Scripting Beauty: An Origin Story

[ 5 minutes ]

For those of you new to the Ordinariate Mass, and those who have yet to encounter the profound beauty and goodness of said form of the Sacred Liturgy, it may come as a surprise that Divine Worship is a fairly recent addition to the Catholic family of liturgical rites given its inclusion of a vibrant ancient ritual gestural language (e.g., varied bows, genuflections, multiple Signs of the Cross, processions) and a frequent use of plainchant, among other venerable delights.

Divine Worship: the Missal, promulgated on November 29, 2015, has been centuries in the making. The offspring of the Sarum Use, the Book of Common Prayer, the English Missal, and the Book of Divine Worship, the Missal is a liturgical tour de force.

A regular feaster at the many fine liturgical websites, blogs and Catholic news sites will have heard that many Catholics - especially the more progressive liturgists in the Church - seem to have slept through the action of the Holy Ghost in recent times. The Third Person of the Blessed Trinity has been busy lavishing upon the People of God many gifts to entice us into a deeper communion with the Holy Trinity. Indeed, God is a God of surprises, and it seems the magnificent Ordinariate Missal has appeared right under the noses of a great many Catholics, many of whom, whether they realize it or not, yearn for the God-centred worship reverently offered in the Ordinariate. The Ordinariate treasure awaits wider reception, and its reception is growing as diocesan Catholics rub shoulders with attendees of the Ordinariate Liturgy.

Divine Worship: the Missal is unique among Roman missals. It is the only missal in the vernacular that has no Latin mother book. The text of the Ordinariate Missal is a compilation of beautiful prayers in the vernacular produced by poet theologians of the first order who have for centuries composed beautiful vernacular liturgical prayers and who have faithfully translated and arranged Latin texts held in trust by God-loving people.

In recent years, that which is most fitting for inclusion - i.e., theologically orthodox and linguistically sublime texts - has been gathered from the English Anglican and Catholic patrimony and organized for the Church by theologically, spiritually and pastorally informed team players to help bring into being Divine Worship: the Missal. That commission of learned men steeped in history and liturgical spirituality, the Anglicanae Traditiones commission, included Archbishop Joseph Augustine Di Noia (Chair), Msgr. (now Bishop) Steven J. Lopes (Coordinating Secretary of the Commission), Msgr. Andrew Burnham, Bishop Peter J. Elliott, Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone, Fr. Uwe Michael Lang, Hans-Jürgen Feulner, Dr. Clinton A. Brand, Fr. Andrew Menke, and Msgr. Peter Wilkinson (Consulter). These men avoided the mistakes made by the Consilium ad exsequendam Constitutionem de Sacra Liturgia.

With the motu proprio Sacram Liturgiam, of January 25, 1964, Pope (Saint) Paul VI erected a committee to revise all the liturgical rites, to be called the Consilium ad exsequendam Constitutionem de Sacra Liturgia (Consilium), “the committee for carrying out the constitution on the Sacred Liturgy”. The committee’s first president was Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro of Bologna, and its secretary was the controversial Fr Annibale Bugnini.

The Consilium is arguably the most ambitious but ill-starred committee in the Church’s history. Its membership was large and international in spread. Its initial 42 members (later 51) were mostly bishops; assisting them were more than 200 official consultors and unofficial advisers. Despite the use of working groups, plenary sessions of the Consilium were unwieldy and procedurally flawed. - Hugh Somerville-Knapman OSB

https://catholicherald.co.uk/the-strange-birth-of-the-novus-ordo/

A bit about the origin-texts of Divine Worship: the Missal.

How did the commission assemble the new missal? 

Dr. Brand: Anglicans have a tradition going back more than 400 years of adapting and translating Latin liturgical texts into English. It is a tradition that began with the translation of the Bible and continued with the development of the Books of Common Prayer. Anglicans pioneered a set of conventions and a memorable style for rendering Latin texts faithfully into English.

The Anglican tradition, then, created an impressive collection of texts which were, in effect, mostly translations and variations of ancient prayers from the Roman Rite. The [Anglicanae Traditiones] commission assessed this collection of texts going back to [the first English Book of Common Prayer of] 1549 and ranging through the Prayer Books of different countries — England, Scotland, Canada and the United States — to distill and assemble the richest, most faithful selections for this adaptation of the Roman Rite. 

