Too often traditionalism and this restoration (hoo...

2008-05-20T05:39:00.000-07:00

Too often traditionalism and this restoration (hooray) are presented as mostly about Latin - which is why I avoid saying 'Latin Mass' - but other than that yes.

I like Latin - proto-Italian, a very pretty language, and given all its words we use every day not that hard to learn - and understand its place (in a multi-lingual church, and having a template in a dead language, that is, unchanging, for all posterity ensures accurate vernacular versions as vernaculars change over time) but of course have no problem with the vernacular.

One of the appealing things about the Anglicanism that baptised me (and raised me with eastward-facing services, Tudor English and chant which I like to say 'Vatican II-proofed' me for life) and received you is that even when it goes liberal it usually has better liturgical sense and taste than worn-out pseudo-folk hymns and rainbow stoles. You'll find even liberals (like Fr Tobias Haller) defending the eastward position and using brocaded, orphreyed chasubles and liturgical language and music that are foundational in Western culture. I understand the Episcopal Holy Week services are more like Pius XII's 1955 ones than the Novus Ordo and the 1979 BCP psalter is nicely pointed to be sung with... Gregorian chant.

Know this and read Thomas Day and you'll understand why most liberal RCs don't become Anglicans even when their theologies match. A lot of it is bound up in ethnic and class identities: culture. (Especially among the historically persecuted Irish who of course dominate English-speaking RC cultures: anti-English and anti-Anglican.) Most of them stay put and are really liberal Protestants but on their terms culturally - anti-high church as Day explains - even as they dissent from Rome and, as part of that, what I call Catholicism theologically. But possibly retaining the odd ethnic devotion - a rosary here, a saint there - to mark them as name-the-ethnic-group.

Comments on The Byzantine Anglo-Catholic: Latin Strikes Back

Too often traditionalism and this restoration (hoo...