were abuses, of finances, of personnel, of defiance of authority. Then, when Abp. Gustavo finally put the entire force of his authority down on the real abuses at Our Lady of Atonement, that’s when it all hit the fan. The people who could not recognize that Abp. Gomez and Abp. Gustavo were not Abp. Flores were still treating the Archdiocese like it was filled with heretics and heathens and would not let it go. And Fr. Phillips used and fanned that sentiment because it furthered his own devices. Fr. Lewis, sadly, is just left holding the bag, facing a changing demographic of parishioners and a dwindling supply of disaffected Catholics to draw from. This seems to be the trend all over the US which might explain why the search for disaffected Catholics has become almost frantic in the Ordinariate: because there are fewer and fewer of them to fight over.

So, in a nutshell, if you think that what you see now and have experienced in the Catholic Church or in the parishes in the LA area are what it has been like in the parishes in San Antonio over the last 30+ years, you are waaaaay off base. The struggle is real! But the Church will always find its way home. And in San Antonio it has been a loooong time coming, but coming it is.

News From San Antonio

A parishioner at Our Lady of the Atonement reports,

I heard that there was an announcement by Fr. Lewis in mid January welcoming a new policy by the Archbishop of San Antonio for those seeking the Sacrament of Holy Communion or Confirmation. The new policy allows a member of the archdiocese to receive the sacrament from Bishop Lopes. All that is required is that a letter be sent to the recipient's pastor, which it said is standard procedure under Canon Law.

If you will recall, the Archbishop disallowed members of the archdiocese from receiving sacraments of initiation at Our Lady of the Atonement. Word was he was angry over losing the parish and/or angry that Fr. Phillips was not removed. This will of course make it easier for parents with children in the school, and I have to say that children should not be made to suffer for petty squabbles in one holy Catholic Church.

Some have suggested that this change in relations is directly related to the restriction of Fr. Phillips which was announced in December. The announcement of his restriction was made a week before he turned 70, the normal retirement age for priests in the Ordinariate. This speaks to the symbolic nature of the move. Disallowing Fr. Phillips from the premises would have been perceived by the parishioners as extreme on the heels of bringing the parish into the Ordinariate.

But after almost three years of slowly easing him out, slowly bleeding off the hard core, finally removing him came not with a bang but with a whimper. Did Bp. Lopes fail the parishioners in this regard? Yes, but as a non casual observer of these events, one has to say that the Archdiocese was also complicit in keeping parishioners in the dark about matters that should have concerned them.

Removing a pastor only when it appears that the parish would leave the Bishop's jurisdiction showed this observer that so many of the problems in the Catholic Church emanate from the preservation of power. Sad to say, what the hierarchy chooses to say, and when they choose to say it, appears to be ruled not by the best interest of the laity.

At a much farther remove, I tend to see this somewhat differently. We simply don't know exactly what the timeline was that caused Abp Gustavo to remove Fr Phillips when he did, nor what led Fr Phillips to reverse course on the ordinariate, when he'd previously chosen to stay out. Keep in mind that there was a history of complaints about Dcn Orr that Fr Phillips did not pass on to the archdiocese as he was required to do. I don't think there was an automatic post hoc propter hoc here; things could have been the other way around.

The visitor continues,

There is something more. As you have reported, upon discontinuing the popular Latin Mass at Our Lady of the Atonement, parishioners were left with the choice of attending the TLM at St. Pius on the north side of San Antonio. Looking at their bulletin's message from Fr. Pat, the Archbishop has ceased the Latin Mass in at St. Pius in this announcement. The reasoning given is dubious, talking about Fr. Juan Carlos not having to drive so far anymore to say the Mass.

It begs the question as to why the Pastor, Fr. Pat, could not attempt the Latin Mass, but that is not revealed. As usual, the laity are expected to be content with explanations that are devoid of basic logic. His notes did say that Archbishop Gustavo has moved the Latin Mass to St. TImothy's. I looked up their website from the archdiocese directory and went there to see what was said about it and learn about the place. Unfortunately, the established parish doesn't even have a website. A google-Map drive by reveals a run down parish in the west side of downtown San Antonio, where, judging from the gating around the church, crime is obviously an issue. Obviously the Archbishop is not concerned with the north-side parishioners having to drive far.

And so there it is. This question of tradition, and desire of the laity for reverence in worship needs to be examined if one is to properly understand the reason for the rise in popularity of Our Lady of the Atonement, the makeup of the parishioners, and how over the course of the tenure of the last three Archbishops of San Antonio (save only Gomez's brief time), the Archdiocese consistently has not promoted any sort of orthodoxy, or given it fertile ground to grow roots and establish.

It seems to me that Our Lady of the Atonement grew over the decades within the context of the archdiocese as a provider of boutique services, a particular kind of school, the Anglican style mass, and the OF Latin mass. As far as I can see, Abp Gustavo was happy enough with this.