The Sarum Missal

• The Sarum Rite, also known as the Use of Sarum, is the family of liturgical services (Office, Mass, Sacraments) that was created at Salisbury Cathedral and utilised from the late eleventh century until the English Reformation. It is substantially the same as the Roman Rite. As a result of the cathedral's Liturgy's high regard during the late Middle Ages, churches across the British Isles and in some regions of northwest Europe adopted its practises. The Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox, and Anglican churches approve of the use, giving it a distinct ecumenical status.
• The Norman nobleman Osmund was named Bishop of Salisbury (Old Sarum) by William of Normandy in 1078. Honouring Norman and Anglo-Saxon traditions, Osmund launched various changes to the Celtic-Anglo-Saxon rite.
• Osmund was one of the Norman bishops who had replaced the majority of the Anglo-Saxon episcopate. It appears that the Normans also imported their French liturgical books because there are similarities between the liturgies in Sarum and Rouen, France.
• Thomas Cranmer, who compiled the first Book of Common Prayer, looked to Sarum for content and inspiration.
• https://www.liturgies.net/Liturgies/Historical/sarum.htm
• http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/Sarum/Ordinary.htm

The Book of Common Prayer (1549)

• The name "Book of Common Prayer" (BCP) refers to a number of prayer books used by the Anglican Communion. The first prayer book, by Thomas Cranmer, including all of the English forms of worship, was published in 1549. It covered both Sunday and weekday services. It contained Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, the Litany, Holy Communion and the occasional services including the rites of Baptism, Confirmation, Matrimony and the funeral.
• http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/1549/BCP_1549.htm
• http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/1549/Communion_1549.htm

The English Missal (1912)

• The English Missal is a 1912 translation of the Roman Missal used by some Anglo-Catholic parish churches. The English Missal was immediately adopted by the Ritualist movement of Anglo-Catholic clergy, who considered the Book of Common Prayer liturgies as inadequate representations of genuinely Catholic liturgy. The translation of the Roman Missal from Latin into the stylised Elizabethan Early Modern English of the Book of Common Prayer allowed clergy to keep the vernacular while retaining Roman Catholic texts and liturgical rubrics.
• The English Missal's inclusion of certain texts from the Book of Common Prayer, including optional prayers from the ordinary of the Communion Service and the lessons for Sundays and major feast days from the Prayer Book's lectionary, which was itself taken from the earlier Sarum Use Mass of pre-Reformation England, is the only difference in content between it and the Roman Missal of the time.
• https://www.angelfire.com/pa3/OldWorldBasic/knottmissal.html

The Book of Divine Worship (1980, 2003)

• The American Book of Common Prayer was modified by the Catholic Church into the Book of Divine Worship (BDW). Within the Pastoral Provision and the Personal Ordinariates' Anglican Use parishes, it was mostly utilised by former Episcopal Church members.
• The Interdicasterial Commission Anglicanae Traditiones of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments collaborated to develop a new liturgy.
• https://web.archive.org/web/20131224210106/http://church.atonementonline.com/wp-content/uploads/Book-Of-Divine-Worship.pdf

The Novus Ordo Missae (1970, rev. 1975, 2000, 2002)

• The Novus Ordo Missae (Ordinary Form of the Mass), well known to Latin Rite Catholics, has contributed the three-year cycle of readings for Sundays and Solemnities and the two-year cycle of readings for weekdays.
• It is important, for the sake of continuity, to acknowledge the architecture that the Ordinary Form and Divine Worship share. Clarity of form enables a fruitful accessibility that allows people to be formed in the very shape of the Mass without loss of the sense of the mystery that entices worshippers into communion with God. The Ordinariate Form makes use of larger pauses and longer prayers in a few instances than the Ordinary Form, that might give one the impression Divine Worship is also close to the Extraordinary Form.
• There are gestures included in Divine Worship that create an acute awareness of the need for attentiveness to the voice of God in Holy Scripture, the need for repentance (a longer penitential rite situated at the heart of the Mass between the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist), and the august nature of the Holy Eucharist. Communion is received on the tongue whilst kneeling at the altar rail. Divine Worship is celebrated ad orientem - the priest faces in the same direction as the people during the prayers.

What makes Divine Worship so beautiful? Balance, poetry, continuity, and clarity of focus.

1. Balance: vernacular language enables immediacy. Divine Worship speaks with an elevated vernacular. Not the language of the street, but a vernacular that glues the attention and intention to the words that express our response to God's invitation to communion. The heart and head and body are united in praise of and in thanksgiving to God.
2. Poetry: language that places upon the lips and in the hearts of believers a serene confidence and hope in the Lord that forms consciences, incites hearts to embrace the call of God Who invites the worshipper into a solemn communion with God, and communicates the dignity of that communion expressed in public worship.
3. Continuity: the both/and of fidelity to ancient custom (sound pedagogy, authentic formation) and openness to the ongoing guidance of the Holy Ghost.
4. Clarity of Focus: orientation to God is sustained by celebrating together facing Liturgical East, toward the altar cross which symbolizes the East, the direction of the rising sun, the direction - it is said - from which Christ will return.

Divine Worship restores to the Church, the Latin side of the Church that is, a much needed emphasis on rightly ordered God-centred worship and preserves the transcendental quality of the sacred. The vitality of Ordinariate communities is due to the understanding that Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist is the heart and soul of every community. If a community gets that wrong, or even places something as noble as a social justice program ahead of the primacy of the Holy Eucharist, then such a community will merely be or become a religious social club whipped about by various fads that can be anything but holy.