The Ordinariate preserves the Latin liturgy but it isn't traddie

Unbeknownst to many Roman Catholics especially those of the Latin traditional persuasion, Anglicanism has preserved  Latin in the Western Church and now hands it back to the 21st century  Church. Professor Diarmaid McCullough credits the Anglicans for preserving what he calls things of beauty the post Vatican II Roman Church threw out.

The Book of Common Prayer has a beautiful psalmody and it is likely that this would be included in the liturgical books of the Ordinariates. The psalms are still introduced by their first Latin verse. Example Psalm 137 is still introduced by its first Latin verse as "Super flumina". Now which Roman Catholic prayerbook still has that?

In three minutes we can see the Mass of St Theresa of Avila in the Anglican Use celebrated by the Rt Rev Msgr Andrew Burnham in St Mary Magdalene, Brighton. No one can confuse this Mass as a Novus Ordo or the Tridentine Mass. It is the Mass of the Anglican Use of the Roman Rite. This Mass does not claim to be the "Mass of the Ages". All Masses are, irrespective of rite or use.

But we do not detect a defiant traddie attitude in this Mass. It is a Mass celebrated in the 21st century but preserves the Catholic ethos of Anglicanism. It is Catholic in an Anglican expression.

The Ordinariate is not a particular church separated and exclusive from the rest of the Catholic Church. It is living a tradition that has restored and preserves  a spirituality that has animated the faithful over the centuries.

Miles Coverdale's translation of the Roman Canon of the Mass

Note: Miles Coverdale, Anglican Bishop of Exeter who had Protestant leanings translated the Bible into English for the first time. His translation of the Roman Canon is noted for its accuracy and majesty and is authorized for use by the Roman Catholic Church for the Anglican Use. 

The Roman Canon

Most merciful Father, we humbly pray thee, through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord.

[He joins his hands and, making the sign of the cross once over both bread and chalice, says]:

and we ask, that thou accept and bless + these gifts, these presents, these holy and unspoiled sacrifices.

[With hands extended, he continues]

We offer them unto thee, first, for thy holy Catholic Church: that thou vouchsafe to keep it in peace, to guard, unite, and govern it throughout the whole world; together with thy servant N., our Pope and N., our Bishop and all the faithful guardians of the Catholic and apostolic faith.

Commemoration of the Living

Remember, O Lord, thy servants and handmaids [N. and N.]

[He prays for them briefly with hands joined. Then, with hands extended, he continues]

and all who here around us stand, whose faith is known unto thee and their steadfastness manifest, on whose behalf we offer unto thee, or who themselves offer unto thee, this sacrifice of praise; for themselves, and for all who are theirs; for the redemption of their souls, for the hope of their salvation and safety; and who offer their prayers unto thee, the eternal God, the living and the true.

United in one communion, we venerate the memory, first of the glorious ever-Virgin Mary, Mother of our God and Lord Jesus Christ; of Joseph her spouse; as also of the blessed Apostles and Martyrs, Peter and Paul, Andrew, James, John, Thomas, James, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Simon and Thaddaeus; Linus, Cletus, Clement, Xystus, Cornelius, Cyprian, Lawrence, Chrysogonus, John and Paul, Cosmas and Damian and of all thy Saints: grant that by their merits and prayers we may in all things be defended with the help of thy protection.

[Through Christ Our Lord. Amen]

[With hands extended, he continues]

We beseech thee then, O Lord, graciously to accept this oblation from us thy servants, and from thy whole family: order thou our days in thy peace, and bid us to be delivered from eternal damnation, and to be numbered in the fold of thine elect. [Through Christ our Lord.]

Vouchsafe, O God, we beseech thee, in all things to make this oblation blessed, approved and accepted, a perfect and worthy offering: that it may become for us the Body and Blood of thy dearly beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

[He joins his hands].