However, it's emerged that the problems with Dcn Orr were not being reported to the archdiocese, which would have been perfectly proper grounds for removing Fr Phillips, and it's hard to avoid thinking this was the actual reason, although the archdiocese was not going to publish this until it was forced to, a couple of years later.

As of the time he removed Fr Phillips, Abp Gustavo seems to have had every intention to continue the parish as a boutique operation within the archdiocese, although he did see the need to place a trusted confidant, Msgr Kurzaj, in charge, which given the problems that have emerged in subsequent years was understandable.

But if the parish was providing a Latin mass for the archdiocese, but the collections from the mass or pledges from members who attended primarily for the Latin mass were no longer going to the archdiocese, I think Abp Gustavo was fully justified in asking that the parish and Bp Lopes recognize the change in its role. I think Abp Gustavo would also be entitled, simply as a bishop, to expect that another bishop deal with Fr Phillips as would be expected of any other bishop given the same circumstance. Fr Phillips, after all, covered up for an abuser, pure and simple.

One issue that Fr Z keeps pointing out to people who want more Latin masses is money. If groups want a Latin mass, they need to pay for it. I don't know if we have enough information on the situation at the St Pius parish to gauge exactly why the Latin mass has been moved elsewhere. I will say, though, that in the case of our parish, which is prosperous and successful, we lost a very good associate when the archdiocese was faced with a sudden unplanned vacancy at another parish.

The shortage of priests meant we had to get through advent and Christmas down one priest, which led to curtailment of some mass and confession times. But given the importance of the parish, the archdiocese went above and beyond to bring in a temporary replacement from the Diocese of Gallup, NM.

Money talks. I betcha Abp Gustavo speaks that language, too.

"I Found The Comments More Interesting Than The Article."

A visitor made that observation about the Charles Coulombe piece in Crisis that I linked Friday. The visitor, whose pithy remarks are always fun, went on:

After the complete destruction of the church in the seventies I figured If I were to be a Protty I should go to the experts. The Baptists and Congregationalists and Presbyterians were nice but lacked color. The Episcopalians were the most interesting, but I never could understand why they tried so hard to be Catholic.

Irrespective of the quality of the comments vis-a-vis the article itself, we're still left with the conundrum of why Mr Coulombe, a cradle Catholic of French Canadian heritage, should be selling -- and using Roger Scruton's insights, selling is what he's doing -- Anglicanism to other cradle Catholics. My regular correspondent observed,

Just looked at the Crisis comments. Presumably those who regularly read this publication are “disaffected Catholics” for the most part. Nothing wrong with looking for good music and liturgy, which as you often point out can be found in a diocesan parish with some searching.

So here's an example. Someone named Bob Wilkens posts,

As for a righteous fulfilling of the early promise of Vatican II before its highjack, one could not do better than attend an Ordinariate Of Peter service...

There in all its glory is the near Latin Tridentine Mass translated into magnificent near King James English....

It is what the English speaking Catholic churches SHOULD have been and were originally meant to be after Vatican II.

. . . And, as mentioned, there is the music...again fulfilling the Vatican II promise of more modern than Gregorian liturgical English language music of stunning beauty, and also the simple Anglo piety of hymns familiar to most any English speaking Christian, ....as opposed to many modern Catholic parishes music of Andrew Lloyd Webber/Peter, Paul and Mary trainwreck style.

The number of ordinariate groups and parishes that actually offer a full fuss-and-feathers liturgy and competent music is somewhere in the low double digits, and the numbers aren't growing. But notice the subsequent comments, in which even more traddy Catholics pile on poor Bob Wilkens:

The English Martyrs would certainly not agree with that statement. Many of them died for the Mass not the Anglican Communion Service. Too many people wrongly think that Divine Worship Mass is simply the TLM in KJV English. It is nowhere near the TLM, more patterned on the Novus Ordo.

And,

It's infinitely better than the Novus Ordo, I would agree, but the Ordinariate Rite as currently constructed is clearly a compromise rite in that it mandates the use of a number of post-Vatican 2 innovations, most likely in the name of avoiding insinuations (such as those lobbed by "dem rad trads") that the post-coniciliar liturgical novelties should be scrapped wholesale.

Most of the commenters appear to be cradle Catholics, although a few do mention they're Anglican converts. But the tenor of the discussion is that the Divine Worship missal is nothing but a compromise, and the true liturgy must be pre-Conciliar, including the old lectionary. One thing that puzzles me is that, of the commenters who are fairly plain about what ought to be, none say they're attending a mass that they find satisfactory, (A couple say they used to have a parish that did things right, but the parish council screwed it up, and they had to leave.)

