Category Archives: Anglican

On-Going Events

Just got back from a couple days away on work. I see there have been some interesting things happening over at the Episcopal Cafe upon which I would have commented had I not been otherwise occupied.

In particular I’m looking at:

More later as time allows…

Ordinary of the Mass, Sarum Edition

If TEC is beginning to gear up to start to plan to prepare to form committees to appoint study groups to undertake the work of thinking about a new hymnal, then it makes sense for us’ns to start thinking about hymnal contents as well.

There are, of course, two major contents to Episcopal hymnals: service music and hymns.

As far as hymns go, I’ll let them off with but a single comment—we need good and suitable Office hymns…

But today, I’d like to think a little around the issue of service music. Two things are sparking this:

  • first, the discovery of this wonderful resource, The Plainsong of the Mass Adapted from the Sarum Gradual (bls, have you found this one before? most of the resources I think I’ve found you’ve already located…)
  • second, the unfortunate concurrence this weekend of the Star Trek prayer with the Darth Vader Sanctus. No. Just—no. It’s so hard to keep a straight face on that combo.

I’m not suggesting anything specific here but rather lifting up two items from the front-matter of the Plainsong of the Mass book:

  1. I had always kind of assumed that mass sets were just that—sets. Clearly they are in later periods. According to this text, however, that’s not necessarily the case for the early  chant settings: “The different melodies may be sung at discretion, as there is no modal connection between parts of the Mass…” (pg. vii)
  2. The work then goes on to reproduce a chart of suggested ordinary chants based on the liturgical height of the day (pgs. viii-x). There’s nothing unusual about this. Indeed, if you look at the recent Gregorian Hymnal you’ll similarly find suggestions. So too does our own Fr. John-Julian’s mass-sets. My question, then, is why we don’t have sets with suggestions as to when they should be done, and with which Eucharistics prayers they work best (or least!)?

New All Saints Sisters Update

Officially approved to be released today is that ten sisters and the chaplain will indeed be received into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church next Thursday, September 3rd. The timeline for the chaplain’s ordination into the Roman priesthood is still on the fuzzy side due to communication between various groups, but is looking good.

I’m sorry to see them go, but certainly wish them all good things in their new church home!

Will Revolt For Food

(I’m still “away” but I couldn’t let this go unremarked…)

From the Independent by way of TOD, bls and Dean Knisely:

Thousand of protesters took to the streets, waving the orange flags of the opposition. Before long, looting began. Buildings were set on fire. But the turning point came when a crowd moved from the main square towards the presidential palace. Amid the confusion, someone panicked and gave the order to the troops guarding the palace to open fire. Scores died. The leaders of the army decided they’d had enough and stormed the palace, causing the president to flee.

A typical African coup d’état? Not quite. Certainly there were allegations of corruption in high places. The president had bought a private jet – from a member of the Disney family – for his own personal use. He was accused of unnecessary extravagance, of mismanaging public funds and confusing the interests of the state with his own. But something else had whipped up the protesters in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, earlier this year, when the government of Marc Ravalomanana was overthrown in the former French colony.

The urban poor were angry at the price of food, which had been high since the massive rise in global prices of wheat and rice the year before. Food-price rises hit the poor worse than the rest of us because they spend up to two-thirds of their income on food. But what whipped them into action was news of a deal the government had recently signed with a giant Korean multinational, Daewoo, leasing 1.3 million hectares of farmland – an area almost half the size of Belgium and about half of all arable land on the island – to the foreign company for 99 years. Daewoo had announced plans to grow maize and palm oil there – and send all the harvests back to South Korea.

Wow—why didn’t we see this coming? Oh wait, we did…

You might believe internet propoganda and think that that 45% of the population (9 million and change at last estimate) are Christian; about half of those Roman Catholic, we have some 120,000 Anglicans in the area. Americans, however, are better informed and know that Madagascar is populated entirely by animated animals who make popular movies, so it’s all good.

I’m glad the Anglican Communion isn’t being distracted by little things like this and is hard at work on restructuring around genital issues.

(And lest you have any qualms, have no fear; this item is entirely unrelated to the whole neo-colonialism thing. No relation in any way.)

