Divine Worship: The Narrative

The Triumph of Christianity over Paganism by Gustave Doré (1899)

The world today - or perhaps more accurately the western world today - is rife with competing narratives. 'He who sets the narrative wins' could be the slogan that defines the present era.

False Narrative

The world is sick with toxic narratives that inflict multiplying harm. Communities are fragmented by the socio-political narratives that assert artificial socio-sexual constructs. Thank you sexual revolution. 

Fraudulent policies flow from disordered hearts and minds. A fraud is a fraud is a fraud. The Father of Lies has been hard at work. Hardcore political ideologues with no healthy insight into the human condition work to undermine reason and thwart reality and commonsense. They attempt to form mindless drones devoid of the capacity to think critically and to act responsibly so that inane policies receive support. Advocates pushing for the acceptance of malignant concepts that distort human relationships and human identity become enraged when their ideas and associated social programs are exposed for their dehumanizing effects.

Meanwhile, at the margins, in the hearts of communities, is a quiet ongoing renewal. Like the honeyed work of a colony of busy bees, tradition-minded Catholic communities conserve societies' humanity and call people to their better selves as children of a just and loving God.

1 Corinthians 1:22-25 For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

Which is to say... God sets the narrative. Where can we see, touch, taste and hear the Gospel narrative come alive? In the Mass.

• See, touch, taste: receive Holy Communion, the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ, the Word Made Flesh, Jesus Present among those gathered in His Name;
• Hear: the life changing word of God.

Liturgical Narrative

Divine Worship (DW), the Mass of the Ordinariate communities established by the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus, also known as the Traditional English Mass, tells God's Story of man's redemption in Christ, the Gospel. The means by which the Story is told blends the vernacular of ancient English spirituality, brewed in Benedictine monasticism, with the Sarum liturgy that loaned shape and content to the Book of Common Prayer synthesized by Thomas Cranmer, and realizes the insights of the Second Vatican Council, for starters.

The telling of the Story employs hieratic English, an elevated form of the English language, to draw worshippers into the liturgical Banquet - the Mass - oriented to Christ returning in glory. The Ordinariate Liturgy necessary provokes and sustains a renewed evangelization that also actualizes an integral ecumenism. The Story is God's love for us, His rescue mission. God desires the salvation of souls... and so should we.

Like most forms of the Roman Liturgy, the Ordinariate Form has two main parts: the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist. Upon witnessing Divine Worship for the first time, one might assume that DW is the older Latin Mass in Tudor English. Many of the sensibilities are the same or similar for both the older form of the Mass and Divine Worship. However, DW is not the 1962 Missal. Nor, might one say, is Divine Worship the Mass of Pope St Paul VI. Divine Worship is a 'third way', both old and new, for Catholics to worship Almighty God as God desires to be worshipped.

If you need an example of Tudor English, you only need turn to the Lord's Prayer in the Novus Ordo Mass (NOM). The lyricism and confidence of the Our Father in hieratic English allows the worshipper to speak to God the Father with due reverence and the familiarity of a child of God speaking to his heavenly Father. 'Thee' and 'thou' are intimate forms of 'you' used in conversation with God, not merely polite or formal sounding variations. The intimacy with God that one experiences in the Ordinariate Mass is a sublime corrective to the sterility of contemporary ideologies.

Eternal Narrative

The story that DW teaches is real of course. God gave us the sacraments so that we might be immersed in His Truth, His Goodness and His Beauty, for He is the Way, the Truth and the Life. He immersed Himself in the human experience so that we might be immersed in His very life.

The Word was made flesh in order that we might be made gods. ... Just as the Lord, putting on the body, became a man, so also we men are both deified through his flesh, and henceforth inherit everlasting life. - St Athanasius (c. 296–373)

CCC 460 The Word became flesh to make us "partakers of the divine nature": "For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God." "For the Son of God became man so that we might become God." "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods." 

The truth DW imparts is not a distant memory. Rather, DW is the Lord Jesus Christ present and active in our midst. The Catechism notes that the principal actor in the Mass is Jesus Himself. His priest is the one through whom Jesus acts to make present His Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity that is the Holy Eucharist. Indeed, Jesus is present in a most sublime way in the Holy Eucharist that we receive during communion. Jesus is present where two or three are gathered in His Name. He is present to us through His word, Holy Scripture. Jesus the High Priest is, as noted, present in and through His priest.

