Debate: Do American Anglo-Catholic liturgical texts belong in Catholicism?

Yes but I'm talking about translations of Tridentine Catholic books, not actually the Book of Common Prayer. Vs. well-meant Catholic prejudice and not just from liberals.

Opener: You know, I might try the Little Office waiting for and riding the train. A little more challenging than the rosary but not as hard as the breviary it imitates, because it's almost the same every day. Great book: the Monastic Diurnal compiled by Winfred Douglas, based on the Benedictine office. The diurnal is halfway between the LOBVM and the real breviary. A perfect breviary for people like us. Douglas's is a Catholic book done in English by an American Anglo-Catholic before Vatican II. There are other English versions of this diurnal. A few little differences from the Roman Breviary: for example, only four psalms at Vespers and no Nunc Dimittis at Compline.

An answer: an echo of the low churchmanship Thomas Day has described. By the way, we can do low-church. Low Mass in a bare Gothic church? Sure! Pre-conciliar Catholicism is the Great Commission in action; so many cultures.

I don't care for Anglican prayer books. Too creepy, fake, lacey-doily.

But it's not really Anglican. Catholicism speaks to me in English in Anglo-Catholicism's idiom, but I don't give the Episcopal Church a second thought.

It ensnared people in Anglicanism letting them think they could be part of the actual Church while remaining wed to that harlot of abominations. Anglo-Catholicism = poison in a milkshake. Sweet, rich, frosty & deadly.

I wasn't exactly ensnared. My dad was. (And he came back to the church.) I was born into it; it taught people like me about God and the church, frankly when the real American Catholics were doing a bad job of that, after Vatican II. (Poison in a milkshake: '70s and '80s Novus Ordo.) And when we figured out it isn't the church, and when the church became hospitable again, we came into the church. Mission accomplished.

'70s and '80s NO = bad milkshake, not a poison one. Jesus is present in every valid Mass. He is not present at the most splendid and beautiful Anglican liturgy. Their orders are null and utterly void, their sacraments aside from baptism & natural marriage are empty and find things, vainly undertaken.

But because I was born outside the church I wasn't guilty of that.

True and is a great blessing for all that you were guided to the Church by the Holy Spirit. Now, seriously, the Anglican stuff is pure rat poison.

The English "Reformation" and the Thirty-Nine Articles sure are: fallible church and the Real Absence. Even subtle stuff like Cranmer's Eucharistic prayer, which the church rightly has never allowed. But the church allows his collects in the Anglican Use of the Roman Rite, as it does Coverdale's psalter and the version of the creed I still say by heart if at a Mass in English. Not rat poison.

That's the cake that conveys the rat poison.

Telling me to give up that artsy old-fashioned stuff and go low-church ICEL, just like heretical American Catholics AND charismatic conservative ones in the '80s and for that matter paralleling Orthodox anti-Westernism. No way.

Not telling you to give up anything beautiful & true, John. But there is beauty enough on the right side of the Tiber. Cast off the blandishments of sin, the Devil and his servant Cranmer.

There's the right kind of ecumenism in which anything beautiful and orthodox is the church's.

Unless it is a rat poison conveyance system.

Why we don't use Cranmer's Communion consecration prayer.

Except your approach fails to appreciate how cunning Cranmer was. His heresy doesn't just affect his Eucharistic incantation, it is shot all thru his prayerbook. Like a cancer in and otherwise healthy limb, the only way to keep the patient alive is to amputate the limb.

You're preaching to the choir. St. Clement's Jr. and I aren't in the ordinariate. (Because St. Clement's was Tridentine, not really Anglican.) That said, we agree with the church: if it's not heretical, it's an option.

But not an optimal one. I think it dangerous to look at Anglicanism to try to salvage something from it. Better to just shake the dust from your feet.

No. It's not about Cranmer. Let me put it this way. American Anglo-Catholicism is my culture. That creed in English isn't just Christian; just like Latin it's our big no to the Sixties.

Second Fellow:

One thing about Anglo-Catholicism — it has its own patrimony of which some might be preserved. Everything good about the Novus Ordo comes from the traditional Roman Rite, therefore, there is nothing about the NO that needs preservation.

Back to the First Fellow:

But a yes to Henry and Edward and Elizabeth.

Exactly, Second Fellow. First Fellow, hell, no. Not from us.

But you pray the words they imposed over the blood of the English martyrs. Edmund Campion would not pray those words. Robert Southwell would not pray those words. Nicolas Owen would not pray those words. They were cut apart rather than saying those words.

The psalms, the canticles, and the creed?! "All this time I thought the English Martyrs were killed because they were Catholic." Among the reasons I don't give the Episcopal Church a second thought: I've stood in a ruined English abbey and knelt at St. John Southworth's tomb.

Why don't you discard the work of those who slaughtered the Martyrs and make use of the translations in the Missal (1962) and Breviary? There is no need whatsoever to make use of Anglican stuff.

Because the English is better.

Disagree. Creed I pray at low Mass every Sunday is beautiful and accurate.

One more time. I lived through the changes in the Episcopal Church so I have much more reason to hate it than you do. I hold no brief for it (not hatred, indifference), because like you I know where it came from, but, unlike the Western-raised Eastern hyperdox, I don't hate my own culture either. (Also, the Episcopal Church promotes schisms in American Catholicism, from Italian neighborhood ones to the PNCC to ACROD, and does false-flag operations: "La Santa Misa en Español" and processions with La Guadalupana. It has a Foreign Rites Canon so it used to do the Tridentine Mass in Latin to trick Catholics. Beliefs and practices that are actually against its teachings. Fakedy-fake. St. Clement's wasn't trying to steal Catholics; it was trying to Catholicize WASPs.) What I'm talking about isn't Anglicanism. It's our own religion back at us in Anglo-American culture. Think of it as the best kind of inculturation. America is British-based culture so there you go. And regarding St. Clement's Jr., like with me the question's moot since we use the 1962 missal in Latin anyway. But "It's Not About Latin™." Knock the wind out of the liberals by not necessarily going back to Latin and even being sort of ecumenical. Think we're bigots? Then one doesn't know the church.

Actually, the liturgical books in question that I like, such as the Knott Missal (actually from England) and Winfred Douglas' diurnal, were BANNED in most of the Episcopal Church. They're ours for the asking.

A common misconception about the church is thinking we have to believe if a Catholic did it, it's better and we must use it over anything else. "The Greek Catholics are perfect so make the Orthodox just like them in their practices," for example. No. "The St. Louis Jesuits are better than Healey Willan." No.