Who the day before he suffered, [On Maundy Thursday he says:

Who the day before he suffered to save us and all men, that is today],

[He takes the bread and, raising it a little above the altar, continues]:

took bread into his holy and venerable hands,

[He looks upward]

and with eyes lifted up to heaven, unto thee, God, his almighty Father, giving thanks to thee, he blessed, broke and gave it to his disciples, saying:

[He bows slightly.]

Take this, all of you, and eat it: this is my body which will be given up for you.

[He genuflects, shows the consecrated Host to the People, places it on the paten, and again genuflects in adoration. Then he continues]:

Likewise, after supper,

[He takes the chalice, and, raising it a little above the altar, continues]:

taking also this goodly chalice into his holy and venerable hands, again giving thanks to thee, he blessed, and gave it to his disciples, saying:

[He bows slightly.]

Take this, all of you, and drink from it: this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven. Do this in memory of me.

[He genuflects, shows the Chalice to the People, places it on the corporal, and again genuflects in adoration].

[Then with hands extended, the Priest says]:

Wherefore, O Lord, we thy servants, and thy holy people also, remembering the blessed passion of the same Christ thy Son our Lord, as also his resurrection from the dead, and his glorious ascension into heaven; do offer unto thine excellent majesty of thine own gifts and bounty, the pure victim, the holy victim, the immaculate victim, the holy Bread of eternal life, and the Chalice of everlasting salvation.

Vouchsafe to look upon them with a merciful and pleasant countenance; and to accept them, even as thou didst vouchsafe to accept the gifts of thy servant Abel the Righteous, and the sacrifice of our Patriarch Abraham; and the holy sacrifice, the immaculate victim, which thy high priest Melchisedech offered unto thee.

[Bowing, with hands joined, he continues]

We humbly beseech thee, almighty God, command these offerings to be brought by the hands of thy holy Angel to thine altar on high, in sight of thy divine majesty; that all we who at this partaking of the altar shall receive the most sacred Body and Blood of thy Son,

[He stands up straight and makes the sign of the cross, saying]

may be fulfilled with all heavenly benediction and grace. [Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.]

Commemoration of the Dead

[With hands extended, he says]

Remember also, O Lord, thy servants and handmaids, [N. and N.], who have gone before us sealed with the seal of faith, and who sleep the sleep of peace.

[The Priest prays for them briefly with joined hands. Then, with hands extended, he continues]

To them, O Lord, and to all that rest in Christ, we beseech thee to grant the abode of refreshing, of light, and of peace.

[Through the same Christ our Lord.]

[The Priest strikes his breast with the right hand, saying]

To us sinners also, thy servants, who hope in the multitude of thy mercies,

[With hands extended, he continues]

vouchsafe to grant some part and fellowship with thy holy Apostles and Martyrs; with John, Stephen, Matthias, Barnabas, Ignatius, Alexander, Marcellinus, Peter, Felicitas, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia and with all thy Saints, within whose fellowship, we beseech thee, admit us, not weighing our merit, but granting us forgiveness;

[He joins his hands and continues]

through Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom, O Lord, thou dost ever create all these good things; dost sanctify, quicken, bless, and bestow them upon us;

[He takes the Chalice and the paten with the Host and, lifting them up, sings or says]

By whom, and with whom, and in whom, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, all honour and glory be unto thee, O Father Almighty, world without end.

The People respond: Amen.

The new English translation of the Mass may yet revive English in our isles

So much has been written about the decline of the English language in the Philippines. While the nation remains the 3rd largest Anglophone nation on the planet with 57% of the 92 million Filipino population  functional in it. However literacy in the language is declining. Literacy would mean that being Filipino can be expressed in the English language. When a Filipino uses the language, another English speaker should see, hear and fell the Filipino speaking or writing and not just a poor imitation of the former American colonial master.

Of course many people are using English for specific purposes (e.g. for call center jobs, employment abroad, for tourism and hospitality jobs etc) but the use of the language to build the nation, its culture and, its ethos is declining. The Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) has decided to implement the new translation of the Mass in English starting Advent 2012. This would give the parish priests one year or so to orient their congregations.