The procession to the sanctuary is our entrance into the story of redemption, the soaring love story into which God invites us. With the celebrant and ministers, we approach the sacred precincts of the parish church, the sanctuary wherein is reserved the Blessed Sacrament. In DW, we typically recite the prayers at the Foot of the Altar, the Prayers of Preparation, that Latin Mass attendees would recognize.

While DW's introductory rites are perhaps a little more lavish than those of the Mass of Pope Saint Paul (NOM), and at times more lavish than the older Mass, they merge into the Liturgy of the Word just as in the Pauline and 1962 Missals.

Formed by the word of God, we now approach the Creed that strengthens our orientation to God. Following the Creed, we share with the Novus Ordo Missae the Prayers of the People, the Universal Prayers that are intercessory in nature. In DW the prayers are recited by the celebrant as an extended collect. These prayers may take the form of an antiphonal litany with the congregation singing or saying the responses. These are set prayers, not improvised nor haphazard, but heartfelt nonetheless. After the Prayers, something unique happens in the Traditional English Mass: the Penitential Rite.

Leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. - St Matthew 5:24

We are present to the Calvary Sacrifice

Together we kneel and enter into a final penitential preparation as we approach the Mass of the Faithful, nowadays referred to as the Liturgy of the Eucharist. A mini-Lent precedes the anamnesis of the Passion and the Easter glory of the consecration and Holy Communion, our entrance into the Sacrifice of the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. 

Made ready by the Liturgy of the Word, the Creed and the Penitential Rite, we draw closer to the summit of the Mass - the Liturgy of the Eucharist. On Sundays we only use the Roman Canon. In the Ordinariate Missal there are only two Eucharistic Prayers - the Roman Canon for Sundays and the Alternative Eucharistic Prayer which is shorter and suitable for week days.

Prophetic Narrative

A master stroke of the Holy Ghost, the Ordinariate Eucharistic Liturgy accompanies the realization of an ecumenical movement of Christians toward Rome. The Holy Ghost moved Pope Benedict XVI (RIP) to create the Personal Ordinariates and Divine Worship: the Missal. The insights and example offered by Saint John Henry Newman, those of the Oxford Movement, and recent witnesses with signed Catechism in hand ready to covert, laid the foundation and provided the impetus by which Pope Benedict XVI could create a vehicle to enable groups of Anglicans and Methodists "to maintain the liturgical, spiritual and pastoral traditions of the Anglican Communion within the Catholic Church, as a precious gift nourishing the faith of the members of the Ordinariate and as a treasure to be shared (Anglicanorum Coetibus)."

The character and teaching of Saint John Henry Newman - convert and cardinal - permeates the Personal Ordinariates. His is a prophetic voice whose profound intellectual witness to the Faith merits for him the title of Doctor of the Church.

The liturgical vision captured in Divine Worship represents in many ways a return to the witness of the Council Fathers. Divine Worship: the Missal is a blueprint to guide how the Church may more fully and authentically implement the teachings found in the documents of the Second Vatican Council.

Newman offered guidance to help Christ's Bride recover her bearing - not that she had lost her fundamental orientation to the Bridegroom. Newman's insights help(ed) the Church to recover her missionary zeal for the welfare of souls.

• Fr. Ian Ker: https://www.abc.net.au/religion/the-father-of-vatican-ii-john-henry-newman-and-doctrinal-continu/10100248
• Fr. Ian Ker: https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/father-of-vatican-ii-5699
• B.C. Butler, OSB: https://vatican2voice.org/3butlerwrites/newman.htm
• George Weigel: https://www.catholicherald.com/article/columns/newman-and-vatican-ii/

Newman’s considerable influence at Vatican II is also evident in the council’s seminal “Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum).” There, the Council Fathers teach that the great tradition “that comes from the apostles makes progress in the Church, with the help of the Holy Spirit. … as the centuries go by, the Church is always advancing toward the plenitude of divine truth, until eventually the words of God are fulfilled in her.” Thus did Vatican II vindicate Newman’s great work on the development of doctrine, which grew from a theological method that brought history, and indeed life itself, back into play as sources of reflection and growth in our understanding of God’s revelation.

That Newman could make this contribution to the Catholic future was due to the fact that he was neither a traditionalist, who thought the Church’s self-understanding frozen in amber, nor a progressive, who believed that nothing is finally settled in the rule of faith. Rather, Newman was a reformer devoted to history who worked for reform in continuity with the great tradition, and who, in his explorations of the development of doctrine, helped the Church learn to tell the difference between genuine development and rupture.