The Composite Order: Part III - Orientation and Transformation

Transforming Sanctuaries; Transforming Perspectives

Many, if not most, Ordinariate communities presently worship in borrowed spaces belonging to diocesan Catholic communities; sanctuaries and naves that are commonly shaped more like lecture theatres than cruciform churches.

To witness a sanctuary transformed, reoriented (from versus populum to ad orientem) for the celebration of Holy Mass, is to witness a powerful analogy for a necessary metanoia in a diocesan community that needs the True, the Good and the Beautiful, yet may be inhibited from doing so due to a preoccupation that pits the pragmatic over theological and artistic depth.

On any given Sunday morning, during the overlap between the dismissal of an Ordinariate congregation and the arrival of a diocesan host community, as communities rub shoulders as it were, that same diocesan community can witness reminders that a parish church is a holy temple of the living God, a place worthy of solemnity: incense hanging in the air; cassocked servers deeply reverencing the altar and the Body of Christ reserved in the tabernacle; congregants genuflecting reverently as they leave their pews; the care with which sacred vessels and the lectionary containing the word of God are handled; women and their young daughters wearing the chapel veil.

That the Ordinariate Mass can and does thrive in versus populum "lecture theatres", while clearly retaining its traditional flavour, its profoundly rich and nuanced symbolism, is a testament to its integrity, its faithfulness to Tradition that has been carefully articulated by those who were entrusted with fostering the publication of the Ordinariate Missal. If one examines the process by which Divine Worship: the Missal gradually came into being, one notices unfailing care for promoting Tradition and nuance (rubrical dynamicity), and theological nuance that entices people to worship God in spirit and in truth.

In our community, a quasi-parish that is steadily approaching sufficient numbers to warrant its designation as a parish, we have in our midst a consulter to the Anglicanae Traditiones Commission that coaxed Divine Worship: the Missal into focus, into publication. The Reverend Monsignor Peter Wilkinson worked with his confreres to realize a missal that is truly unique in the history of the Church, a synthesis of Catholic and (compatible, purified) Protestant liturgical theological praxes that constitutes a miracle for ecumenism and a reminder to Catholics what authentic ecumenism really looks like. Arguably the most important outcome of that ecumenical dialogue is the production of a vernacular missal, one-of-a-kind in the history of the Church.

https://www.ordinariate.net/documents/2017/4/Bishop_Lopes_28March17_Lecture.pdf

Given the beauty of the Ordinariate Mass, a proponent of said Liturgy might be forgiven his enthusiasm for contending that the successful publication of the Ordinariate Missal is a Heavenly confirmation of the ecumenical trajectory set forth in the official documents of the Second Vatican Council.

Among those in which Catholic traditions and institutions in part continue to exist, the Anglican Communion occupies a special place.

Those former-Anglicans, and those continuing to join the Ordinariate, have found and are finding the "special place", that Composite Order that is the Ordinariate.

For those of us pre-Ordinariate converts and cradle Catholics who, up until the establishment of the Ordinariate and the promulgation of Divine Worship: the Missal, had been malnourished, severely starved for too many years by being fed a diet of the bland and banal, Divine Worship is an answer to prayer.

To speak of liturgical impoverishment is not to assert a condemnation of the Ordinary Form, i.e., the Mass of Bl. Paul VI. Given the nature of the Mass and how we should therefore conduct the public worship of Almighty God, it is entirely appropriate and necessary to reject carelessness and deliberate distortion of the Sacred Liturgy in any of its forms.

Finding the miracle of the Ordinariate is to enjoy a blessed relief from unnecessary distractions, a relief from liturgical abuse and liturgical carelessness, and to be immersed in a second conversion to the Faith that many former Anglicans, fleeing Liberal Protestantism, also experience in the oasis of orthodoxy and orthopraxy that the Ordinariate provides. More than a mere refuge, the Ordinariate and its Liturgy clearly manifests unity in the Truth, the Truth that is the Catholic communion of (sui iuris) Churches that calls all who profess faith in Jesus Christ to visible unity in the One Church of Christ.

With the above in mind, an enthusiastic recipient of such a blessing can also be forgiven for shouting 'Deo gratias!' and 'Laudetur Iesus Christus!' The less enthusiastic "cafeteria types'" who are content with a mediocre liturgical life because, frankly, they hesitate to allow themselves to risk participation in the life-giving venture into which the Holy Gospel invites us, would do well to explore a vibrant liturgy, which is to say a liturgy that exemplifies a triumphant order, a "Composite Order", into which the soul is plunged and strengthened to swim toward God and to swim against the current of the world, the flesh and the devil.

Let us again acknowledge the Composite Order for the rightly ordered triumphalism for which it stands—the triumph of Christ over sin and death. In omnibus glorificetur Deus. In all things may God be glorified.

Postscript

Let us conclude with a hope-filled practical note from Peregrinations, the blog of Ordinariate Catholic Priest Fr. John L. Hodgins:

There is now really only one theologically, liturgically, and doctrinally consistent locus for Anglicanism to survive and thrive free from secular domination, state interference, and endless fragmentation. Returning to the rock from whence we were hewn, in repentance for rebellion against magisterial teaching, but with ­acceptance of all that is best in Anglicanism, is an option that serious Anglicans cannot dismiss."—Fr. John L. Hodgins, Toronto, Canada

That "rock" of which Fr. Hodgins speaks so well is, of course, Rome.

Fr. Hodgins' comment should find ears among cradle Catholics as much as Anglicans and Episcopalians, especially those Catholics of a more liberal or progressive bent who might be given to pursuing a course (away from the Faith of the Apostles) not unlike the tragic course that Fr. Hodgins' former Western liberal Anglican peers continue to follow.

That "one theologically, liturgically, and doctrinally consistent locus for Anglicanism" is also a home for Tradition-minded diocesan Catholics who crave Truth, Goodness and Beauty. That locus, that Composite Order, for Anglicans and cradle Catholics, is a parish or community of one of the Personal Ordinariates that offers Divine Worship.

Christus vincit! Christus regnat! Christus imperat!