Real Church

I just can’t work up the interest to look at many church politics items, recently. I think it may be a periodic numbness from exposure to its unhealthy radition. I won’t say church politics isn’t imporant for church folks—we have a responsibility to keep an eye on what’s going on—but not all the time…

We went on a mini-vaction to Washington DC over the weekened and, looking at the two churches we really wanted to visit, the one closest to a metro stop was St Paul’s K Street. We arrived late due to work on the blue-orange lines, but enjoyed a pleasant Rite I Sung Mass by Fr. Nathan Humphrey; apparently if we’d gone to the Solemn High Mass later, we would have run into Fr. Cramer too. We had to run back to check out of our hotel so ducked out with just a hasty word to Fr. Humphrey and the music director who recognized us from our mutual time at Smokey Mary’s.  On the subway, M asked Lil’ G how she had liked the service. She responded, “It was really nice to go to real church again.” Her favorite part was the chanted Lord’s Prayer.

There’s just something to be said for beauty, especially in the addition of music.

Ah well.

More later, perhaps…

Catholic Notes

Two interesting things:

Former Episcopalians often have quite a lot to say about Episcopal and Anglican dealings. Their words are often voluminous, often colorful, and not often “edifying”. It’s in light of these realities that I was interested to read a more measured take on the actions of General Convention from a Former Episcopalian now Roman Catholic, our favorite online Cistercian, Br. Stephen. While I don’t agree with everything he says there, of course, I did find his perspective and analysis quite interesting.

On the other hand, I do believe we’ve just been identified as the Antichrist by noted anglo-paplist Fr. Hunwicke:

The essence of the concept of the Antichrist is that he, the ultimate manifestation of evil, is skilfully dressed up so as plausibly to appear the genuine article. It occurs to me that the movement known as Affirming Catholicism is exactly this. The enthusiasm and the technical mastery with which they deploy their props – the lace, the monstrances, the music, the incense, the 39 buttons down their soutanes – are simply deceptions of the Evil One, designed to draw away the faithful from their Redeemer.

I mustn’t let my rhetoric run away with me. Some of them are decent and well-meaning, but misguided, people. I am not their judge; I shall stand before the same tribunal as they do. But there are some of them who have a virulent hatred of us. They do not say “These people who reject women priests are decent and good Catholics with whom I would wish to collaborate in every possible way because – except in this one issue – we share the same faith; and I wish them well because – although they’re just making this one mistake – they can share with us our mission to spread the Catholic Faith within the Church of England”. They want to see us persecuted, they want to see us denied a place within the Provinces of Canterbury and York. Their hatred of us seems visceral.

Now that’s where the devil really is.

Actually, I believe that I do and have said “These people who reject women priests are decent and good Catholics with whom I would wish to collaborate in every possible way because we share the same faith…” so I guess that makes me a well-meaning but misguided soul.

(Personally, I take real issue with the notion that “catholicity” is identical with the Neoscholasticism of the past hundred-and-change years, but now’s not the time for that particular discussion.)

Fr. Hunwicke is, of course, correct: the devil is in visceral hatred of other humans—especially fellow Christians no matter what their “party”. It’s unfortunate how often that point gets missed, and how often the opposite gets pushed on blogs.

HWHM Options: Kalendrical Minutae

This is a shorter version of a longer and more technical (read: tedious) post with full cross-references , historical examples, etc. IOW, if you really want expansion of any of these items, I can do it but warn you in advance…

As far as the BCP’s kalendar goes there are 5 general categories of occasions that impact how we do liturgy:

  • cat1: Principal Feasts (p. 15). These are the biggies (Christmas, Easter All Saints, etc.). They have Eves (1st Vespers in the old schemes) and the Mass and Office are always of the occasion.
  • cat 2: Sundays (p. 16). They have Eves (see direction on collect use on p. 158) and the Mass and Office are always of the Sunday.
  • cat 3: Holy Days (pp. 16-17). They have Eves (see collect note as above and most have explicit readings for the Eve with a few odd omissions that we can believe are actually errors) and the Mass and Office are always of the occasion.
  • The vision of the BCP is that the three above categories are to be celebrated with a public Eucharist. (See p. 13.)
  • (The cat 4: Days of Special Devotion (p. 17) have no liturgical effect unless one chooses to use the Confession of Sin and/or the Litany.)
  • cat 5+: Days within the Octave until the Subsequent Sunday. This one’s not actually laid out in the book but I think it’s a principle of post-Vatican II liturgics which ought to be recognized. That is, following the general Western consensus found in Sacrosanctom Consilium and then applied in the General Norms for the Liturgical Year, regular ol’ weekdays (feria) now have a somewhat higher position by virtue of their role in the Temporal cycle and may even supersede Sanctoral occasions (as in the Roman Catholic “Optional Memorials” and our next category, “Days of Optional Observance”). These don’t have Eves. The Collect is of the originating occasion—a Sunday except for Ash Wednesday, the Ascension, and perhaps a few other occasions—and the Essentials of the Office are as found in the Daily Office Lectionary. Mass, well, you’ve got options including the Propers of the Sunday, Propers of the Day [following the 2 year Daily Mass Lectionary], or a votive of your choice.
  • cat 5: Days of Optional Observance (pp. 17-18). This is where all of the black-letter days in the BCP & therefore all of the occasions in HWHM come in. And here we get to the issue…

So—we know how we’re supposed to celebrate the Mass and Office on days of cat 1-3; what’s the deal with a cat 5 as it bumps up against a cat 5+? Is it automatic replacement—and if so, how? As best I can determine, HWHM, like its predecessor LFF, appoints three readings and a psalm, yet doesn’t actually give directions for their use. What the heck are these and how do we decide?

As I see it, we have the following options moving from lesser impact to greater:

  1. Ignore It. The rubrics do indeed give us the option to ignore any cat 5 occasion we like. In this case, everything is, of course, of the cat 5+ “feria”.
  2. Commemorate It. This is the minimum level of observation. Mass and Office are of the cat 5+, but the Collect of the optional cat 5 is said immediately after the Collect of the Day (i.e., preceding Sunday/Observance). Alternatively, this collect with or without additional antiphonal material could be said at the end of the Office.
  3. Offer It. Here the Office is of the cat 5+ with a commemoration of the cat 5 (as above), but the Mass is of the cat 5 with the appointed lessons for the HW/HM used as Mass Readings.
  4. Observe It. Here the Accidentals of Office are of the cat 5—hymns, antiphons, and Collect; the cat 5+ collect would not be said. The Essentials—psalms and Scripture lessons—are of the cat 5+ as laid out in the Daily Office Lectionary.
  5. Celebrate It. Here the entire Office is of the cat 5 as is the Mass. No cat 5+ elements would appear at all. The HWHM readings and the appropriate Common of Saints (pp. 925-927) would be deployed, using one set of readings for the Office and the other for the Mass.  In places where the Daily Mass is neither said nor reckoned, the HWHM readings would replace the appointed cat 5+ readings from the Daily Office Lectionary.
  6. Whoop It Up. Deploying appropriate Commons, the cat 5 becomes (effectively) a Local cat 3 complete with an Eve. This level is permitted as long as it doesn’t interfere with a higher level occasion (cat 1-3).

So, this gives us clarity on what we do, but we have yet to identify when these six levels of observance should be used. The books don’t really give us direction either. Therefore we’re flying subjective at this point.

We have two fundamental choices: 1) observe all black-letter/cat 5/HWHM occasions in the same way or 2) create local kalendars that have different levels of observation for different days.

Uniform Observation

This would seem to be the mind of the resolution at General Convention when it says in the princples of revision:

Levels of Commemoration: Principal Feasts, Sundays and Holy Days have primacy of place in the Church’s liturgical observance. It does not seem appropriate to distinguish between the various other commemorations by regarding some as having either a greater or a lesser claim on our observance of them. Each commemoration should be given equal weight as far as the provision of liturgical propers is concerned (including the listing of three lessons).

If we go this route, what is most appropriate?

I must register a strong objection against the practice that I’ve seen in some circles of Celebrating all cat 5 occasions (i.e., using option 5 for all Optional Observances). Especially given the multiplication of occasions in HWHM, this practice does exactly what Cranmer warns against in the Preface to the 1549 (pp. 866-7) and completely obscures the Temporal arrangement of the Daily Office Lectionary and any sort of regular Psalm pattern.

I would even suggest that option 4 is a bit much. I believe that the Collects appointed for Sundays are, overall, of a higher quality and better convey the full scope of the faith than many of the sanctoral collects. Thus, I’d rather we not overly obscure these liturgical gifts.

