The Ordinariate Liturgy
Mgr Andrew Burnham looks at the Ordinariate Use and Anglican Patrimony
There is a story about Mgr Graham Leonard, formerly Anglican Bishop of London, being asked by
Cardinal Hume what he valued in the worship of the Church of England and would miss as a Catholic.
He replied that it would be the Prayer Book Offices of Matins and Evensong, and in particular the
psalms in course, following the Coverdale Psalter, as set in the Book of Common Prayer.
There is no doubt that the daily services are the jewel in the crown and, when both Pope Paul VI and
Pope Benedict XVI expressed their admiration for Anglican worship, it was the public celebration of
the Offices that they had most clearly in mind. Small wonder then that the Ordinariate clergy in the
United Kingdom particularly value the availability to them, as Catholics, of Morning and Evening
Prayer in the Prayer Book tradition, as distilled in the Customary of Our Lady of Walsingham.
Modern Anglican and Roman rites
But what of the Mass? Looking back at the classical Anglican rite of Holy Communion, this is clearly
a Protestant service. Yet there is much that can be rescued. The Ordinariate’s Order of Mass
incorporates this material and presents it in a shape largely familiar to congregations of the period up
to about 1965 in such unlawful but widely used adaptations of the Roman Mass as the English Missal
and Anglican Missal.
Fifty years have now elapsed and Anglo-catholic congregations in England and Wales have almost
entirely used the modern Anglican and Roman rites during this period. Nevertheless, it is good that
there is a distinct Ordinariate Order of Mass, that it is in the sacral language of the Prayer Book, and
that, though it will not be usable in many pastoral contexts, there will be some in which it is entirely
right.
It is, and will be, a milestone in the journey of Western liturgy and, like the other material ncorporated
into the Roman Rite through the Ordinariates, it will be very influential in the future evolution of the
Roman Rite as it is expressed in English.
Anglicanae Traditiones
Work is nearly complete on the Missal, or Sacramentary, for the Ordinariate. Though the Order of
Mass has already begun to be used, the largest task for Anglicanae Traditiones, the liturgical
Commission set up by the Holy See, has been the editing of the Propers. For almost every day and
almost every occasion there are Propers.
There is the Introit, or Entrance Antiphon, the Collect, the Gradual, the Alleluia or Tract, the
Offertory, the Prayer over the Gifts, the Communion, and the Prayer after Communion.
Add to these the Prefaces, for use with the Eucharistic Prayers, and the special rites for such occasions
as Candlemas, Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday, the Easter Triduum, and the Vigil of Pentecost, and it is
not hard to see why the Missal is likely to weigh in at well over a thousand pages.
Anglicans who are familiar with older versions of the Missal – the English Missal or Anglican Missal
– will be surprised, perhaps, to discover that there are almost no readings in the Ordinariate Missal.
One of the conventions of modern liturgy is that the Mass Lectionary is published separately and,
indeed, we already have that for the Ordinariates in the Revised Standard Version, 2nd Catholic
Edition.
Those who have attended Ordinariate Masses everywhere will have felt the impact of this version of
Scripture. It is much better suited for public reading than the Jerusalem Bible, used in most Catholic
churches in England and Wales.
The Jerusalem Bible, itself a very fine piece of work in its day, had its roots in an original French
translation but the RSV is directly within the tradition of English Bible, stretching back to the work of
Coverdale in the sixteenth century and the King James Version of the seventeenth. It will be good to
notice how well the psalm texts of the Ordinariate in Tudor English counterpoint with the readings in a
modernised sacral style.
Some necessary revisions
Most of the minor Propers – Introit, Gradual & Communion – are psalm texts and many of them will
be familiar to elderly folk because they are found at the back of the English Hymnal and were used for
the English Gradual. Some additions were necessary – there are Catholic solemnities not recognised
by the English Hymnal – and some necessary revisions.
The Gradual, Alleluia, and Tract are alternatives to the Responsorial Psalm and Acclamation in the
Lectionary. This, incidentally, is not the innovation it might appear to be: the Graduale Romanum of
1974 remains an official liturgical book and that contains all these texts too. In fact, one of the
revisions of our Gradualia is to make the corpus of English texts conform more closely to the Graduale
Romanum which, itself, has been conformed in minor ways to the post-conciliar Lectionary.
Prayer Book collects
A marvellous feature about the Ordinariate Missal is that it preserves the Prayer Book collects and
something of the logic of the Prayer Book seasons – Time after Epiphany, the ‘-gesima’ Sundays, the
Pentecost Octave, Time after Trinity. All of this reflects not only the inherited Sarum Use of England
but also that of the Latin Church from earliest times.
Translations of Latin originals
The Prayer Book not having Prayers over the Offerings or variable Prayers after Communion, the
Ordinariate Missal has drawn these from the translations of Latin originals offered variously by the
English Missal and Anglican Missal. There has been a similar policy with regard to the Collects for
the very many ‘black letter days’, for which the Prayer Book makes no provision.
We shall have two collections of these, temporarily at least, because the Customary of Our Lady of
Walsingham has an adaptation of the Common Worship traditional language collects, brought together
in England during the twentieth century.
Whether the two collections co-exist for a long time, we shall have to see but it would be a shame to
see the English collection disappear, because some of it is very fine, much is associated with
cathedrals and praying communities that generated them, and it indubitably is one of the sets of
official Anglican texts which it was the intention of Anglicanorum Cœtibus to incorporate into the
Roman Rite.
Divine Worship
We now know that the Ordinariate Use will be called, as a whole, Divine Worship. At present this title
is being used sparingly in Britain because it could easily be confused with the Book of Divine
Worship which it replaces and which is still around. Nevertheless we already have our first official
liturgical book.
A very beautiful production
Divine Worship – Occasional Services is a very beautiful production, the work of the Catholic Truth
Society, and it is heartening to know that the Missal, when it appears, perhaps later this year, will be of
similar beauty.
(from The Portal, June 2014)