I just listened via live streaming the Ordinary of Our Lady of Walsingham, Monsignor Keith Newton deliver his keynote address to the 2011 Anglican Use Conference in Texas, USA. While on the subject of the Ordinariate liturgy, Mgr Newton said that the Ordinariate has decided to stick with traditional English in its future liturgy now aborning. The reason is that this English usage will preserve the Anglican  patrimony in the Roman Catholic Church and enrich the culture of today's multicultural England. Mgr Newton admits and we have to agree that the Anglican patrimony is extremely hard to define even in England. The use of the traditional  will make it easier. This is unlike in the USA, where the Anglican Use has options for contemporary English use. This insistence on traditional English struck me since as Mgr Newton says many of the Ordinariate groups when they were in the Church of England used the Roman Novus Ordo with its more to be desired English translation. The shift to the traditional use will require adjustment from these congregations. Mgr Newton also said that the Ordinariate prefers the Revised Standard Version (RSV) Bible to be used at Mass and the prayers. The Catholic Church in England has long opted for the Jerusalem Bible but the RSV represents continuity from the Anglican tradition. (Rome has used the Jerusalem Bible since 1966 in its English liturgies) I myself have been reared and nurtured in the Oxford Anglican and Catholic versions of the RSV with the Catholic one having Cardinal Heenan's imprimatur. The RSV has nurtured me in my study of English. While the Jerusalem Bible is good, I learned my English from English language teachers taught by Episcopalians, thus the partiality to English language translations made in England.

The CBCP is rightly concerned about  Filipinos being habituated to the English 1973 Mass translation and that a sudden shift to the more literal new translation will be a shocker.  But I believe it is a necessary shift since the new English translation will help recover tradition (although the new translation is in contemporary English) and Catholic faith among our people. Also it would help revive the English language in the country. Why do I say so?

Mgr Newton points out that the language used in worship enriches the use of that language in daily life. The good monsignor believes that the Ordinariate may preserve and conserve something good and beautiful in the English language. This does not preempt the fact that the English language evolves and coins new terms. English is a dynamic language which borrows and innovates, but it is not a good idea to throw what is good in the past.

The English language was brought to the Philippines by the American colonizers and not a few of the teachers were Episcopalian. In a real sense English in the Philippines is an Anglican/Episcopal patrimony which needs to be conserved and promoted. The ECP has been completely Filipinized but it has an obligation to celebrate the English language it received more than a century ago. But English is not just an Episcopal inheritance. Irish and American Roman Catholic priests also taught the language and by the late 1920s the Ateneo de Manila had garnered the reputation of being a good school to learn excellent English.

The old Roman Missals were an example of good traditional English. The Latin of the Mass was on the left page and the correct English (traditional) translation on the right.

Was Mgr Newton correct in saying that the language used in worship builds the culture of the nation? Your thoughts please.

The new English translation of the Roman Missal, Ordinariate liturgy

Will the new translation cause Mass confusion?

The Catholic Bishops of Conference of the Philippines will implement the new English translation of the Mass starting Advent 2012. This will give enough time for the bishops to familiarize their flocks on the new translation. A catechetical guide has been published authored by liturgist Fr Anscar Chupungco to help priests familiarize their congregations.

The new translation has been in the works since 2000 when Pope John Paul II ordered a new translation that corrects errors in the 1973 translation. The 1973 translation was a "sense" translation while the new one is a more literal translation from the Latin. The US Catholic Bishops conference has published sample texts here.

The new translation is more faithful to the original Latin. For example in the words of consecration it uses the word "Chalice" instead of "Cup" which the 1973 translation uses and which all editions and versions of the Book of Common Prayer use. The 1549 BCP translates "calix" as "cuppe".  This is more faithful since the meaning of "cup" has changed since 1549. While "calix" literally translates to "cup", the nuance has changed since when Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer translated the Latin of the Mass into English. "Cup" now is so banal and we can expect to get one at Starbucks or any coffee shop!