If, therefore, a uniform method is chosen, I’m of the opinion that it ought to be of the level of option 3.

There is, however, one major hitch in the logic of the “Principles of Revision”: they’re all optional… It seems like opting to celebrate versus opting not to celebrate would be a distinction of a kind, wouldn’t it? I think the main argument for uniformity fails through irony due to the optional nature of all of these occasions.

Let me say, though, that I think it’s fine for the national church to not make any distinctions—but that also does not preclude dioceses, parishes, and people from making distinctions; it just means the Province isn’t making the choice for us.

Local Kalendars

This is the option of greater antiquity and established Christian custom. Not that I’m biased one way or the other… In fact, I’d say that this option connects directly to Sacrosanctum Consilium‘s wise observation that there’s a difference between Universal observations and those of liturgical “families”:

Lest the feasts of the saints should take precedence over the feasts which commemorate the very mysteries of salvation, many of them should be left to be celebrated by a particular Church or nation or family of religious; only those should be extended to the universal Church which commemorate saints who are truly of universal importance.

To put this in BCP terms: you’ve got your cats 1-3—choose the cat 5 observances that resonate most with you.

Of course, this option then becomes the one that requires the most work, because it means sorting through all of the observances and assigning celebration options to them all. So:

  • option 6 would be used rarely (2 or 3 times a year) for patrons (personal, parochial, or otherwise)
  • option 5 would also be pretty darn rare (again, 2 or 3 times a year) for secondary patrons and such
  • option 4 would be uncommon (say, 3 to 5 times a month) and for for the HW/WM with which you/your parish have a special connection or veneration
  • option 3 would be more frequent for those classes of saints that best connect
  • options 2 or 1 would serve for the rest. The choice between 2 or 1 would most likely have more to do with how you understand the place of these observations within the church as a whole. I.e., are these to be considered the proper prayer of this church—or are they truly optional.
  • Let’s not forget that, these being optional, there’s nothing wrong with personal/parish kalendars adding in days (*cough* Marian feasts *cough*) that are not contained in HWHM…

That’s where I’m at. Time to start sifting, I’d say…

Guerilla Evangelism!

I’m back from vacation and am now behind in every single facet of my life. It’ll take a while to fight back to the surface.

To keep you all occupied until then, I think it’s time that we take the bull by the horns. Given the slashing of the evangelism budget by General Convention, it really is up to us (kinda like it always has been…).

You have until July 31st to complete our first exercise in Guerilla Evangelism which is to create an evangelism tract to welcome any and all to the Episcopal Church—or whichever church you happen to belong to. Put it up on your site and I’ll link to it or send it on to me and I’ll stick it up here.

RBOC: Vacation Edition

  • We’re on our yearly pilgrimage to the Shore.
  • It’s more fun hanging at the beach with the family than reading General Convention reports.
  • Nevertheless, I have popped over to the Cafe on occasion to see how things are going.
  • In other news… A friend of the blog sends a request that we look over the Niagra Rite. I have given it a quick glance and must say that I agree with his assessment: “. . . I believe their new liturgy is the absolute quintessence of everything that is wrong with liberal
    Anglican liturgics. It’s so supernally bad, abysmally written, and theologically horrifying that if I were a gay man in the Diocese of
    Niagara contemplating marriage, I might throw myself over the falls in despair. It’s no wonder that so many anti-inclusion Anglicans see
    inclusivity as the path by which the Anglican Churches will abandon their fidelity to the Creeds and to the theology of the Prayerbook.” In the glance that I gave it, the rite seemed horribly strained to avoid anything that might be considered an orthodox invocation of the Triune God and that just sets us up for all sorts of problems…
  • In happier news, I’ve received an email that there’s a group working to bring the Society of Catholic Priests to American shores. Here’s their emerging website. Essentially this looks like the sort of spiritual norms centered on the sacraments, Daily Office and spiritual formation that one finds in the Society of the Holy Cross (SSC) but welcomes women (and thus men who support women clergy).
  • I was struck in the email, however, how focused it was for clergy. Yes, clergy need their own groups as most laity don’t understand the issues clergy face if you”re not one or don;t live with one. At the same time, I wouldn’t mind seeing a nice fraternity/sodality/fellowship that promotes a catholic sense of the sacraments, Daily Office and spiritual formation for laity…