More Thoughts On The Ordinariate Missal

I've moved on from studying Lumen Gentium and Gaudium et Spes and have started Anthony Esolen's The Beauty of the Word: A Running Commentary on the Roman Missal. This is described as "A comprehensive, step-by-step commentary on the changes in the Order of Mass (including Prefaces), the Proper of Time, and the Proper of Saints" for the 2011 revision of the Roman Missal.

Looking back on my various confirmation classes, including Evangelium and the RCIA course, but going even farther back to my Episcopalian confirmation class, almost nothing covered in the Vatican II constitutions, and none of the key insights Esolen brings to the liturgy, was in any of those classes, which is unfortunate, but I'm at least glad to have been able to catch up. For instance, it was only after researching the subject several years ago that I discovered the three-year lectionary, now adopted by most US Anglicans as well as something like 200 other Protestant denominations, was an innovation stemming from Vatican II.

In fact, the lectionary, which I admire tremendously, seems nevertheless to be at the basis of objections in the US to The Episcopal Church's 1979 Book of Common Prayer. But so little time was spent on this in my Episcopalian confirmation class that I assumed it came from the Church Fathers or something -- only someone like St Augustine could have had the comprehensive understanding of scripture to put something like that together. At least, that's what I thought. Instead, I discover it was developed much more recently by people who were nearly as smart.

I haven't followed critiques of the ordinariates' Divine Worship missal very closely, except that in light of reading Esolen, I'm beginning to see that in comparison to the 2011 Roman Missal, the DW missal is looking more and more like a slapdash job. My regular correspondent from the old blog brings me up to date:

Presumably most ordinariate members/attendees outside the UK are quite happy with Divine Worship:The Missal. But it has many detractors, although from inconsistent points of view. Christian Campbell from time to time lobs an acid comment onto one or other of the two main Ordinariate-themed Facebook pages regarding DW’s debt to the Ordinary Form mass, a very Bad Thing in his opinion. Presumably he and those who “Like” his comments want the Ordinariates to uphold English standards of church decor, choral music, liturgical taste and tone, etc but are really Traditional Latin Mass supporters at heart.

On the other side we have Christopher Mahon and the “Anglican” contingent, who lament DW’s every departure from the Book of Common Prayer: the three-year lectionary and the consequent disharmony between the Collects and the readings, the Cranmerised Roman Canon, the general cut-and-paste nature of DW. Naturally there is overlap in their specific complaints about the Ordinariate liturgy, although they come from opposite perspectives.

I think the problem is summed up by Bp Lopes’s decision regarding the celebrations of Ascension Day and Epiphany. The Anglican tradition is to celebrate these on the fortieth day after Easter and January 6, respectively; the USCCB has moved both to Sundays. Bp Lopes stated that the OSCP could not differ from the USCCB on both celebrations, and after consultation left Ascension Day on a Thursday and moved Epiphany to the Sunday. A foot in both camps, in other words.

My impression is that anyone who is genuinely knowledgeable about liturgy finds much to deprecate about DW, however satisfactory it is to those who simply enjoy its Olde English Bulldogge/TLM-lite aesthetic. Consequently it’s hard to imagine how Bp Lopes could be regarded as qualified to chair a liturgical committee, but then Bp Rozanski also would also seem an odd choice.

BTW, one of the announcements at the recent annual meeting of all active OCSP clergy is that there will be an external audit of every community’s finances this coming year. Not a minute too soon, I would imagine. Presumably an attempt to avoid a repetition of the debacle at St Barnabas, Omaha.

So what I'm seeing is that there's a cult of traditionalists who not only object to mass in the vernacular, but who also object to the three-year lectionary. I've run into this now and then, but the specific issues remain unclear to me -- the reasoning seems to be that if Catholics were less reverent after 1970, it was due not only to the departure from Latin, but also the new lectionary. And this is also related to traditionalist Anglican objections to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer.

The question I would raise is that the only ordinariate that's doing well at all, the one in North America, is still functioning at a C-minus level, to the point that the chancery seems now to be worrying about where such money as the communities have is being spent. (Let's not think for now about the priest who beat his wife before the altar, or the one who got the hospital sisters upset by celebrating OF daily mass ad orientem.) Well, maybe if they could clean up the collects, the prefaces, and the readings, things would get better. Yeah.

The problem I have with that is as I read Esolen, I discover that the people who put the 2011 missal together had all the potential discrepancies worked out. And they did a good job with it. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?