I would go so far as to say there's a mythic quality to these remarks, a "once upon a time" when the liturgy was good, but it ain't good no more, and even a place they used to go that had good liturgy is gone, killed by the parish council. Poor Bob Wilkens, who wandered into an ordinariate parish and thought it was OK, is brought sternly up short -- the Cranmerian prayers, the post-Conciliar insertions, indeed, that awful lectionary.

None of these people says, "At St _______, they do it right!" Where does any of them actually go to mass? Or do they go to mass at all, if no mass meets their standards?

Yes. Mass could be vastly improved if the celebrant refrained from making off the cuff side comments, joking in his homilies, and having people clap multiple times during Mass for attendees "accomplishments". I was at one Mass where we (rather they...I refuse to) clapped eight times . .

Joking during homilies? Angels and ministers of grace defend us!

I think it's important that Mr Coulombe's appeal is sentimental and an example of what Roger Scruton calls deep Romantic mourning for the life of "natural piety" in a mythic past. There is in fact no practical exhortation in Coulombe's piece -- he doesn't say, "Get right over to Holy Martyrs Murrieta! You'll find no applause, no joking homilies from Fr Bartus there!"

Instead, he invokes the abdicated Benedict XVI, the Duke of Windsor in the modern Church, who proposed an abstraction, Anglicanorum coetibus, that I think the intended audience interprets quite correctly as something not entirely real, certainly not fully realized, but also not quite the thing required, and thus not worth real followup.

But hey, Charles, thanks for letting us know about it!

We're Never Going To Get Clarity Over What "Anglican" Means

My wife commented yesterday that her family has roots from pre-Revolutionary times in coastal Maryland, but ever since there's been a United States, they've called themselves Episcopalians. "Anglican" would never have computed with them. And outside English or History departments, the term "Anglican" was not in use in the US. (Within academic departments, the term would have been used chiefly in service of the Whig Interpretation.) It became common with the "continuing" movement in 1977, largely as a legal device to avoid infringement on the Episcopalian franchise.

As a theological term, it has little precision. Denominations that call themselves Anglican are not necessarily "in communion" with each other, while Episcopalians are "in communion" with Lutherans, and there is no effective catechism or other definition of Anglican doctrine. It isn't even useful as a historical term, since "Anglican" denominations sprout up de oovo with no reference to any previous Church of England affiliation.

This brings me to the peculiar artifact that emerged from the Charles Coulombe essay that I linked yesterday, the title "Be England Thy Dowry". While it stands out as exceptionally bad poetry, my regular correspondent and I independently looked it up and found that it's a line from the so-called “Lourdes Hymn” (“Immaculate Mary”) published in Catholic Church hymnals at least from 1898, which of course explains the late Victorian diction. But inexplicably, I have never encountered anything about England thy dowry in any US hymnal, no matter how awful the Dan Schutte songs it may contain. Why is that, I wonder? Of course, many Americans, whatever their heritage, have never had particular fondness for the English, and a line like that would not play well with Irish Catholics in particular.

So why is Mr Coulombe flaunting it in his title? Certainly his audience is heavily American and presumably Catholic. I think this reflects something of the agenda behind "Anglican" in the context of the ordinariates. This goes as well for the reading list Mr Coulombe proposes in his piece, "Anglican" authors, not even Catholics, who may offer insights. We've already shown how T S Eliot and Dorothy Sayers provided a deep understanding of what marriage means to the Anglican faith, which both earnestly professed.

But what of another name on that list, Arthur Machen? As an American bumpkin, I'd simply never heard of him, but thanks to Wikipedia, I discover

He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. His novella The Great God Pan (1890; 1894) has garnered a reputation as a classic of horror, with Stephen King describing it as "Maybe the best [horror story] in the English language."

. . . Machen, brought up as the son of a Church of England clergyman, always held Christian beliefs, though accompanied by a fascination with sensual mysticism; his interests in paganism and the occult were especially prominent in his earliest works. Machen was well read on such matters as alchemy, the kabbalah, and Hermeticism, and these occult interests formed part of his close friendship with A. E. Waite.

In other words, he was a perfectly good Anglican of a certain sort, since occultism seems always to have been a sideline of English clergy -- James Pike began his final disintegration under the influence of priests in England whom he found especially helpful in contacting his dead son.

I notice that the motto of Anglican Embers, the former journal of the Anglican Use Society, was "Keeping the embers of Anglicanism alive in the Catholic Church". Indeed. Perhaps we can hold a seance to contact those embers more fully.

But why should Mr Coulombe, a cradle Catholic of French Canadian heritage, be so intent on convincing other Catholics to become more Anglican? Frankly, there's a payoff here somewhere. After only a short time, the Crisis piece has attracted many comments from enthusiastic readers who seem pretty unanimous in saying yes, this is all a refreshing change from the banality of the post-Conciliar Church.