Nonetheless the new English translation is in contemporary English. The Roman Catholic Church never had a public English Mass liturgy in what Anglicans still call as "Traditional Language". The closest Anglophone Roman Catholics ever had were the English translations in their Latin Roman Missals. The left pane of each page (often beautifully illustrated) had the Latin said at Mass and the right pane had the English in traditional usage.  These pre Vatican II Missals often used a traditional language similar to what Anglicans used. The English used is quite close to equivalent BCP texts. But Vatican II reforms did away with all of these. Traditional English almost disappeared from the Anglophone Roman Catholic's mindset. This made Anglophone Roman Catholicism culturally poorer.

Anglicans on the other hand struggled with the issue of Traditional and Contemporary English that use of either is an option in the liturgy. The contemporary use as much as possible tries to be faithful to the traditional one.

Filipino bishops are worried that since for over 40 years, Filipino Catholics have been used to the 1973 translations, a quick shift to the new translation may confuse. But this can be overcome by effective catechism. I hope parish priests are up to the challenge. But some traditionalists are much concerned that Fr Chupungco is the author of the prescribed catechism. They note that Fr Chupungco is liturgically trendy!

The proof of the pudding is if people will respond to "The Lord be with you" with "And with your spirit" which is  faithful to the Latin and was first translated into this form by Cranmer in 1549.

The Ordinariate liturgy

Father Aidan Nichols' essay on the Ordinariate liturgy continues here. Fr Nichols gives a historical survey which is required reading for those into Liturgy. What is interesting is that he writes that the Ordinariate liturgy has taken much from really Anglican sources

"There were no comparable difficulties attached to the other texts in the proposed English book: the daily Offices of Mattins and Evensong (to which, following the example of the 1928 proposed Prayer Book, an Office of Compline and a Day Hour were added; the Litany; the Lectionary (for the Office as well as for the Mass), and rites for marriage and funerals – though the inclusion in the latter of explicit prayer for the departed (and not simply for the bereaved) was strengthened by the addition of the Sarum rites for the commendation of the dead person which followed on the Requiem Mass. The calendar proposed was the current seasonal calendar of the Church of England, itself of Sarum origin, together with the cycle of festivals as found in the 1970 General Calendar of the Roman rite, and a number of English or British commemorations, in excess of those in the National Calendar for England and Wales (though not necessarily exceeding the total number if saints in the local calendars of English and Welsh [and Scottish] dioceses were to be added together). There was one unusual feature of the Office of Mattins. Following contemporary Church of England precedent, the second reading at Mattins could be drawn from post-biblical sources. In the context of the Latin church, the Roman rite Office of Readings is an obvious source for these, but the book drafted for the English Ordinariate contains an alternative cycle for Sundays and feasts taken from insular sources. A number of these are taken from patristic writers (Bede, Aldhelm), mediaeval sources (John of Ford, Mother Julian, Nicholas Love), and English Catholic martyrs (Fisher, More, Campion), but the larger number derive from the Anglican patrimony (the Caroline divines and their Restoration successors, the Tractarians with particular reference to Newman, and a selection of later Anglo-Catholic writers). It is, as it were, a testimony to what might have been had the English Reformation proceeded on Catholic lines, as did the Catholic Reformation in much of Continental Europe. No Baptismal liturgy or liturgy for Confirmation has been provided, on the twofold ground that Anglicanism has not produced a version of such a liturgy which has endeared itself to its faithful, and also that there is something especially fitting about the use in an Ordinariate of the rites of the Roman liturgy for Christian initiation, as a sign of belonging to the wider Latin church (and thus to the Catholic Church as a whole). The same congruence might well be ascribed to the use of the Ordination rites of the mainstream Latin church."

The question is whether the Mass books of other Ordinariates will be similar to the English one. What happens to the American Anglican Use? We have to keep posted on these developments.

