Ordinariate Watch: Curiouser and curiouser: the Pope has now turned the Book of Common Prayer (well, quite a bit of it) into a Catholic liturgy

I have been pondering this week about two items of news to do with the way in which, slowly but surely, the results of Anglicanorum coetibus are unfolding throughout the English-speaking world. The first is a story about the beginnings of an American ordinariate; here it is, as reported in the New York Times:

Maryland: Episcopal Parish Will Join Catholic Church

An Episcopal parish in Blandensburg will be the first in the United States to join the Roman Catholic Church under a new streamlined conversion process created by Pope Benedict XVI, leaders of both church groups said Monday. St Luke’s Episcopal Parish will come under the care of Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, who is forming a United States ordinariate – effectively a national diocese – for Episcopalians converting under the pope’s plan. Bishop John Chane of Washington, an Episcopalian, said he had approved St Luke’s decision and would allow the congregation to continue worshipping in their church under a lease with an option to buy the building.

To describe Anglicanorum coetibus as “a new streamlined conversion process” is particularly crass, but what do you expect from the New York Times? As a conversion process, in fact, there’s nothing particularly new about it in the US: it already existed there, on a parish by parish basis, in the so-called “Anglican Use Pastoral Provision”, whereby Anglican Parishes converted, but became not, as under the ordinariate, part of a new jurisdiction but simply joined the local diocese.

To read more, click here.

What William Oddie fails to note is that the 1549 Prayer Book was only a partially-reformed, transitional service book, which was replaced by the reformed liturgy of the 1552 Prayer Book, which reflects Cranmer's mature thinking and is Protestant and Reformed in doctrine. While Cranmer retained the old where the old might be well used, he also used only what he believed to be consonant with Scripture, a fact that Anglo-Catholics and Roman Catholics generally fail to mention. While Cranmer borrowed some of Cardinal Quinones' ideas for the reform of the Daily Offices, the changes that Cranmer made in the Daily Offices were far more sweeping as the essay "Concerning the Service of the Church" printed at the end of the 1549 Prayer Book and the beginnng of the 1662 Prayer Book explains. Here again the guiding principle was that the texts of the services must come from the Scriptures or be agreeable to the Scriptures. The "book on doctrine and liturgy by Hermann von Wied, Archbishop of Cologne" to which Oddie refers was one of the early German Lutheran Church Orders, from which Cranmer adapted prayers and other liturgical texts, making them Reformed in doctrine. Archbishop Hermann was deprived of his see for his reformed views.

The addition of Benediction, the exposing of a consecrated Host in a monstrance for the congregation to adore is a practice that the Thity-Nine Articles and authentic historic Anglicanism rejects and is antithetical to the spirit of the Anglican service of Evensong, which is first and foremost a Service of the Word. The abuse of the Anglican service of Evensong in this manner is appalling.