Sunday

• My picks for ordinariate Masses and on thous and thees. I’m sure most English Missal users wouldn’t mind if the Cranmer options went away as most didn’t like Cranmer any more than we do, most didn’t use those options and those options were in the book only so Anglican priests whose bishops enforced Prayer Book use had something to fall back on to pray aloud while sneaking the Tridentine Mass around that. Again I’d be happy with the option of the old American Prayer Book framed by the Tridentine Mass, the American Missal and the Anglican Missal, American Edition. IMO it works because despite Cranmer’s heresy, he still shared with the Catholic Church a 16th-century Godward worldview. In the context of a Mass patterned on the Tridentine, by an RC priest, ‘our only Mediator and Advocate’ for example isn’t a problem (after all, it’s true – the saints and we are only mediators and advocates by participating in Christ). So my picks for ordinariate Masses are Ordinary Form in English as cleaned up by Pope Benedict and in Latin with traditional-like ceremonial, Extraordinary Form in English (Knott/English Missal), Extraordinary Form in Latin and the American Missal and Anglican Missal, American Edition for ex-Episcopalians who wants a catholicised Prayer Book (better than the Anglican Use now; less Novus Ordo and more Tridentine). Thous and thees: other than sentimental reasons I can take or leave them. Interestingly Protestants who have centuries-old traditions of praying in English often still worship with them, from Episcopalians’ Rite I option to the Baptist fundamentalists sticking to the King James Bible; RCs often don’t like them and think they’re Protestant except for prayers they’ve long done in English, those of the Rosary, so even the most liberal Novus Ordo parish reverts to thou to pray the Our Father.
• Common statement on baptism: why?
• Viva Cristo Rey.

Labels: Anglicanism, history, the Catholic faith