The Catholicity of the Prayer Book Part VII

So far in this unusually extended series the focus has been on the classical Anglicanism of the 16th to 18th centuries, a recognized strain (however idiosyncratic) within the world of reformed protestant orthodoxy. We have not touched on the great “sea change” effected by the 19th century Anglo-catholic movement. As the name suggests, the movement sought to recover the catholic heritage of Anglicanism; and it assertively upheld the divine origin and authority of the church, its sacraments and orders of ministry. In theology it looked to the Church Fathers, to the divines of the 17th century rather than the 16th century, and to the Prayer Book as rule of faith, more than the Thirty Nine Articles. In its second generation the movement took a ritualist turn, reviving the liturgical practices of the medieval Church of England or adopting those of the counter-reformation Rome. Theologically and liturgically, Anglo-catholics can be located on a continuum that ranges from Prayer Book catholicism to “more Roman than the pope” Anglo-papalism. The old high churchmen had been content to live within the parameters of the Reformation formularies; Anglocatholics often moved assertively beyond them, and even against them, and it led to sometimes bitter controversy, especially with Anglican evangelicals. Regrettably, a knee-jerk antipathy to and ignorance of the reformation heritage lingers on in the Anglo-catholic movement to this day.

Despite this alienation from the Reformation heritage, many Anglocatholics were and are deeply attached to the historic Prayer Book, whose rites they enveloped in the rich ornament, vestment, music and ceremonial of the Sarum or Roman liturgy. When a liberal Catholicism hostile to the Anglican formularies became ascendant in the Episcopal Church in the post -war period, and outlawed the historic Prayer Book in favor of the ecumenist catholic liturgy of 1979, the movement was split at least three ways, between liberal Anglo-catholics who embraced the 1979 Prayer Book and the progressive agendas in ministry and marriage that followed it; conservative Anglocatholics who also embraced the 1979 Prayer Book but resisted the subsequent innovations in doctrine and morals (many of whom have since entered the ACNA); and conservative Anglo-catholics attached to the old liturgy, many of whom withdrew from the Episcopal Church and organized small “continuing” churches (like our friends at St. Stephen’s Anglican Catholic Church in Athens.)

Thus by a strange twist of history, one of the chief guardians of the Prayer Book liturgy in the USA are catholic-minded conservatives inside and outside the Episcopal Church. It’s not, of course, because of their appreciation for the reformational theology of the Prayer Book, about which they often know little. Many were put off by the rhetorical banality of the new rites, their inability to match the “weight of conviction” borne by Cranmer’s cadences, and the gratuitous vandalism of euchological jewels like the Prayer of Humble Access. Many also intuited correctly that the disruption of liturgical tradition was psychological preparation for the progressive theological and moral agenda that followed. But the heart of their attachment was a reverence for liturgical tradition, one of the key elements of the catholic outlook.

It was Robert Crouse, a Prayer Book catholic unusually well-versed in and sympathetic to the Reformation heritage, who did the most perhaps to develop a theological rationale for this Prayer Book traditionalism. His argument built on the Augustinian theology of the soul, and was based on the analogy of memory in the human personality, which, he said, is “the ground of our attention in the present and our expectation of the future. The concreteness and sanity of our present understanding and judgments will depend quite radically upon the clarity and integrity of memory. Without that dimension, we would be as those who suffer a crippling amnesia….” As memory is in the soul, so is tradition in the Church. Our memory as Anglicans, he wrote elsewhere, is “our lively awareness of that continuous tradition of faith and worship which must be the basis of any sound judgment in the present, and any genuine hope for the future. Memory is the necessary matrix of all creativity; amnesia can only produce disorientation and disintegration. The Book of Common Prayer is the form of the collective memory of Anglicans, the consensus fidelium, the “common mind” of the Church, the principle of authority and cohesion of the institution, and the guarantee of its catholicity”. Again, “Anglicans recognize no papal magisterium [teaching office]; for us, it is the tradition of common prayer which elucidates and defends and deepens our memory of the Word of God”. Crouse’s generous catholic traditionalism opened the way for catholic-minded Anglicans to reappropriate more fully and sympathetically the reformation heritage of Anglicanism.