I’ve always felt sympathetic to foreigners on holiday in England who come across a church advertising Mass and displaying crucifixes and statues inside. When they discover later that they have been at a service of the Church of England, not of the Roman Catholic Church, they are puzzled and confused.
So what would you think if you went into a church and heard the clergyman begin: “God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid; cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit”¦”?
If you said it was an early part of the Anglican service of Holy Communion, you’d be right. But I’ve just been looking at a new service booklet with the Order of Mass according to the Use of the Ordinariate. It begins with that prayer, yet it is a Roman Catholic liturgy. Instead of bells-and-smells Anglicans stealing the Catholics’ clothes, as it were, we have Catholics (Roman Catholics) cannibalising the Book of Common Prayer
From the Preface to the Cloud of Unknowing, written in the 14th century.
GOD, unto whom all hearts be open, and unto whom all will speaketh, and unto whom no privy thing is hid. I beseech Thee so for to cleanse the intent of mine heart with the unspeakable gift of Thy grace, that I may perfectly love Thee, and worthily praise Thee. Amen.
Those who study the historical sources of the Book of Common Prayer are aware aware of just how much of it was “cribbed” by Cranmer from Medieval Catholic sources, the Sarum Rite, the monastic office, the collects, a lectionary. Granted that Cranmer modified these things considerably, why offended that Roman Catholics are now borrowing back what we borrowed form them in the first place?
Dr Witt beat me to it! Large chunks of the BCP were adapted from the Sarum Rite. Not, I think the Prayer of Humble Access (‘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’ and so on ) but it’s a gorgeous prayer anyway both scriptural and eucharistic.
FWIW you might like to know that the collect for purity forms the sacristy prayer in Westminster Cathedral (the RC cathedral here in London, not to be confused with the Abbey) before going in to celebrate Mass.
I would not want to concede that the material in the BCP which came from mediaeval English sources was borrowed from ‘them’ – as though England was Roman Catholic and then became Anglican. Surely a more Anglican way to see it is that the post-Reformation church is not an alien intrusion supplanting the original Roman Catholicism of the country (that is the Roman view) but a genuine reformation of the ancient church of the islands, calling it back to its original purity. So those mediaeval texts were always the inheritance of Anglicanism – not taken from an entirely different church. The post-Reformation church was in continuity with what had been there previously.
#3 William S – exactly so! Anglicanism is not – at least according to the original proclaimers of such – an aberration of RC, but a continuation (re-formed) of the One True Catholic and Apostolic Church.
Whatever one’s opinion may be about how the English Reformation turned out, the Reformers certainly intended a return to the church of the apostolic and patristic era. When I began to learn about the degree of continuity between Cranmer’s prayer book and the liturgies which preceded it was the moment I began to understand that radical Protestantism stripped of liturgy and sacrament was not “catholic” as the Creeds say.
I’m enough of a card-carrying dues-paying Anglican to concede everything writteb above about Anglicanism’s self-understanding as a reforming movement within the Catholic Church.
At the same time, one can hardly deny that the Medieval liturgy being used in England at the time of the Reformation was a late Medieval Roman Catholic liturgy. Otherwise, the whole point of an Anglican re-formation is sort of lost.
Whatever his complaints about the inadequacies of this late Medieval liturgy (“Preface to the 1549 BCP”), it was precisely much of this Medieval material that Cranmer “borrowed,” “appropriated,” “incorporated,” “adapted,” “continued,” “inherited.” The verb is not that important.
In that light, the writer’s complaint (“How dare THEY steal OUR stuff?”) is sort of silly. Pointing to a self-understanding of Anglicanism as “Reformed Catholicism” only makes the complaint even sillier.
Thank you, Dr. Witt, for pointing out the silliness of the article. Even Hilaire Belloc, no great fan of Cranmer, commended the Archbishop for rendering in sublime vernacular many of the riches of the Latin Mass. I’ve noted in the most recent translation of the RC liturgical texts some of Cranmerian phrases are found in the Collects.
Well, I find this all very puzzling (tongue in cheek). I find it rather difficult when visiting other Episcopal or Anglican Churches to be offered the opportunity to pray the prayer of Humble Access as well as other exquisitely beautiful prayers. We seem to have tossed so much of our language and traditions out of the window, I am thankful no matter where those words might be appropriated!