Thursday, October 19, 2017

A Visitor Looks At The Divine Worship Mass

A visitor took the trouble to look through the versions of the Anglican Use and Divine Worship masses available on line and comment:
I know you have been searching for the text of the new Divine Worship- The Missal with limited success. I had a link to it when it first came out, years ago, and am kicking myself that I did not save it, but I did read it in its entirety. I had attended Mass at Our Lady of the Atonement so I remember comparing the new, official missal to what they celebrated before and there were not many changes, but what did change was text at the focal point of the Mass. I remember being struck (happily so) with how, now, the Liturgy of the Eucharist and the Eucharistic Prayers are pretty much directly from the Ordinary Form of the Roman Missal. In fact, the Liturgy of the Eucharist (offertory form II) is almost word for word with very little fancification the same as the OF. The Roman Canon used for Divine Worship- The Missal follows exactly Eucharistic Prayer I in the OF English Mass with “you” and “yours” swapped out with “thee” and “thine” and a few other words changed so it will sound like Olde English( ex. 1 be pleased = vouchsafe ex. 2 you sanctify them, fill them with life, bless them = dost sanctify, quicken, bless ) Perhaps the best summarization I have seen about what the new missal is and isn’t is the US Conference of Catholic Bishops newsletter from October of 2015. Here is the link.

I also include a link to OLA’s Anglican Use Mass booklet.

In a brief scan of the St.Thomas More/St. Gregory versions circulating online, I can see a few differences between that and the OLA version that was updated after 2015 to reflect the required changes of the new Divine Worship- The Missal Order of Mass. One of the differences between these two version sets has to do with the “Our Father” prayer. The St. Thomas/St. Gregory version has the traditional Roman Catholic style with doxology between the main body of the prayer and the auxillary “For thine is the kingdom…” the OLA version only has the Our Father as a song with no doxology. The OLA version only has Offertory form II for the Liturgy of the Eucharist and it is the EXACT text of the OF Mass. The St. Thomas More/St. Gregory versions use the OF substance with fancified English. Either way, all of the Ordinariate parishes should be on the same page. Maybe OLA parish is not using this Mass booklet but just hasn’t removed it from their website. I’m not sure what they use but what I do see is… with these versions and the descriptions provided in the USCCB newsletter, as far as I can tell, the Liturgy of the Word uses the Roman Lectionary RSV, the Liturgy of the Eucharist is OF Roman Rite and the Eucharistic Prayer is the Roman Canon ( OF Eucharistic Prayer I ). It’s not exactly in keeping with the 1549 spirit but it can be made to sound like it is.

The USCCB newsletter cited above has the following descriptions:
Proper of Time
The organization of the liturgical seasons in Divine Worship follows that of the earliest Anglican sources, which date from the mid-sixteenth century and which tend to mirror what is found in the older forms of the Roman Missal. For example, instead of Ordinary Time, one finds the “Time after Epiphany,” a pre-Lenten series of Sundays (Septuagesima, Sexagesima, Quinquagesima), and the Sundays after Easter Time numbered sequentially from Trinity Sunday. The liturgies of Holy Week tend to follow the rubrical instructions of the current Roman Missal, while many of the prayer texts come from Anglican sources.

Order of Mass
While Divine Worship permits a number of options, meant to take into account various customs that have developed in Anglican communities in different places, the general structure of the Order of Mass will be familiar to those who are accustomed to the Roman Missal. Included among the options during the Introductory Rites, however, are several traditional Anglican elements: the “Collect for Purity,” the “Summary of the Law,” and the recitation of the Decalogue. One noticeable departure from the Roman Missal is the placement of the Penitential Rite after the Liturgy of the Word. The current Roman Lectionary is used for Scripture readings, but using the translation of the Revised Standard Version (Second Catholic Edition).

It's hard to avoid thinking this is much ado about not much, and when you get down to it, the lack of enthusiasm among Anglicans over Anglicanorum coetibus pretty much reflects what's actually going on, or not, in this liturgy. Making some supererogatory changes to the OF mass -- some thees and thous, and the Cranmerian prayers -- reflects the idea that "continuing" Anglicans will be drawn to the 1928 BCP, although Anglo-Papalists in the UK had dropped the 1662 BCP in favor of the Roman rite decades earlier, and the "continuers" in the US are an aging population that isn't being renewed.

Add to this the much more troubling issue that Anglican priests brought into the ordinariates are at best not well formed as Catholic priests. There have been two high-level scandals rooted in this problem this year alone.