Know thy Mass!

This was from my Anglo-Catholic "lola" who bought it in 1952 when she was studying in Minnesota. If I am not mistaken, Anglo Catholics in the American Episcopalian biretta belt used the American Missal which is an almost exact translation of the Roman Missal. In fact I was able to follow the Tridentine Mass in a Cubao Catholic parish using her Missa Anglicana and this catechetical comic book!

Nonetheless, forty one years after Vatican II's reforms on the Mass, most people have no clue on what is happening in the Mass. No wonder they text during the service. The Mass itself has ceased to be an occasion for catechism, but rather as a ho hum service which is most likely even made worse by bad homilies. But pre Vatican II Mass books for the laity had always a bit of catechetical information on what the Mass rubrics really mean. The pre Vatican II Mass books are much much closer in ethos to the Anglican Book of Common Prayer than the Mass books and Missalettes Roman Catholic have today. Both the Roman Missal and the BCP had a didactic function and that is to hand in the Faith (in Latin "Traditio")

In the scanned image above, the comics explain the Creed. This is an act of  what is called in Latin as "renditio" which means to "hand over". We hand over our understanding of the Faith at this point of the Mass.

All these need to be recovered in both the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches. It is not surprising that modern Anglican prayer books and liturgies have taken cue from what Reformation historian Diarmaid MacCulloch calls "What the post Vatican II Roman Catholic Church threw out"

The saving grace is that Anglicanism preserved much of what the Roman Church threw out. And all hopes are with Anglicans on both sides of the Tiber to reflect and restore all these things of beauty and Faith.

The Prayer of Humble Access and the Centurion's prayer

The Prayer of Humble Access is a traditional prayer in the Anglican Eucharistic celebration which was part of the early Books of Common Prayer. It was said after the Canon of the Mass. In later revisions in many Anglican provinces it was moved to after the Paternoster is said but before the Agnus Dei. It is said before the Body and Blood of the Lord is given to the people.

It is analogous to the Roman Rite's Centurion's prayer

"Domine, non sum dignus, ut intres sub tectum meum: sed tantum dic verbo, et sanabitur anima mea"


Which is translated in the English Mass used in the Philippines as

"Lord I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed"

This isn't really so accurate. The Eastern Churches (the Orthodox and those Churches in communion with Rome) view the Eucharist as a "medicine of the soul". It is a medicine that first cleanses before the healing comes.

In the new translation authorized for US dioceses it goes like this

"Lord I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word, my soul shall be healed"

Which is quite close to the Latin of the Mass but in my honest opinion still misses out on an earlier understanding closer to that understood by the Early Church.. "Sed tantum dic verbo, et sanabitur anima mea"  I translate with my rusty Latin as "Just say the word, and my soul shall be cleansed"

We must receive the gifts of the Altar as spotless as possible!

Nonetheless we should be glad that the new translation captures much of the old understanding a form of which is used in the Anglican Use Mass.

The Prayer of Humble Access in the American Anglican Use Mass follows the words found  in the 1928 American Book of Common Prayer.

"We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy. Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the Flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his Blood, that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen."


In the Anglican Use,  After the Prayer of Humble Access is said by the priest, the Ecce Agnus Dei follows  and then the Centurion's Prayer.


The Prayer of Humble Access and the Centurion's Prayer are two of my favourite prayers in the Anglican Eucharist and Roman Mass. The two prayers remind us how so unworthy of us to receive the Lord, now truly present under the appearances of Bread and Wine. The reference to the 'crumbs under thy Table" is from the Gospel story of the Syrophoenician Woman whose daughter was healed. In our politically correct world, it is extremely offensive to call another person "like a dog". But because of our sinful nature, we might as well be even worse than dogs, but Jesus raises us up, even to the extent that we are worthy to receive Him in the Eucharist. And like the Centurion's servant, we shall be cleansed and healed.