Weekly essays inspired by Anglican themes and theology.
It is in the liturgies it provides for the sacraments that the Prayer Book’s claim to be fully reformed and fully catholic – without being puritan or papist – is most contested. Naturally, the chief focus is on the service known variously as the Mass, the Lord’s Supper, the Holy Communion, or the Eucharist – all of them terms with ancient origins, and varied patterns of use among catholics and protestants.
To claim (as I did in the first part of this essay) that when Cranmer’s reform seems most protestant, it is simultaneously most catholic, is undoubtedly paradoxical, but not merely a rhetorical flourish.
Those who esteem the old Prayer Book are used to sniping from opposite sides – from catholics, that it is “too protestant”; from evangelicals, it is “too catholic”. It’s a pattern of criticism that can be traced back to the recusants (non-conforming papal loyalists) and puritans (nonconforming advanced protestants) of the 16th century.
As with most of the apostles, there is not much detail about Bartholomew in the New Testament. Bartholomew was probably a patronymic (‘son of Tolmai’), not his proper name...
The most important Anglican mind most Anglicans have never heard of was a frequent visitor to St. John’s in years past, the Canadian priest and professor of Classics, Robert Crouse. There was nothing showy about him, and he did not seek the spotlight.
Every feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary is a testimony to the truth of the Incarnation: that the Son of God became Son of Man in the Virgin's womb, so that the sons (and daughters) of men might become the sons of God.
That is the nobility of erotic love - to be caught up by another, to love with such abandon, to give oneself entirely to another in devotion. That is the sublimity shared between lovers.
On the feast of St. Mary Magdalene we read in Scripture an erotic love poem between a man and a woman - the Song of Songs. Mention of the erotic, of Eros, is likely to make us uncomfortable.
In continuity with the practice of the ancient Church, Anglicans practice infant baptism, “as most agreeable with the institution of Christ” (Article 27). “For the infants of Christians belong to God and to the Church no less than did formerly the offspring of the Hebrews to whom circumcision was administered in infancy.
Though the Scriptures are silent on the question of whether to baptize infants or not, other texts do shed definitive light on the question: those that speak about circumcision (the Old Testament sign that corresponds to Baptism), and the participation of the children of the covenant people in the blessings of the covenant.
