More from the Anglican press conference:
It was also interesting to note that the greater part of the Vatican correspondents from the secular press (NYT, ABC, etc) really didn't seem to know what to ask. They were more or less at sea without an accepted "angle" that could bring in one or more of their religious hobby-horses. "Yes, but what has this got to do with homosexuals, married priests and womynpriests?" ....yaaaaaawwwwwnnn... Oh, sorry, were y'all asking something?
I think mine was the second to last question asked, and I was thanked by AB Di Noia for bringing up the liturgy.
I pointed out that the Anglos have a multiplicity of uses, what with the BCP, the Book of Alternative Services, high church stuff, low church stuff, broad church...and we have the Novus Ordo and the Extraordinary Form even just in the Latin rite, what was going to be the accepted form of liturgy for these envisioned Anglican-rite Catholic Masses?
He told us that while this Apostolic Constitution was only the beginning and things like the liturgy was still to be hammered out, the use that had already been established was going to be the groundwork.
He held up a copy of the Book of Divine Worship and said that this was probably going to form the ground work for the new practices.
I take it from my friends who pay attention to these things that this is good news.
4 comments:
Better news would have been that The English Missal would be adopted. Then we would have the old Mass in English with accompanying polyphony and Gregorian chant.
But BDW, better than nothing.
And for an Anglican Extraordinary Form, the Sarum rite?
Heaven forbid.
If the BDW ends up being the basis for their liturgy, the move does nothing for the reform of the reform and the greater Church.
Archbishop Gus, if you're reading, make it the English Missal and the Anglican Breviary, please.
Spot-on about the secular journos; if it doesn't involve sex (including the sexes) they don't care. (Just had this thought: the unlikely union of Rome and Orthodoxy would get less mainstream coverage than the adventures of Gene Robinson or Alberto Cutié.)
Anyway the English Missal was written more than 90 years ago because English Anglo-Catholics unlike American ones long have been RC-orientated: Anglo-Papalists. (This latest news is mostly about them and not Episcopalians or former Episcopalians.) Most English ones some time ago dropped the English Missal and use the Novus Ordo but in some places with traditionalist Anglo-Catholic panache (Americans: often Tridentinesque ceremonial but Prayer Bookish texts and non-papal theology), and would want nothing to do with BCP-based services such as the Book of Divine Worship.
So this new plan is as I like to say more like Roman Rite national parishes (in America for ethnic groups that once didn't speak English) than a different rite like the Byzantine Catholics: same rite but different ethnos with slightly different ethos.
P.S. Trying to revive the Sarum Use (not a rite but a 'use', a variant of the Roman Rite) was popular with non-papalist English ACs 100 years ago; I think that's largely died out.
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